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

Exploring the structure of Freytag’s Pyramid

From NowNovel.com:

Storytelling is at the heart of our human interactions. We tell stories when we talk to each other, explaining what has happened in our lives. We also pay money to consume stories in the form of movies, theatre, books and so on. So many stories use the Freytag’s Pyramid (or Triangle) method, and it’s worth looking at it in detail to see how you can use it in your own writing. Understanding the plot structure is a good way of engaging readers and creating compelling narratives.

So, what is Freytag’s Pyramid (or Triangle) and how can you use it to write fiction? Let’s explore this in more detail. You may have heard of it, as it’s a literary analysis mode that is spoken of often when exploring creative writing. It was named after Gustav Freytag, a 19th century German novelist and playwright who first devised it.

What is Freytag’s Pyramid?

Simply put the Freytag Pyramid is a narrative structure that breaks down a story arc into five sections or five acts. The five-act structure looks like this:

  • exposition
  • rising action
  • climax
  • falling action
  • resolution/denouement 

Freytag’s Pyramid is so called as it falls into a pyramid structure.

It’s a helpful way to order the series of events and plot your stories, and will ensure you have a recognisable beginning, middle and end in your story. It’s super useful to consult it. So many stories naturally follow this pattern anyway, as we’ll see in the examples below, and it’s good to have to it to hand and make a study of it. It’s an excellent way to figure out how a story unfolds. Using it helps you create a logical progression of events, and gives readers a sense of familiarity and satisfaction. 

It’s important to note that although Freytag’s Pyramid is an extremely useful tool to use, be aware of the fact that it might not fit every story structure.

First, though, it’s important to note that although Freytag’s Pyramid is an extremely useful tool to use, be aware of the fact that it might not fit every story structure. Freytag devised his pyramid by looking at classical Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama and observing how these plays were constructed. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, was the first person to say that the structure of drama is shaped like a pyramid with a beginning, middle and end, what is known as the three-act story structure. 

The downside is well explained on Reedsy:

Make no mistake: Freytag’s pyramid is not a one-size-fits-all structure. It identifies story elements that are common to classical and Shakespearean tragedies, including a revelation or plot twist that changes everything — resulting in catastrophe for the hero. As a result, the pyramid is less applicable to non-tragic narratives in which the protagonist usually wins out in some way, or when writing more upbeat genres like comedy.

Exposition

This is where the stage is set: the author introduces the main characters, setting and milieu of the story. It’s here that the characters’ backgrounds, motivations and circumstances are introduced. This is also where, most likely, you will show the reason for the story. In other words, in this section the writer will establish the central conflict or problem that the protagonist will face in the story.

Thematic concerns will be introduced here as well, as well as hints of what character development might occur in the narrative.

Your exposition should end with the ‘inciting incident’ – that’s what will start the ball rolling in the narrative, or set off the events of your story.

Rising action

The inciting incident occurs in this section. Ideally this section should occur quite early in your story. You don’t want to have reams of exposition here. You can always weave in backstory and more as the story progresses. The inciting incident is the event that disrupts the status quo and sets the main conflict of the story in motion. The protagonist is now faced with a problem, challenge or dilemma that they must solve.

Link to the rest at NowNovel.com

Academic Writing

One thinks about modern academics, especially philosophers and sociologists. Their language is often voiceless and without power because it is so utterly cut off from experience and things. There is no sense of words carrying experiences, only of reflecting relationships between other words or between “concepts.” There is no sense of an actual self seeing a thing or having an experience… Sociology—by its very nature?—seems to be an enterprise whose practitioners cut themselves off from experience and things and deal entirely with categories about categories. As a result sociologists, more even than writers in other disciplines, often write language which has utterly died.

Peter Elbow

Harvard Probe Finds Honesty Researcher Engaged in Scientific Misconduct

From The Wall Street Journal:

A Harvard University probe into prominent researcher Francesca Gino found that her work contained manipulated data and recommended that she be fired, according to a voluminous court filing that offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at research misconduct investigations.

It is a key document at the center of a continuing legal fight involving Gino, a behavioral scientist who in August sued the university and a trio of data bloggers for $25 million.

The case has captivated researchers and the public alike as Gino, known for her research into the reasons people lie and cheat, has defended herself against allegations that her work contains falsified data.

The investigative report had remained secret until this week, when the judge in the case granted Harvard’s request to file the document, with some personal details redacted, as an exhibit.

The investigative committee that produced the nearly 1,300-page document included three Harvard Business School professors tapped by HBS dean Srikant Datar to examine accusations about Gino’s work.

They concluded after a monthslong probe conducted in 2022 and 2023 that Gino “engaged in multiple instances of research misconduct” in the four papers they examined. They recommended that the university audit Gino’s other experimental work, request retractions of three of the papers (the fourth had already been retracted at the time they reviewed it), and place Gino on unpaid leave while taking steps to terminate her employment.

“The Investigation Committee believes that the severity of the research misconduct that Professor Gino has committed calls for appropriately severe institutional action,” the report states.

HBS declined to comment.

The investigative report offers a rare look at the ins and outs of a research misconduct investigation, a process whose documents and conclusions are often kept secret.

Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at the University of Oxford whose work has drawn attention to research problems in psychology, praised the disclosure. “Along with many other scientists, I have been concerned that institutions are generally very weak at handling investigations of misconduct and they tend to brush things under the carpet,” Bishop said. “It is refreshing to see such full and open reporting in this case.”

Harvard started looking into Gino’s work in October 2021 after a group of behavioral scientists who write about statistical methods on their blog Data Colada complained to the university. They had analyzed four papers co-written by Gino and said data in them appeared falsified. 

. . . .

Academic Misconduct

Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at the University of Oxford whose work has drawn attention to research problems in psychology, praised the disclosure. “Along with many other scientists, I have been concerned that institutions are generally very weak at handling investigations of misconduct and they tend to brush things under the carpet,” Bishop said. “It is refreshing to see such full and open reporting in this case.”

Harvard started looking into Gino’s work in October 2021 after a group of behavioral scientists who write about statistical methods on their blog Data Colada complained to the university. They had analyzed four papers co-written by Gino and said data in them appeared falsified.

An initial inquiry conducted by two HBS faculty included an examination of the data sets from Gino’s computers and records, and her written responses to the allegations. The faculty members concluded that a full investigation was warranted, and Datar agreed.

In the course of the full investigation, the two faculty who ran the initial inquiry plus a third HBS faculty member interviewed Gino and witnesses who worked with her or co-wrote the papers. They gathered documents including data files, correspondence and various drafts of the submitted manuscripts. And they commissioned an outside firm to conduct a forensic analysis of the data files.

The committee concluded that in the various studies, Gino edited observations in ways that made the results fit hypotheses.

When asked by the committee about work culture at the lab, several witnesses said they didn’t feel pressured to obtain results. “I never had any indication that she was pressuring people to get results. And she never pressured me to get results,” one witness said.

According to the documents, Gino suggested that most of the problems highlighted in her work could have been the result of honest error, made by herself or research assistants who frequently worked on the data. The investigative committee rejected that explanation because Gino didn’t give evidence that explained “major anomalies and discrepancies.”

Gino also argued that other people might have tampered with her data, possibly with “malicious intent,” but the investigative committee also rejected that possibility. “Although we acknowledge that the theory of a malicious actor might be remotely possible, we do not find it plausible,” the group wrote.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

BBC 500 Words Story Competition

From The Oxford Owl:

As part of an ongoing programme of language research, the department of Children’s Dictionaries & Children’s Language Data at Oxford University Press has analysed children’s creative writing submitted to the BBC 500 WORDS story competition in 2023 and the results are out today!

Key Findings from the Report

• Themes around contemporary conflicts feature more prominently in the stories than in previous years.
• There is a shift away from the topic of Brexit, with very few mentions of this word (and none in a political context).
• There is a substantial increase in the frequency of AI in the stories – often in relation to a dangerous entity that could take over the world.
• The stories indicate an increasing awareness of neurodiversity, and conditions are often portrayed as a strength.
• Barbie occurs twice as frequently in stories from 2023 than 2020.
• TikTok is seen as a more established app and part of everyday life in 2023.
• Lioness(es) increased in frequency compared with 2020, and over half of the mentions were in reference to football. In 2020, almost all mentions of lioness(es) were references to the animal.
• The 2023 stories are the first to demonstrate a lived experience of Covid in the UK, and the pandemic is evidently still a reference point for children.

Insights from the 2023 stories

• The proportion of boys and girls who submitted a story in 2023 was 39% and 61%respectively. Excluding names, words that are used much more frequently by boys than girls include: Madrid, titan, league, Godzilla and champions. Meanwhile, words that are used much more frequently by girls than boys include: gymnastics, pony, foal, makeup and tiara.
• Words that appear much more often in stories from the 5-7 age category than the 8-11 age category include: mammy, baddy and teddybear. Meanwhile, words that are used much more frequently in stories by children in the older age group than the younger age group include intrigue, commander and murder. Adverbs, including practically, seemingly and sincerely, are also used more frequently in this age group.
• Words which had much higher frequency in stories from 2023 than 2020 include seasonal trends such as pumpkin and Halloween, footballers such as Haaland and Raya, and animals such as capybara and axolotl. Camilla is also used much more often in stories from 2023 – both in reference to the Queen and as a general character name.
• Meanwhile, words which had much higher frequency in stories from 2020 than 2023 include ps4, bushfire, trump, Brexit and coronavirus

Link to the rest at The Oxford Owl

7 Novels About Women on a Journey to Figure Out Who They Are

From Electric Lit:

As an identity crisis just par for the course as human beings? Does it happen to everybody? I wondered this to myself as a friend told me that her brother-in-law had decided, in his late thirties, to hit the pause button on his life. He was going to Bali for two months, she said, to “find himself.” This was shocking not in the least because he had a family he would be leaving behind in order to go off and conduct this search, but also, because he wasn’t entirely clear about whether he would be coming back. A search for self on a paradise island free of responsibility. Only in a man’s world, I thought, enviously. A woman would never go about it like that.

I didn’t set out to write a story about a woman in search of herself. My original intention was to generate some acting work. If I could write a great play (or even just an okay one, I acquiesced, whenever I had writers block), produce it and perform it myself, then the “right” (whatever that means) people would see it, which would lead to more scripts—ones I hadn’t had to write myself—flooding my way. Then, I’d be in. I’d be a busy actor having no choice but to turn down parts and I would never have to write anything ever again.

. . . .

This is a reading list about women who, at any one time, have had their doubts about who they are and who they present themselves to the world as. In these stories, they are piecing together the puzzle of their own identities. For them, the importance of this notion waxes and wanes, it is not necessarily their primary preoccupation, but bubbles to the surface in varying degrees. The question of their own essence and what it means in a fast-paced world where it feels like everyone else is so sure of themselves and what they stand for, may not always be the point of these stories but it is certainly an essential by-product. To someone not in that questioning, contemplative place themselves, it may well be missed. For me, however, they became the parts of these books which spoke the loudest. Read these books for their keenly observed female protagonists’ exploration of the world around them—through language, location, love, politics, and friendship—and for the ways in which the lives they are leading or the new ones they are seeking out, speak to their essence. And as for my friend’s brother-in-law, he came back in the end. But, just as with the characters in these novels, finding yourself back where you started doesn’t make it all for nought. It’s in the journeying that we find our essence, not necessarily at the destination.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Two mixed-race best friends who meet as youngsters at dance class, find themselves on divergent paths as one (the unnamed narrator) watches the other—Tracey—achieve their shared childhood dream becoming a dancer. Through her teens, twenties and thirties, we see the narrator going through the motions: university, first job, short lived love affairs, the allure of orbiting a celebrity when she lands a job as assistant to a pop star the girls idolized growing up. She watches on as Tracey’s career fizzles out, replaced by the challenges of  motherhood on the same council estate they were raised on. Smith’s thought-provoking insights on race, trauma, aging and the choices we make in life and where they lead us subtly force the reader to consider these things in relation to themselves at every turn. On reading the last page, I thrust the book into the hands of the nearest person in my vicinity telling them to read it. I defy you not to do the same thing.

. . . .

Temper by Phoebe Walker

Purpose and identity are often inextricably linked to place for many women. We feel this in almost every line of Phoebe Walker’s debut. Infused with her characteristic poetic imagery and keenly observant eye for the world around her, she gives us yet another unnamed narrator (a theme worthy of a reading list of its own!) who has left London on the coat tails of her corporate boyfriend and his new job. Being a freelance writer, she has the freedom to work from anywhere, and the Netherlands, she reasons, is as good a place as any. But the promise of expat life, with its shiny, social media-ready exterior and the feeling of excitement in the first days and weeks, quickly fades. What our protagonist is left with is creeping isolation, loneliness and a lack of purpose. When she reluctantly befriends an untrustworthy fellow expat who has been shunned by everyone else who knows her out there, the narrator’s reflections on just how and exactly where to go about building a life for oneself in a big world, becomes all the more intriguing and absorbing. 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

The Celebrity as Muse

From The Paris Review:

1. The Divine Celebrity

“There isn’t really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does,” the artist Richard Phillips observed in 2012. “Something happens when she steps in front of the camera … She is very aware of the way that an icon is constructed, and that’s something that is unique.” Phillips, who has long used famous people as his muses, was promoting a new short film he had made with the then-twenty-five-year-old actress. Standing in a fulgid ocean in a silvery-white bathing suit, her eyeliner and false lashes dark as a depressive mood, she is meant to look healthily Californian, but her beauty is a little rumpled, and even in close-up she cannot quite meet the camera’s gaze. The impression left by Lindsay Lohan (2011), Phillips’s film, is that of an artist’s model who is incapable of behaving like one, having been cursed with the roiling interior life of a consummate actress. Most traditional print models can successfully empty out their eyes for fashion films and photoshoots, easily signifying nothing, but Lohan looks fearful, guarded, as if somewhere just beyond the camera she can see the terrible future. Unlike her heroine Marilyn Monroe, Phillips also observed in a promotional interview, Lohan is “still alive, and she’s more powerful than ever.” It is interesting that he felt the need to specify that Lohan had not died, although ultimately his assertion of her power is difficult to deny based on the evidence of Lindsay Lohan, which may not exude the surfer-y, gilded vibe he might have hoped for, but which does act as a poignant document of Lohan’s skill, her raw and uncomfortable magnetism.

“Lindsay has an incredible emotional and physical presence on screen that holds an existential vulnerability,” Phillips argued in his artist’s statement, “while harnessing the power of the transcendental—the moment in transition. She is able to connect with us past all of our memory and projection, expressing our own inner eminence.” “Our own inner eminence” is an odd, not entirely meaningful phrase, used in a typically unmeaningful and art-speak-riddled press release. What the artist seems to say or to imply, however, is that Lohan’s obvious ability to reach inside herself and then—without dialogue—vividly suggest her depths onscreen acts as a piquant reminder of our own complexity, the way each of us is a celebrity in the melodrama of our lives.

What makes Lindsay Lohan art and not a perfume advertisement, aside from the absence of a perfume bottle? The same quality, perhaps, that makes—or made—Lohan herself a star, as well as, once, a sterling actress. All Phillips’s talk of transcendence and the existential may be overblown, but then stars tend to be overblown, as evidenced by the superlatives so often used in descriptions of Hollywood and its denizens: “silver screen,” “golden age,” “legendary,” or “iconic.” “Muses must possess two qualities,” the dance critic Arlene Croce claimed in The New Yorker in 1996, “beauty and mystery, and of the two, mystery is the greater.” At first blush, Lohan might not have seemed like an especially mysterious muse, with her personal life splashed across the tabloids and her upskirt shots all over Google. In fact, her revelations are a trick, the illusion of intimacy possible because she has enough to plumb that we can barely touch the surface. We can see her pubis and her mugshots and the powder in her nostrils, but it is impossible for us, as regular, unfamous people, to know what it feels like to be her.

“When [Lohan] bats her eyes over the Gagosian Gallery logo at the end of Phillips’s short film, millions of art world dollars immediately alight upon our shores,” the late and cantankerous art critic Charlie Finch wrote in a review of Lindsay Lohan, later noting that the film also acts as a salute to “the cosmetology industry as treated cosmologically.” “Few beauties have (ahem) not required the surgeon’s knife as little as Lindsay,” Finch continues, “but her lips sure appear to be as (allegedly) collagen-injected as those of Melanie Griffith, Meg Ryan, or Cher. Score another point for Richard Phillips, patron saint of female models everywhere and their cutting-edge search for visual perfection.” It was certainly permissible to write about a female subject in a rather different tone in 2011, and the titillated focus on cosmetic surgery here now feels quaint. Still, whether or not Finch is being facetious, he is right about Phillips’s willingness to lavish his attention on the hard work stars do to keep themselves suitably celestial, ensuring prominent places in the firmament of fame.

. . . .

2. The Decaying Celebrity

In 1974, in Florence, a Californian hippy couple were visiting the Uffizi when a strange thing happened to the heavily pregnant wife: as she stood admiring a da Vinci, she began to feel her baby moving, as if he too had been struck by the genius of the work. “Allegedly, I started kicking furiously,” Leonardo DiCaprio told an interviewer at NPR in 2014. “My father took that as a sign, and I suppose DiCaprio wasn’t that far from da Vinci. And so, my dad, being the artist that he is, said, ‘That’s our boy’s name.’ ” That I first encountered this origin story as a child at the height of Leo-mania in the nineties, in an unofficial souvenir book about the then-twenty-one-year-old actor and heartthrob, feels entirely apposite: it is a clever bit of mythmaking, an anecdote that might just as well have belonged to classic Hollywood and the era of Photoplay or Screenland as to the first, faltering days of the online age. DiCaprio’s father, an underground comics publisher who associated with both Timothy Leary and the graphic artist and world-renowned macrophiliac Robert Crumb, foresaw Leonardo’s future status as an artist even if he was not certain of the medium he would work in. Many of us who were prepubescent when Leonardo DiCaprio first rose to real prominence are eminently aware of his nineties image as the ultimate nonthreatening (very nearly nonsexual) sex symbol, so rosy-faced and champagne-haired and softly pretty that that he might as well have been a handsome girl, but the ardor of his swooning fanbase did not cancel out his reputation in adult critical circles as a genuine early master of his craft. Consider the cool, casual way he delivered Shakespeare in Romeo + Juliet (1996), Baz Luhrmann’s loony, technicolor adaptation of the play: young, alive, unmistakably Californian, he spoke all his thee’s and thou’s with the throwaway inflection of a person fluently communicating in a second language they had practiced all their lives.

As it happened, DiCaprio ended up with a more literal link to art in later life, becoming a collector of such scale and (to use Phillips’s word) eminence that, in spite of his being a supposedly frivolous Hollywood A-lister, the art world takes him fairly seriously. Unlike, say, collecting classic cars or couture clothing, the maintenance of an art collection has the dual benefit, for a celebrity, of conferring cultural cachet and trumpeting their tremendous wealth (provided, of course, that their selections knowingly and tastefully run the gamut from aesthetically desirable to conceptually rigorous, haute-contemporary to historical). DiCaprio—who does not seem to have an art buyer in his employ, and who therefore presumably actually cares about the pieces he acquires—is catholic in his tastes, collecting works by artists like Basquiat and Picasso as well as other, much newer works by relative unknowns.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

When PG read the OP, the term, “overcooked prose,” came to his mind.

American Flannel

From The Wall Street Journal:

Many years ago, during a reporting trip to Copenhagen, I met an economist for the Danish labor federation. I had just visited a company that was transferring production of hearing aids abroad, and I asked him about this move. To my surprise, the economist was entirely in favor. “We want to be a wealthy country,” he said, “and we can’t be a wealthy country with low-wage jobs.”

That conversation came back to me as I read a pair of books about people committed to reviving U.S. garment manufacturing. Both Steven Kurutz’s “American Flannel” and Rachel Slade’s “Making It in America” follow entrepreneurs who have dared to produce American-made apparel at a moment when the domestic supply chains for such products barely exist. Both books are interesting to read. The human stories are moving, the founders’ determination admirable. But neither book finally provides a convincing answer to a question that lurks in the background: Should we even want apparel manufacturing to rebound in the U.S.?

Mr. Kurutz introduces Bayard Winthrop, a descendant of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He grew up in Greenwich, Conn., and spent two years on Wall Street before deciding to seek more meaningful work. After stints selling snowshoe bindings and marketing messenger bags, he created American Giant in 2011 to manufacture clothing in the U.S. Labor costs precluded products that would have required extensive sewing. Instead, Mr. Winthrop settled on cotton hoodies with heavier fabric and better construction than most others. A favorable news article brought a flood of orders, enabling American Giant to buy sewing plants and inspiring Mr. Winthrop to attempt a far more complicated product: the flannel shirts to which the title of Mr. Kurutz’s book alludes.

For guidance, Mr. Winthrop turned to James McKinnon, the head of Cotswold Industries, a family-owned textile company. “Flannel is an art and an art form,” Mr. McKinnon explains. He introduced Mr. Winthrop to small companies that had survived the textile industry’s contraction and that might have the skills and equipment to dye yarn and finish cotton fabric the way Mr. Winthrop wanted it. Mr. Kurutz’s on-the-scene reporting provides a ground-level view of what it means to reassemble a domestic supply chain for flannel, colorfully illustrating why “reshoring” is so complicated a task.

Mr. Kurutz’s other main character is Gina Locklear, who grew up around her family’s sock mill in Fort Payne in Alabama’s DeKalb County. At the start of the 1990s, the author tells us, “there was hardly a man or woman in all of DeKalb County who didn’t have a connection to the hosiery business.” But as imports gained ground, the self-proclaimed “sock capital of the world” lost its kick. Many mills closed. In 2008 Ms. Locklear used spare capacity in her parents’ factory to start Zkano, a company that knits high-fashion socks from organic cotton spun and dyed domestically. The socks sold well. The challenge, she found, was finding workers. As Mr. Kurutz writes: “You could create new business. You couldn’t invent someone with thirty years of experience in the hosiery industry.”

Rachel Slade presents a similar story in “Making It in America,” featuring Ben Waxman, a former union official and political consultant who decided in 2015 to start a business with his then-girlfriend (and now wife), Whitney Reynolds. They mortgaged their home in Maine to fund American Roots. “Together, they would bring apparel manufacturing back to America,” Ms. Slade writes. “They would be uncompromising in their commitment to domestic sourcing and the welfare of their employees.” They began with a hoodie designed to fit large men doing physical jobs in harsh weather, a product whose manufacture required 54 operations on six different kinds of sewing machines. At $80, it was too expensive for the retail market, but Mr. Waxman sold it to labor unions that were delighted to offer members a garment made by union workers in the U.S.

I have no criticism of the individuals Mr. Kurutz and Ms. Slade profile. If these entrepreneurs can make a profit and create jobs by producing clothing in the U.S., congratulations are in order. They are well-intentioned people committed to doing right, and it’s hard not to admire them. But it’s disingenuous to pretend that a handful of mom-and-pop companies sewing hoodies and socks point the way to the revival of manufacturing in the U.S. Apparel is fundamentally different from most other manufacturing sectors; its factories still rely heavily on sewing machines, usually operated by women stitching hem after hem or attaching collar after collar. The U.S. has no great productivity advantage when it comes to making hoodies.

The authors present gauzy portraits of the industrial past. Fort Payne, Mr. Kurutz writes, was “a Silicon Valley for socks” where the annual Hosiery Week “bonded the community together” before the U.S. government lowered barriers to sock imports. That’s not exactly true: Silicon Valley is notorious for ample paychecks, Fort Payne’s sock mills less so. In 1993, the year before apparel and textile makers received what Mr. Kurutz calls a “death blow” from the North American Free Trade Agreement, the 5,478 hosiery workers in DeKalb County were paid, on average, 11% less than the average private-sector employee in the same county. In North Carolina, where American Giant does its sewing, the gap was even wider: The average private-sector worker was paid $22,000 in 1993, the average apparel worker $14,649. People took jobs in garment factories not for bonding but because that was all they could find.

The American garment industry was in decline for decades before Nafta. That it survived as long as it did was due to strict import quotas and high tariffs on both textiles and apparel, fought for by an unholy alliance between garment-workers’ unions and virulently antiunion textile manufacturers. The result was that U.S. consumers were forced to pay high prices for linens and clothes to keep those industries alive.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

A very long time ago, PG practiced law in a small town located in a part of the United States not known for its wealth.

One of his clients was a small garment manufacturing business owned and operated by a husband and wife. As per expectations, the business employed mostly women and paid minimum wage or something close to it.

The jobs offered provided important income for families, including single mothers, but nobody expected to get rich working there. Had the garment manufacturer closed its doors, the result would likely have been an increased number of families relying on welfare payments for their survival.

In some circles, low-wage jobs are regarded with disdain, but they can play an important economic role in small communities as a first job or an emergency job in the event of a change in family structure or injury to a working member of a family.

In PG’s observations during this time period, while government welfare was sometimes necessary for families with no ability to support themselves, having a job-holder in the family made a positive overall improvement to the family’s long-term stability and happiness.

ALA Reports Record Spike in Book Titles Challenged in 2023

From Publishers Weekly:

The American Library Association announced today that the number of unique titles targeted for censorship surged 65% in 2023 compared to 2022, once again hitting record levels.

In a release, ALA officials said that 4,240 unique book titles were reported challenged in schools and libraries in 2023, a sharp increase over 2022, when 2,571 unique titles were targeted for removal. ALA also reported 1,247 tracked challenges in 2023, which is down slightly from 1,269 challenges in 2022. But ALA officials stressed that the number does not reflect decreasing challenges, noting that prior to 2021, the vast majority of tracked challenges to library resources came from individuals seeking to remove or restrict access to a single book. Now, as result of an organized political movement and sharing book lists compiled by various groups, the overwhelming majority of tracked challenges come from groups and involve multiple titles.

“The reports from librarians and educators in the field make it clear that the organized campaigns to ban books aren’t over,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Each demand to ban a book is a demand to deny each person’s constitutionally protected right to choose and read books that raise important issues and lift up the voices of those who are often silenced.”

In addition to the surge in unique titles challenged, ALA also reported:

  • The number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92%, while school libraries saw an 11% increase.
  • Titles representing the voices and experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals made up 47% of those targeted in censorship attempts.
  • There were attempts to censor more than 100 titles in 17 states in 2023: Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly (located at 49 West 23rd Street, Ninth Floor, New York, NY)

While some of this is wrong-headedness on the part of parents, in other instances, parents may have reasonable objections about their children being exposed to highly-offensive content purchased with funds that originate with their tax dollars.

Who owns the community or local school library?

Are the librarians automatically entitled to decide what local children should read and what they should not read? If so, who granted librarians this entitlement?

On those occasions when PG checked books that were controversial as part of a community or school library, such books were invariably published by companies headquartered in New York City.

Is it surprising that Manhatten opinions about what children should read may differ from Omaha opinions or Boise opinions or Nashville opinions?

Is there a sense of entitlement among New York school book publishers that they know better or that they’re smarter than people who live elsewhere?

Book store owners across the nation certainly understand that just because New York trade publishers agree a new title is wonderful doesn’t mean that the book store’s customers will like it or will want to spend their own money to purchase the latest thing from NYC.

New York Disbars Infamous Copyright Troll

From Above the Law:

For years, Richard Liebowitz ran a very successful operation mostly sending threatening letters to companies claiming that they had infringed upon copyrights held by his photographer clients. Under the best of circumstances it’s a niche practice area that’s… kinda shady. But Liebowitz gained a degree of infamy across a number of matters for high-profile missteps in cases that sparked the ire of federal judges. Now, finally, New York has disbarred him.

Liebowitz wasn’t alone in the copyright trolling practice. A number of entities scour the internet looking for photographs that they can claim are “unlicensed” and demanding thousands of dollars to settle the matter knowing that between statutory damages for copyright infringement and the cost of litigation, most companies will just pay it. Many times, the photo in question actually is legally licensed through an agency like Getty Images, but the plaintiff photographer has, for whatever reason, pulled the image since the license was granted.

This runs the risk that some plaintiff might do this on purpose hoping to catch some legal licenseholder unawares and bank on the target just settling to avoid bringing any lawyers into the situation. Which is why, for example, a judge in one case cited by the disbarment opinion ordered Liebowitz “produce to the defendant records sufficient to show the royalty paid the last three times that the picture at issue was licensed, and the number of times the picture was licensed in the last five years; if the picture was never licensed, the plaintiff was to certify that fact as part of the plaintiff’s production.” In this case, Liebowitz “did not timely produce the required royalty information to the defendant” per the disbarment opinion.

Though most of the opinion describes more fundamental case management problems. From a case brought in 2017:

The respondent stated under penalty of perjury that he did not and had never made a settlement demand in this matter. In fact, the respondent had sent the defendant’s counsel an email in which the respondent proposed settling the matter for the sum of $25,000.

And another case brought in 2017:

On January 13, 2018, the respondent submitted a letter (hereinafter the January 13, 2018 letter) to the District Court, requesting an adjournment of the pretrial conference scheduled for January 19, 2018, and stating that the defendant “had yet to respond to the complaint” and that the plaintiff intended to file a motion for a default judgment. Judge Cote granted the request and ordered the motion for entry of default due on January 26, 2018.

The respondent’s statement in his January 13, 2018 letter that the defendant “had yet to respond to the complaint” was false and misleading, and the respondent knew that it was false and misleading when he made it. The January 13, 2018 letter failed to advise the court of the months-long history of communication between the parties, beginning in July 2017, as mentioned above.

. . . .

From yet another matter:

The plaintiff admitted in a deposition and in other documents that the Photograph had been previously published on numerous occasions. To prevent the defendants from learning that the plaintiff did not hold a valid registration, the respondent stonewalled the defendants’ requests for documents and information. The respondent also failed to comply with an order by Magistrate Judge Debra Freeman to obtain and produce Copyright Office documents to demonstrate a valid registration. After it came to light that the Photograph was not registered, and despite the record stating otherwise, the respondent argued, without evidence, that the lack of registration was merely a mistake.

If there’s a lesson to take away from these and the many, many more examples included in the opinion, it’s that copyright trolling outfits are largely unprepared for someone to push back on their demands. Firing off demand letters, memorializing boilerplate licensing agreements, and collecting cash is a tidy business model right up until a firm has to juggle hearings and discovery requests and experts and “not committing perjury.”

But perhaps the most bizarre story involves Liebowitz missing an April 12, 2019 hearing, explaining that his grandfather had passed. When Judge Seibel directed Liebowitz under penalty of contempt to furnish evidence or documentation regarding the date of his grandfather’s death, Liebowitz shot back that the order “likely constitutes a usurpation of judicial authority or a breach of judicial decorum.”

On November 7, 2019, the respondent retained counsel to represent him in the contempt proceedings, and on November 11, 2019, the respondent sent a letter to Judge Seibel admitting that he failed to carry out his responsibilities to the District Court and to his adversary. The respondent also admitted that his grandfather died on April 9, 2019, and was buried that same day.

Link to the rest at Above the Law

While most lawyers don’t engage in this sort of behavior, either because they regard it as intrinsically dishonest or worried they’ll get caught, as the OP demonstrates, somebody is going to call their bluff. That’s easier to do in places that are not so clogged with cases like New York, Chicago, etc.

In less massive and chaotic court systems where a lawyer is likely to encounter opposing counsel in another case sooner or later, the rule of living by the sword/dying by the sword comes into play as an effective deterrent to not being a jerk.

Federal Court Suspends Florida Attorney Over Filing Fabricated Cases Hallucinated by AI

From LawNext:

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about two more cases of AI-hallucinated citations in court filings leading to sanctions, and now comes the case of a Florida lawyer suspended from practice after filing cases that were “completely fabricated.”

On March 8, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida suspended attorney Thomas Grant Neusom from practicing in that court for one year, after which he will be eligible to apply for reinstatement.

In ordering the suspension, the court adopted the report and recommendation of its grievance committee, which issued a report in January finding that Neusom violated rules of the court and Florida’s Rules of Professional Conduct through a series of actions, including having filed pleadings that contained frivolous legal arguments based on fabricated cases.

The matter was brought to the attention of the disciplinary committee after Neusom’s opposing counsel, Nabil Joseph, was unable to find the cases and asked Neusom to furnish text versions. Neusom “provided non-responsive and evasive answers to the request for the cited authorities,” according to the committee.

When the committee asked Neusom about the pleadings during a telephone interview, he said that “he used Westlaw and Fastcase and may have used artificial intelligence to draft the filing(s) but was not able to check the excerpts and citations.” In a subsequent written response, he failed to offer any explanation for the fabricated cases “or provide any sense of understanding of the seriousness of the situation.”

Based on this, the committee found that Neusom had not only failed to exercise the reasonable due diligence required of an attorney, but that his conduct went “beyond a lack of due diligence as some of his legal authorities were completely fabricated.”

Link to the rest at LawNext

PG’s immediate response was that the penalty was not severe enough. He would have added a sizeable fine on top of the suspension.

PG wouldn’t be surprised if the attorney’s malpractice carrier had voided his policy, based on intentional idiocy.

I Always Knew I Was Different. I Just Didn’t Know I Was a Sociopath.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Whenever I ask my mother if she remembers the time in second grade when I stabbed a kid in the head with a pencil, her answer is the same: “Vaguely.”

And I believe her. So much about my early childhood is vague. Some things I remember with absolute clarity. Like the smell of the trees at Redwood National Park and our house on the hill near downtown San Francisco. God, I loved that house. Other things aren’t so clear, like the first time I sneaked into my neighbor’s house when they weren’t home.

I started stealing before I could talk. At least, I think I did. By the time I was six or seven I had an entire box full of things I’d stolen in my closet. Somewhere in the archives of People magazine there is a photo of Ringo Starr holding me as a toddler. We’re standing in his backyard—not far from Los Angeles, where my father was an executive in the music business—and I am literally stealing the glasses off his face. I was not the first child to ever play with a grown-up’s glasses. But based on the spectacles currently perched on my bookshelf, I’m pretty sure I was the only one to swipe a pair from a Beatle.

To be clear: I wasn’t a kleptomaniac. A kleptomaniac is a person with a persistent and irresistible urge to take things that don’t belong to them. I suffered from a different type of urge, a compulsion brought about by the discomfort of apathy, the nearly indescribable absence of common social emotions like shame and empathy.

I didn’t understand any of this back then. All I knew was that I didn’t feel things the way other kids did. I didn’t feel guilt when I lied. I didn’t feel compassion when classmates got hurt on the playground. For the most part, I felt nothing, and I didn’t like the way that “nothing” felt. So I did things to replace the nothingness with…something.

This impulse felt like an unrelenting pressure that expanded to permeate my entire self. The longer I tried to ignore it, the worse it got. My muscles would tense, my stomach would knot. Tighter. Tighter. It was claustrophobic, like being trapped inside my brain. Trapped inside a void.

Stealing wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to do. It just happened to be the easiest way to stop the tension. The first time I made this connection was in first grade, sitting behind a girl named Clancy. The pressure had been building for days. Without knowing exactly why, I was overcome with frustration and had the urge to do something violent.

I wanted to stand up and flip over my desk. I imagined running to the heavy steel door that opened to the playground and slamming my fingers in its hinges. For a minute I thought I might actually do it. But then I saw Clancy’s barrette. She had two in her hair, pink bows on either side. The one on the left had slipped down. Take it, my thoughts commanded, and you’ll feel better.

I liked Clancy and I didn’t want to steal from her. But I wanted my brain to stop pulsing, and some part of me knew it would help. So, carefully, I reached forward and unclipped the bow. Once it was in my hand, I felt better, as if some air had been released from an overinflated balloon. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t care. I’d found a solution. It was a relief.

These early acts of deviance are encoded in my mind like GPS coordinates plotting a course toward awareness. Even now, I can recall where I got most of the things that didn’t belong to me as a child. But I can’t explain the locket with the “L” inscribed on it.

“Patric, you absolutely must tell me where you got this,” my mother said the day she found it in my room. We were standing next to my bed. One of the pillow shams was crooked against the headboard and I was consumed with the urge to straighten it. “Look at me,” she said, grabbing my shoulders. “Somewhere out there a person is missing this locket. They are missing it right now and they’re so sad they can’t find it. Think about how sad that person must be.”

I shut my eyes and tried to imagine what the locket owner was feeling, but I couldn’t. I felt nothing. When I opened my eyes and looked into hers, I knew my mother could tell.

“Sweetheart, listen to me,” she said, kneeling. “Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is stealing. And stealing is very, very bad.”

Again, nothing.

Mom paused, not sure what to do next. She took a deep breath and asked, “Have you done this before?”

I nodded and pointed to the closet. Together we went through the box. I explained what everything was and where it had come from. Once the box was empty, she stood and said we were going to return every item to its rightful owner, which was fine with me. I didn’t fear consequences and I didn’t suffer remorse, two more things I’d already figured out weren’t “normal.” Returning the stuff actually served my purpose. The box was full, and emptying it would give me a fresh space to store things I had yet to steal.

“Why did you take these things?” Mom asked me.

I thought of the pressure in my head and the sense that I needed to do bad things sometimes. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Well… Are you sorry?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. I was sorry. But I was sorry I had to steal to stop fantasizing about violence, not because I had hurt anyone.

Empathy, like remorse, never came naturally to me. I was raised in the Baptist church. I knew we were supposed to feel bad about committing sins. My teachers talked about “honor systems” and something called “shame,” which I understood intellectually, but it wasn’t something I felt. My inability to grasp core emotional skills made the process of making and keeping friends somewhat of a challenge. It wasn’t that I was mean or anything. I was simply different.

. . . .

For more than a century, society has deemed sociopathy untreatable and unredeemable. The afflicted have been maligned and shunned by mental health professionals who either don’t understand or choose to ignore the fact that sociopathy—like many personality disorders—exists on a spectrum.

After years of study, intensive therapy and earning a Ph.D. in psychology, I can say that sociopaths aren’t “bad” or “evil” or “crazy.” We simply have a harder time with feelings. We act out to fill a void. When I understood this about myself, I was able to control it.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Microsoft Reading Coach is now available as a stand-alone app for schools

From Neowin:

In March 2022, Microsoft first introduced Reading Coach as an app available in Microsoft Teams. The app became available later for individual users outside the classroom. Today, the company has announced that Reading Coach is now available as its own Windows stand-alone app, or via its website at coach.microsoft.com, specifically for school use.

In a blog post, Microsoft says that schools that want to access the new stand-alone app can access it with a Microsoft Entra ID. School admins must enable support for Reading Coach via a signup page.

. . . .

Microsoft stated the apps will help students with their reading skills in a number of ways. The biggest feature is the app’s ability to create a unique story via AI for each student. The company said:

Create a story puts the story in reader’s hands by giving them the choice of a character, setting and reading level to create a unique AI generated story each time.

The blog post adds that the AI stories follow Microsoft’s AI guidelines, and are moderated for the story’s content quality and safety, along with setting up stories for specific age groups.

The app also lets students read from previously written content from its library. Teachers can also add their own story content as well.

Reading Coach lets students read stories out loud. The app’s speech recognition technology, combined with AI features, allows it to analyze how students read, and detect if they find specific words hard to read. After each session, the app shows an overall score and can also generate word practice sessions with those challenging words.

Link to the rest at Neowin and thanks to F. for the tip

Classical Culture and White Nationalism

From BookBrowse:

The hands of history have reshaped the Greek past for centuries, sculpting it into an idealized version credited with birthing a myriad of ideas and concepts, notably identity. Certain contemporary political currents claim that Hellenic identity was what we would today consider white, although Greece was a multiethnic society that did not have our modern concepts of race.

Groups promoting racist ideology have pushed the interpretation that the apparent lack of color and ornamentation in Greco-Roman classical sculpture, which is in fact due to the erosion of pigments over time, is indicative of a more advanced and sophisticated culture resulting from the supposed superiority of white Europeans. As Lauren Markham writes in A Map of Future Ruins, “classical iconography continues to be a touchstone of white supremacy today, building off the myth that ancient Greece is the taproot of so-called Western culture.”

. . . .

The former president has also drawn on classical imagery. In 2020, a draft of an executive order titled “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” was leaked. It sought to establish neoclassical architecture as the preferred style for federal buildings. The draft argues that in designing Washington D.C. buildings, the founding fathers embraced the classical models of “democratic Athens” and “republican Rome” because they symbolized “self-governing ideals.”

. . . .

Classicists are pushing against this misuse of antiquity’s ideas and symbols. According to Curtis Dozier, founder of Pharos and assistant professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College, these views “all depend on the widespread assumption that Greco-Roman antiquity is admirable, foundational and refined. Thus any presentation that promotes uncritical admiration for the ancient world, by presenting it as a source of ‘timeless’ models and wisdom, has the potential to be complicit in white supremacy.”

As classics and black world studies professor Denise McCoskey explains, the “idea that the Greeks and Romans identified as ‘white’ with other people in modern-day Europe is just a complete misreading of ancient evidence.

Link to the rest at BookBrowse

PG reminds one and all that he doesn’t necessarily agree with items he posts on TPV.

He also asks that any comments to this or other posts avoid any disparagement of anyone on the basis of race or any other characteristic that is inherent to an individual’s personhood.

It’s Time for Publishers to Tell the Truth About Posthumously Published Books

From Book Riot:

This week saw the publication of Until August by Gabriel García Márquez, a work that was incomplete at the time of his death in 2014 and which he expressly stated should not just be kept private but completely destroyed. The novella, which is being marketed as a “rediscovered” work, was published with the permission of García Márquez’s sons, the executors of his literary estate. 

The reasoning goes like this: their father worked doggedly on the book until memory loss due to dementia required him to stop writing in 2004. At the time, he had amassed nearly 800 pages of drafts, fragments, and notes and even once submitted a draft to his agent before ultimately declaring, “This book doesn’t work” and instructing his sons to destroy it upon his death. Now here’s where it gets tricky. 

It was only when he was suffering severe memory loss from dementia that he decided it wasn’t good enough.

When they revisited the last draft, García Márquez’s sons found it was better than they remembered. Had dementia clouded their father’s judgment of his own work? Fearing that they had made a mistake by honoring his wishes and holding back what could be a meaningful addition to his legacy and literary history, the brothers decided to reverse course. They told the New York Times’s Alexandra Alter that they know it might look like a cash grab.

His sons acknowledge that the book doesn’t rank among García Márquez’s masterpieces, and fear that some might dismiss the publication as a cynical effort to make more money off their father’s legacy.

I’m deciding to take García Márquez’s sons at their word and assume that they are trying to do the right thing in a very complicated situation. 

I’m not asking literary executors and publishers to do something different because I’m not sure they should, and I know better than to think they will. What I am asking is for them to do better

As scholar Álvaro Santana-Acuña notes, having to weigh your loved one’s last wishes against Global Literary History (especially when your loved one was a Nobel Prize-winning author) is an impossible position to be in. From my comfortable perch as an armchair ethicist in this debate, the answer to “Should you publish work your loved one expressly instructed you to destroy?” is “It depends.” 

What it depends on is largely how you do it. 

Like many readers, I am of two minds about posthumous publication that defies a writer’s wishes. The financial, reputational, and historical incentives are compelling. I get it, and I understand that for those reasons, posthumous publication of lost/incomplete/etc work will continue to be a thing. Fine. I’m not asking literary executors and publishers to do something different because I’m not sure they should, and I know better than to think they will. What I am asking is for them to do better

. . . .

Go Set a Watchman wasn’t a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird; it was an early draft Harper Lee wanted to keep out of the public eye for good reason. Until August is not a rediscovered Gabriel García Márquez novel; it’s a 144-page construction Frankensteined together from the author’s working material. And there’s nothing wrong with that! What is wrong is the profit-driven decision to package and market these books as something that they aren’t. 

. . . .

Publishers do readers and authors alike a disservice when they misrepresent the nature of posthumously published work to make it more commercially appealing, and literary executors fail their charges when they agree to this packaging. There are plenty real reasons for readers to be interested in a posthumously published work, publishers and estates don’t need to fudge the backstory.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

Does generative artificial intelligence infringe copyright?

From The Economist:

GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) will transform the workplace. The International Monetary Fund reckons that AI tools, which includes ones that produce text or images from written prompts, will eventually affect 40% of jobs. Goldman Sachs, a bank, says that the technology could replace 300m jobs worldwide. Sceptics say those estimates exaggerate. But some industries seem to be feeling the effects already. A paper published in August 2023 on SSRN, a repository for research which has yet to undergo formal peer review, suggests that the income of self-employed “creatives”—writers, illustrators and the like—has fallen since November 2022, when ChatGPT, a popular AI tool, was released.

Over the past year artists, authors and comedians have filed lawsuits against the tech companies behind AI tools, including OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic. The cases allege that, by using copyrighted material to train their AI models, tech firms have violated creators’ rights. Do those claims have merit?

AI generators translate written prompts—”draw a New York skyline in the style of Vincent van Gogh”, for example—into machine-readable commands. The models are trained on huge databases of text, images, audio or video. In many cases the tech firms appear to have scraped much of the material from the internet without permission. In 2022 David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, one of the most popular AI image generators, admitted that his tool had hoovered up 100m images without knowing where they came from or seeking permission from their owners.

Generators are supposed to make new output and on that basis AI developers argue that what their tools produce does not infringe copyright. They rely on the “fair-use doctrine”, which allows the use of copyrighted material in certain circumstances. This doctrine normally protects journalists, teachers, researchers and others when they use short excerpts of copyrighted material in their own work, for example in a book review. AI tools are not entitled to that protection, creatives believe, because they are in effect absorbing and rearranging copyrighted work rather than merely excerpting small pieces from it.

Generative AI is so new that there is almost no case law to guide courts. That makes the outcome of these cases hard to guess. Some observers reckon that many of the class-action suits against AI firms will probably fail. Andres Guadamuz, an expert in intellectual-property law at the University of Sussex, reckons that the strength of the fair-use doctrine is likely to trump claimants’ concerns.

One case will be particularly closely watched. On December 27th the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI after negotiations failed. It alleges that the tech companies owe “billions of dollars” for using copyrighted work to train ChatGPT. The newspaper’s lawyers showed multiple examples of ChatGPT producing New York Times journalism word for word. This shows that AI tools do not substantially transform the material they’re trained on, and therefore are not protected by the fair-use doctrine, they claim.

On January 8th OpenAI responded, saying that it had done nothing wrong. Generative AI tools are pattern-matching technologies that write responses by predicting the likeliest next word based on what they have been trained on. As in other cases of this kind, OpenAI says that is covered by fair use. It claims that the New York Times overstates the risk of “regurgitation”, which it blames on a bug that produces errors only rarely. In a filing submitted on February 26th, OpenAI claimed that the New York Times cherry-picked answers from “tens of thousands” of queries it sent to the chatbot. Some of these were “deceptive prompts” that violated its terms of use, it alleged.

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG still thinks the use of materials protected by copyright to train AI systems qualifies as fair use. Those who use an AI system to create written material cannot, to the best of PG’s knowledge, call up an exact copy of a New York Times story.

PG is going to see if he can make his way through the various contentions, but he was immediately reminded of the Google Books case that was ultimately resolved in favor of Google in 2015.

The basis for the Google Books decision was the transformative nature of Google’s use of the content of the books to populate a huge online database with millions of books.

PG suggests that there is a much greater degree of transformation involved in AI usage of the texts involved in the New York Times’s Lawsuit Against Microsoft and OpenAI than there is in Google’s use of the text of 40 million books in 500 languages.

Trust Your Intuition: The Writer’s Sixth Sense

From Writers in the Storm:

Just as martial artists trust their instincts, writers must trust their intuition. If something doesn’t feel right, don’t dismiss it. Whether it’s a subtle discomfort or a gut feeling, your intuition is a valuable tool for detecting potential threats. Trust it and take appropriate action to protect your safety.

Writing in public places, such as coffee shops and libraries, offers a unique blend of inspiration and potential challenges. As both a martial artist and author, the combination of creativity and personal safety comes naturally. However, for others, safety may not be a major consideration. Drawing from my experience as a black belt and self-defense seminar instructor, I offer these tips for writers to balance safety and creativity.

The Art of Location Selection: Choose Well-Lit and Crowded Spots

Just as a martial artist assesses their environment for safety, writers should be discerning about their chosen writing spaces. Select well-lit and populated areas where the flow of people ensures a reasonable level of security. Avoid secluded corners or dimly lit spots that might pose safety risks. Your writing sanctuary should inspire creativity without compromising your well-being.

Strategic Positioning: Sit Facing Entrances for Enhanced Awareness

In martial arts, practitioners learn the significance of positioning themselves for optimal defense. Similarly, when writing in public places, sit facing entrances and exits. This strategic placement not only allows for a clear view of your surroundings, but also enhances situational awareness. Observing who enters and exits establishes a mental map of the immediate environment, helping you to focus on your writing without neglecting your safety.

Engage and Disengage: Knowing When to Look Up

Immersing yourself in your writing is crucial, but so is periodically disengaging to assess your surroundings. Establish a rhythm—write for a set period, then take a moment to look up and scan your environment. It’s a dance between creativity and vigilance, ensuring you remain connected to both your work and the world around you. Designate breaks in your writing session to focus solely on your surroundings. Use these moments to reorient yourself and ensure your safety protocols are intact.

Make a habit of being mindful of those around you and any unusual behavior. Trust your instincts—if something feels off, it probably is. Being mindful of your surroundings helps protect your creative flow from unexpected disruptions.

Guarding the Arsenal: Keep Valuables Secure

Martial artists safeguard their weapons, and for writers, the laptop or tablet is a formidable tool. Be mindful of your belongings—keep your laptop, bags, and personal items within reach. Avoid leaving them unattended, as distraction can provide an opportunity for opportunistic individuals. By maintaining control over your possessions, you safeguard both your creative work and personal safety.

Digital Fortifications: Use Lock Screen Features and VPNs

Just as martial artists fortify their defenses, writers should fortify their digital presence. Enable lock screen features on your devices to protect your work and personal information. Use strong passwords or biometric authentication for an added layer of security. When working on public Wi-Fi, avoid accessing sensitive financial or personal information. Consider using a virtual private network (VPN) for added security, ensuring that your digital activities remain shielded from potential threats.

Strategic Alliances: The Buddy System for Writers

In martial arts, strength often lies in alliances. Likewise, writers can benefit from the buddy system. If possible, work with a writing partner or a friend when venturing into public spaces. Having someone by your side not only deters potential threats but also provides a safety net, allowing you to immerse yourself in your writing without undue worry.

. . . .

Trust Your Intuition: The Writer’s Sixth Sense

Just as martial artists trust their instincts, writers must trust their intuition. If something doesn’t feel right, don’t dismiss it. Whether it’s a subtle discomfort or a gut feeling, your intuition is a valuable tool for detecting potential threats. Trust it and take appropriate action to protect your safety.

Link to the rest at Writers in the Storm

The corny over-extension of martial arts wisdom would normally have caused PG to pass the OP by.

However, he was concerned about authors, perhaps mostly female authors, having problems finding safe public spaces in which to write.

In ancient college times, PG would often walk to the library to write if things were a little chaotic around the apartment he shared, checking only on how much longer the library would remain open. He relied on library staff to kick him out at closing time. He would then walk home, without a second thought, seldom seeing anyone else on his way.

Thinking back, he almost never saw any female students during his close-the-library trips. To be fair, the campus was regarded as quite safe, even after dark.

But in those ancient times, a gentleman or would-be gentleman or guy who didn’t want to be excoriated by persons of both genders (there were only two back then), would always walk his date to the door of her dormitory, sorority, apartment, etc., and wait until the door locked behind her before leaving, regardless of what substances he had taken into his body during the preceding hours.

The Case for Pursuing a Traditional Publishing Deal Without an Agent

From Jane Friedman:

Securing the services of a literary agent has long been the gold standard for authors pursuing a long and successful career in publishing.

It’s easy to understand why. At the turn of the twentieth century, the so-called “author’s representative” emerged as the figure who would help authors cut a better deal with publishers. Most publishers were unhappy about this since agents who skillfully leveraged their clients’ hot properties forced publishers to shell out more money on better terms.

By mid-century, the agenting game was well established. Legendary agents like Sterling Lord (Jack Kerouac and Doris Kearns Goodwin were among his clients) and Robert Gottlieb (Toni Morrison, Robert Caro) impressed writers with their ability to champion talent, nurture genius, and land lucrative publishing deals. Needless to say, authors couldn’t accomplish half so much on their own behalf. The gatekeepers had won—and were here to stay.

Fast forward to today. Agents still function as gatekeepers, especially to the Big Five publishers and many top-tier smaller publishers, such as Tin House (whose open-reading periods are limited to a few days a year). Breakout debuts by authors like Jessica George (represented by David Higham) and stratospheric careers like Bonnie Garmus’ (repped by Curtis Brown) would not be possible without agents in the mix.

But, dear authors, securing an agent is not the only path to getting happily published (outside of self-publishing).

One big reason to consider other strategies (especially with a first book) is that the agenting business model is showing serious signs of wear-and-tear. Many agents readily admit the industry is in flux.

According to the latest member survey by the Association of American Literary Agents, an overwhelming majority of agents report feeling burned out and are working too much uncompensated overtime. And no wonder, as roughly a fifth of them receive 100 or more queries per week. Many also feel underpaid, given that roughly two-thirds depend in part or entirely on commissions—and making a sale can take months, if not years. (Do you imagine this is an elite group? Roughly 30 percent of American agents earn less than $50,000 annually.)

There’s no need to put all your editorial eggs into this one (turbulent) basket.

Scores of traditional small presses operating professionally and ethically in North America (and the UK, Australia, and elsewhere) are open to reviewing manuscripts year-round or seasonally without charging a fee.

Before getting into nuts and bolts on this, let me anticipate some objections that I know are out there, because the lure of agent-magic is strong:

But going directly to a publisher is less prestigious than going with an agent!

Even if that were objectively true, by the time your book is out in the world, readers have no idea how it got there and aren’t thinking about who reps you. The means justify the ends.

But an agent will fight for a better contract, or a bigger advance, than I’d get by negotiating with the publisher myself!

There may be some truth to this, but the tradeoffs are worth considering. For one thing: you’re getting published! A small advance, or no advance, may be offset by your efforts to successfully market your book when it comes out. Secondly, consider spending a few hundred dollars for an attorney to review your contract. The Authors Guild does this for free, and some states (such as Maryland) offer pro bono legal services to artists.

But a small press can’t market my book effectively!

It’s true that the Big Five publishers have bigger marketing budgets for ads and other forms of publicity. But will they put any of that money behind your book? And even big-name authors are increasingly expected to help market their own books and participate on social media.

The best small presses will submit reviews to the same outlets as the Big Five, from Kirkus to Publishers Weekly, and will engage in guerrilla marketing techniques to get you noticed. The gap in marketing efforts is not as wide as you think—and you’ll be expected to self-market with any publisher.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

PG says 99 out of 100 small presses have most of the drawbacks of large publishers with even more downside risk.

A large publisher will generally offer to pay a respectable advance. Most small publishers can’t afford those kind of up-front expenditures.

A small press, by definition, doesn’t sell very many books. A small press has to really fight to get one of its titles selected by a major reviewer with lots of readers.

Yet, the terms of a typical small press publishing contract almost always follows New York publisher patterns of demanding everything without a binding commitment to generate a respectable number of sales.

None of the small presses PG has examined vary from large publisher results of an occasional blockbuster, but mostly books that get launched, then flame out.

Why it’s hard to write a good book about the tech world

From The Economist:

When people ask Michael Moritz, a former journalist and prominent tech investor, what book they should read to understand Silicon Valley, he always recommends two. “They are not about Silicon Valley, but they have everything to do with Silicon Valley,” he says.

One is “The Studio” (1969) by John Gregory Dunne, an American writer who spent a year inside 20th Century Fox watching films get made and executives try to balance creativity with profit-seeking. The other, “Swimming Across” (2001) by Andy Grove, the former boss of Intel, a chipmaker, is a memoir about surviving the Holocaust. It shows how adversity can engender grit, which every entrepreneur needs.

That Sir Michael does not suggest a book squarely about the tech business says a lot. Silicon Valley has produced some of the world’s most gargantuan companies, but it has not inspired many written accounts with a long shelf life. Wall Street, on the other hand, claims a small canon that has stood the test of time, from chronicles of meltdowns (“Too Big to Fail”), to corporate greed (“Barbarians at the Gate”) to a fictionalised account (“The Bonfire of the Vanities”) that popularised the term “masters of the universe”.

Why not the masters of Silicon Valley? Part of the problem is access, as is often the case when writing about the powerful. Tech executives may let their guards down at Burning Man, but they have been painstakingly trained by public-relations staff to not get burned by writers. This has been the case for a while. When John Battelle was writing “The Search” (2005), about online quests for information, he spent over a year asking to interview Google’s co-founder, Larry Page. The firm tried to impose conditions, such as the right to read the manuscript in advance and add a footnote and possible rebuttal to every mention of Google. He declined. Google ended up granting the interview anyway.

Journalists who manage to finagle access can feel they owe a company and its executives and, in turn, write meek and sympathetic accounts rather than penetrating prose. Or they cannot break in—or do not even try—and write their book from a distance, without an insider’s insights.

Two new books demonstrate how hard it is to write well about Silicon Valley. “Filterworld” is an outsider’s account of the Valley’s impact, which reads as if it was entirely reported and written in a coffee shop in Brooklyn. The book laments how “culture is stuck and plagued by sameness” and blames Silicon Valley’s algorithms, “the technological spectre haunting our own era of the early 21st century”.

This is the sort of tirade against tech that has spread as widely as Silicon Valley’s apps. It is not wrong, but nor is it insightful. The author, Kyle Chayka, who is a journalist for the New Yorker, never reconciles the tension between the cultural “sameness” he decries and the personalisation everyone experiences, with online users possessing individual feeds and living in separate informational bubbles. Nor is this a wholly new phenomenon. People have been complaining about globalisation eroding local culture since “recorded civilisation” began, the author concedes. In 1890 Gabriel Tarde, a French sociologist, lamented the “persistent sameness in hotel fare and service, in household furniture, in clothes and jewellery, in theatrical notices and in the volumes in shop windows” that spread with the passenger train.

Burn Book” is a better, though imperfect, read. Kara Swisher, a veteran chronicler of Silicon Valley, is both an insider and an outsider. She has attended baby showers for tech billionaires’ offspring, and even hosted Google’s top brass for a sleepover at her mother’s apartment. But she has a distaste for the Valley’s “look-at-me narcissists, who never met an idea that they did not try to take credit for”.

In delicious detail, she offers her verdict on the techies who have become household names, such as Facebook’s founder: “As sweat poured down Mark Zuckerberg’s pasty and rounded face, I wondered if he was going to keel over right there at my feet.” (That was in 2010,before he had gone through media-training galore.) Much as Truman Capote, an American writer, was willing to skewer the socialite swans of New York, Ms Swisher delights in prodding some of her subjects to make readers smile and squirm, such as media mogul Rupert Murdoch (“Uncle Satan”) and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (“a frenetic mongoose” with “a genuinely infectious maniacal laugh”).

Link to the rest at The Economist

Catastrophe Ethics

From The Wall Street Journal:

It’s getting harder and harder to be a decent person. You wake up hankering for a coffee. But hold on! Before you order one, better make sure that a fair-trade producer supplied the beans. And then: a drop of milk? Cows have such a huge carbon footprint. Almond milk? Growing almonds requires copious quantities of water. Soy? Don’t even think about it.

Time to walk to work. That’s how you’ve been getting there since learning, last week, that your electric car’s cobalt comes from mines that engage in unacceptable labor practices. Now you’ve arrived but—can you believe it?—a co-worker just made a deplorable comment about the presidential campaign. Cut ties? A busy day of discussion ensues.

At last you’re home for the evening. Perhaps watch a comedian on your favorite streaming service? Not till you’ve checked whether he’s uttered something offensive in the past 15 years.

Modern life, Travis Rieder declares in “Catastrophe Ethics,” is “morally exhausting.” Everything we do “seems to matter,” he notes, and yet “nothing we do seems to matter.” The term “catastrophe” might seem to apply more to climate change than offensive comedians, but Mr. Rieder is speaking generally of collective problems that lie beyond the capacity of any of us to affect individually. They’re catastrophic in that they involve large social matters—the comedian, say, might be contributing to public prejudices by ridiculing a particular group—even though our own role in affecting them is vanishingly small. You’re not going to stop climate change on your own—you are, after all, one person in a global population of eight billion. Nor will the comedian you cancel even notice. What to do?

The great moral theories, Mr. Rieder tells us, are of little help. His prime target is utilitarianism, which holds that the right thing to do is whatever will maximize benefits and minimize costs for all concerned. Such counsel is useless, though, when our individual actions will neither yield any measurable benefit nor reduce any perceptible cost.

Other doctrines are explored as well. “Deontology” argues that we should not treat other human beings manipulatively, simply as means to our own ends. But its prohibitions seem better suited to acts like lying or promise-breaking, Mr. Rieder notes, than buying coffee or watching a comedian.

Then there is virtue ethics, which advises us to cultivate morally good character traits like temperance or moderation. Because the development of such traits takes place over time, though, it can’t really tell us whether our taking a joyride in our Hummer next Tuesday is right or wrong, since it’s unlikely to affect our character one way or another. Virtue ethics is not, Mr. Rieder concludes, particularly action-guiding.

Mr. Rieder, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins, advises that the best course is simply to follow our own sense of personal “integrity,” an idea he derives from the philosopher Bernard Williams. For example, you might drink only fair-trade coffee because the proper treatment of workers is central to your sense of right and wrong, but you’re OK with listening to a comedian who offends particular groups. I, on the other hand, might cancel the comedian because his humor crosses some non-negotiable lines in my moral core, but I don’t get particularly worked up over where my coffee comes from.

We can’t, Mr. Rieder says, do everything. But we can be a person of integrity, as long as we “walk the walk” of our deepest values. There is a gentle wisdom here, reminiscent of the rabbinical saying: “You are not obliged to complete the work of the world, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Even so, Mr. Rieder might be too quick to dismiss utilitarianism and too sanguine about personal integrity.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Catastrophe Ethics

From The Wall Street Journal:

It’s getting harder and harder to be a decent person. You wake up hankering for a coffee. But hold on! Before you order one, better make sure that a fair-trade producer supplied the beans. And then: a drop of milk? Cows have such a huge carbon footprint. Almond milk? Growing almonds requires copious quantities of water. Soy? Don’t even think about it.

Time to walk to work. That’s how you’ve been getting there since learning, last week, that your electric car’s cobalt comes from mines that engage in unacceptable labor practices. Now you’ve arrived but—can you believe it?—a co-worker just made a deplorable comment about the presidential campaign. Cut ties? A busy day of discussion ensues.

At last you’re home for the evening. Perhaps watch a comedian on your favorite streaming service? Not till you’ve checked whether he’s uttered something offensive in the past 15 years.

Modern life, Travis Rieder declares in “Catastrophe Ethics,” is “morally exhausting.” Everything we do “seems to matter,” he notes, and yet “nothing we do seems to matter.” The term “catastrophe” might seem to apply more to climate change than offensive comedians, but Mr. Rieder is speaking generally of collective problems that lie beyond the capacity of any of us to affect individually. They’re catastrophic in that they involve large social matters—the comedian, say, might be contributing to public prejudices by ridiculing a particular group—even though our own role in affecting them is vanishingly small. You’re not going to stop climate change on your own—you are, after all, one person in a global population of eight billion. Nor will the comedian you cancel even notice. What to do?

The great moral theories, Mr. Rieder tells us, are of little help. His prime target is utilitarianism, which holds that the right thing to do is whatever will maximize benefits and minimize costs for all concerned. Such counsel is useless, though, when our individual actions will neither yield any measurable benefit nor reduce any perceptible cost.

Other doctrines are explored as well. “Deontology” argues that we should not treat other human beings manipulatively, simply as means to our own ends. But its prohibitions seem better suited to acts like lying or promise-breaking, Mr. Rieder notes, than buying coffee or watching a comedian.

Then there is virtue ethics, which advises us to cultivate morally good character traits like temperance or moderation. Because the development of such traits takes place over time, though, it can’t really tell us whether our taking a joyride in our Hummer next Tuesday is right or wrong, since it’s unlikely to affect our character one way or another. Virtue ethics is not, Mr. Rieder concludes, particularly action-guiding.

Mr. Rieder, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins, advises that the best course is simply to follow our own sense of personal “integrity,” an idea he derives from the philosopher Bernard Williams. For example, you might drink only fair-trade coffee because the proper treatment of workers is central to your sense of right and wrong, but you’re OK with listening to a comedian who offends particular groups. I, on the other hand, might cancel the comedian because his humor crosses some non-negotiable lines in my moral core, but I don’t get particularly worked up over where my coffee comes from.

We can’t, Mr. Rieder says, do everything. But we can be a person of integrity, as long as we “walk the walk” of our deepest values. There is a gentle wisdom here, reminiscent of the rabbinical saying: “You are not obliged to complete the work of the world, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Even so, Mr. Rieder might be too quick to dismiss utilitarianism and too sanguine about personal integrity.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

John Blake rebrands true crime author Christopher Berry-Dee for new readership

From The Bookseller:

Bonnier Books UK imprint John Blake is rebranding true-crime author Christopher Berry-Dee for a new readership.  The publisher said: “True crime has evolved into a new generation of Millennial and Gen-Z podcasters, TikTokkers and influencers, with #truecrime reaching 1.4 million hits on Instagram and 732,000 on TikTok. The rebrand will reach this existing and already engaged audience, updating Christopher Berry-Dee for a new readership.” Executive editor at John Blake, Toby Buchan said: “Seven years on from our last redesign of Christopher Berry-Dee’s Talking with. . . series of true-crime bestsellers, and having just published his 12th book in the series, it seemed the perfect time to modernise the cover designs to suit today’s knowledgeable and enthusiastic readership. He is about to deliver his latest, Talking with Serial Killers: Murderous Medics, which John Blake will publish in January 2025. Christopher is a much-valued author, and given the size and keenness of the audience, we are only too glad to add extra zip to a body of work that is both wide-ranging and highly regarded.”

. . . .

Art director Nick Stearn said of Jake Cook, the designer who headed the redesign: “Jake’s fresh look at pushing the boundaries of CBD’s true crime series has resulted in a stand-out colourful repackaging which can’t help but catch your eye and draw you in to discover the sinister truths.”

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

Tackling the TikTok Threat

From The Wall Street Journal:

The House on Wednesday is expected to vote on a bill that would give popular social-media app TikTok an ultimatum: Break up with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or break up with the U.S. It didn’t need to come to this, but Beijing and TikTok’s Chinese-owner ByteDance left Washington with no choice.

Congress has spent years debating how to mitigate the national-security risks of TikTok’s Chinese ownership that have grown with the site’s popularity. About 150 million Americans use TikTok, and the app is a top source of news and search for Generation Z.

Donald Trump tried in 2020 to force ByteDance to divest TikTok, but his executive order was blocked in court, partly because the President lacked clear authority from Congress. Legislation by Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher and Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi aims to overcome the legal obstacles.

Their bill would ban TikTok from app stores and web-hosting services in the U.S. if the company doesn’t divest from ByteDance. It also establishes a process by which the President can prohibit other social-media apps that are “controlled by a foreign adversary.” The bill is narrowly tailored while giving the President tools to combat future threats.

Banning TikTok should be a last resort, but ByteDance and Beijing have demonstrated that they can’t be trusted. Reams of evidence show how the Chinese government can use the platform for cyber-espionage and political influence campaigns in the U.S.

Numerous reports have found that posts about Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang province, the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong protests, Tibet and other politically sensitive content in China are suppressed on TikTok. A December study by the Network Contagion Research Institute found significant disparities between hashtags on Instagram and TikTok. The site also appears to amplify content that sows discord and ignorance in America. Pro-Hamas videos trend more than pro-Israel ones. Videos promoting Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “letter to America” went viral on TikTok last autumn.

How has TikTok responded to allegations that its algorithms are controlled by the Chinese government? In January it restricted researcher access to its hashtag data to make it harder to study. “Some individuals and organizations have misused the Center’s search function to draw inaccurate conclusions, so we are changing some of the features to ensure it is used for its intended purpose,” a TikTok spokesperson said.

Yet TikTok can’t explain why posts that are divisive in America go viral, while those that are sensitive for the CCP get few views. TikTok tried to ameliorate concerns about CCP wizards behind the screen with its Project Texas, which houses American user data on Oracle servers and gives the U.S. software company access to its algorithms.

But TikTok’s algorithms are still controlled by ByteDance engineers in China. The Journal reported in January that TikTok executives have said internally that they sometimes need to share protected U.S. data with ByteDance to train the algorithms and keep problematic content off the site. Like protests for democracy in Hong Kong?

TikTok’s other major security risk is cyber-espionage. The app vacuums up sensitive American user information, including searches, browsing histories and locations. This data can and does flow back to China. “Everything is seen in China,” a TikTok official said in a leaked internal recording reported by Buzzfeed.

ByteDance employees tried to uncover internal leakers by spying on American journalists. After this surveillance was reported, ByteDance blamed “misconduct of certain individuals” who were no longer employed. But there’s nothing to stop CCP puppets in ByteDance back-offices from spying on Americans.

Meta ignited a firestorm several years ago when it was found to have given British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica access to user personal data. Political campaigns used the data to target ads. TikTok’s privacy risks and malign political influence are more disturbing since it answers to Beijing.

Xi Jinping has eviscerated any distinction between the government and private companies. ByteDance employs hundreds of employees who previously worked at state-owned media outlets. A former head of engineering in ByteDance’s U.S. offices has alleged that the Communist Party “had a special office or unit” in the company “sometimes referred to as the ‘Committee.’”

. . . .

In any case, the House bill doesn’t restrict First Amendment rights. It regulates national security. It also has ample precedent since U.S. law restricts foreign ownership of broadcast stations. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States forced the Chinese owners of Grindr, the gay dating app, to give up control of the company.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

PG thinks the WSJ opinion writers are going more than a bit overboard in their fears and, particularly, their “solution” to the problem they’ve overthought.

China is going to continue to engage in Communist behavior regardless of what happens with TikTok. If, “everything is seen in China,” then China is spending a huge amount of human time looking at TikTok videos.

“TikTok can’t explain why posts that are divisive in America go viral.”

Posts that are divisive in America frequently go viral without any help from foreign nations. It’s a feature of democratic societies, not a bug.

People disagree on political issues face-to-face, by snail mail, by email, via newspaper editorial pages and, especially, online. Look at what was printed in old-fashioned newspapers run by William Randolph Hearst and Pulitzer when there were far fewer sources of news available to regular folk than is the case today.

When a case containing dismembered human remains surfaced in New York’s East River in June of 1897, the publisher of the New York Journal–a young, devil-may-care millionaire named William Randolph Hearst–decided that his newspaper would “scoop” the city’s police department by solving this heinous crime. Pulling out all the stops, Hearst launched more than a journalistic murder investigation; his newspaper’s active intervention in the city’s daily life, especially its underside, marked the birth of the Yellow Press.

Most notable among Hearst’s competitors was New York City’s The World, owned and managed by a European Jewish immigrant named Joseph Pulitzer. These two papers and others exploited the scandal, corruption, and crime among the city’s most influential citizens, and its most desperate inhabitants

PG claims no deep expertise about what goes on in the uncountable number of online discussion groups, but suspects there are copious numbers of people from all sorts of places who subscribe to the belief that Joe Biden is being controlled by alien invaders, just like Donald Trump was before him.

How Pseudo-Intellectualism Ruined Journalism

From Persuasion:

I was sitting across from the professor as she went over my latest piece. This was 1986, Columbia School of Journalism, Reporting and Writing I, the program’s core course. At one point, in response to what I don’t recall, I said, “That doesn’t bode well for me.” I could have been referring to a lot of things; there were so many, in my time in journalism school, that did not bode well for me. One was the next set of words that came out of her mouth. “‘Bode?’” she said. “I haven’t heard anyone bode anything in a long time.” Another was her comment, on a previous piece, about my use of “agglomerate.” She had circled it and written, “No such word.”

But the most important was the intellectual climate of the school as a whole, in that it did not have one. We were not there to think. We were there to learn a set of skills. One of them, ironically, was asking questions, just not about the profession itself: its premises, its procedures, its canon of ethics. I know, because from time to time I tried, and it didn’t go well. This was trade school, not liberal arts school. When a teacher said something, you were supposed to write it down, not argue.

The main thing that I learned in journalism school was that I didn’t belong in journalism school. The other thing I learned was that journalists were deeply anti-intellectual. They were suspicious of ideas; they regarded theories as pretentious; they recoiled at big words (or had never heard of them). For a long time, I had contempt for the profession on that score. In recent years, though, this has yielded to a measure of respect. For notice that I didn’t say that journalists are anti-intellectual. I said they were. Now they’re something else: pseudo-intellectual. And that is much worse.

The shift reflects the transformation of journalists’ social position. This phenomenon is familiar. Journalism used to be a working-class profession. I think of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, icons of the New York tabloids, the working people’s papers, in the second half of the twentieth century. Breslin’s father was a drunk and a piano player who went out for rolls one day and never came back. His mother was a teacher and civil servant. Hamill’s father was a grocery clerk and factory worker; his mother, a domestic, a nurse’s aide, a cashier. Breslin went to Long Island University but dropped out after two years. Hamill left school at fifteen to apprentice as a sheet metal worker, enlisted in the Navy, and took some art school classes later on (he hoped to be a cartoonist). Both were Irish Catholic: Hamill from Brooklyn, Breslin from Queens, long before those boroughs were discovered by the hipsters and the condo creeps.

Coming up working-class, you develop a certain relationship to facticity. Your parents work with their hands, with things, or on intimate, sometimes bodily terms with other people. Your environment is raw and rough—asphalt, plain talk, stains and smells—not cushioned and sweetened. You imbibe a respect for the concrete, the tangible, that which can be known through direct experience, and a corresponding contempt for euphemism and cant. You develop a gut and a bullshit detector, acquire a suspicion of experts who operate at a remove from reality, which means academics in particular. Hence the recognition, in figures like Breslin and Hamill, that the world is chaotic, full of paradox, that people evade our understanding. Hence their sense of curiosity and irony and wonder. At the source of their moral commitments, they had not rules but instincts, a feeling for the difference between right and wrong. For the masses, they felt not pity but solidarity, since they were of them.

That was the profession’s ethos—skeptical, demotic—and you didn’t have to grow up working class (or be a man) to absorb it. Molly Ivins, Nora Ephron, Cokie Roberts, Maureen Dowd, Mara Liasson, even Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm, in their own ways: all had it or have it. But none of them was born more recently than 1955. In the last few decades, journalists have turned into a very different kind of animal. “Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession,” wrote David Brooks not long ago, citing a study that found that more than half of writers at The New York Times attended one of the 29 most selective institutions in the country; “we’re an elite-college-dominated profession.”

. . . .

A couple of years ago, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, an Ivy League professor said the quiet part out loud. “Not all of our students will be original thinkers,” she wrote, “nor should they all be. A world of original thinkers, all thinking wholly inimitable thoughts, could never get anything done. For that we need unoriginal thinkers, hordes of them, cloning ideas by the score and broadcasting them to every corner of our virtual world. What better device for idea-cloning than the cliché?” She meant academic clichés, having mentioned “performativity,” “normativity,” “genderqueer,” and others. “[W]e should instead strive to send our students forth—and ourselves too—armed with clichés for political change.”

And that’s exactly what has happened, nowhere more so than in journalism. The progressive academic ideology has become the intellectual framework of the field, or at least of its most visible and influential parts: The New York TimesThe Washington Post, NPR, et al. More to the point, the field now has an intellectual framework, one that journalists seek, top-down, to impose on the world, on the stories they report. The practice travels under the name of “moral clarity”—as if moral clarity were anything, in this world, besides a very rare commodity (I would love to know what Didion thought of the concept), and as if the phrase meant anything other, in this context, than tailoring the evidence to fit one’s pre-existing beliefs. Facts are now subordinated to the “narrative,” a revealing word: first, because it comes from academia (it is one of those clichés); second, because it’s almost always misused, a particle of garbled theory cloned and memed (as the professor would have wanted). When journalists say “narrative,” they mean “idea.” And it is always an idea they’ve received from someone else.

They think they’re thinking, but they’re wrong. They think that thinking means applying ideas, in the sense that you’d apply an ointment. What it actually means is examining them, reworking them, without fear, without cease. They believe that they are skeptical. In fact, they’re alternately cynical and gullible: cynical toward the other side and gullible toward their own (that they see themselves as being on a side is part of the problem, of course). That is why they’re helpless before the assertions of like-minded activists and academics or of acceptably credentialed experts—incapable of challenging their premises or putting pressure on their arguments. For those who lie outside their mental world, who haven’t taken the courses and acquired the jargon, they feel not kinship but, depending on the former’s demographic category, condescension or contempt.

Few students, at any time, come out of college fully equipped to think. 

Link to the rest at Persuasion

The sad realities of publishing a book: money!

From Crazy Classic Rock:

In this blog post, we’re going to talk about money and the business side of things. Money is a topic that makes me anxious and it’s not the most fun one to think about, but until we have fully automated luxury gay space communism it’s necessary in order to live. I want to be as open and honest about all the sides of self-publishing so you can make the most informed decision you can as an author. There are many great things like having a lot of creative freedom and getting to call the shots, however that freedom comes with a tradeoff, you have to pony up a lot of money and your hope is to at least break even, or if you’re lucky you might make a profit! Whereas with a traditional publisher, you don’t have to pay anything up front, but they get a lot more control – they may pick a book cover design you don’t like or ask you to omit an entire chapter. Regardless, you’ve poured your heart and soul into this book and you hope that it’s something that will sell and not fade away into oblivion. You don’t want to feel like that person who bakes a cake for a party and then no one eats it.

. . . .

The books are being shipped from my home in England. The book itself costs £13.99. I calculated shipping costs on the Royal Mail website and using my website statistics did estimates for the countries where I have the most readers and followers, so the Anglosphere and Europe, mainly. If you live elsewhere and you want to buy the book through me, contact me and I’ll get you a shipping quote. I want to make sure that anyone who wants my book can get an autographed copy, which you can only get if you buy directly through me. If you order from another website, I cannot sign your book, unless we happen to bump into each other and you happen to have your copy of Crime of the Century with you – in that case I’d be very happy to sign it and take a selfie with you!

  • If you live in the UK, shipping is just £3.50, for a total cost of £17.49.
  • If you live in Europe (not just the European Union, but also other countries in Europe), the shipping is £11, for a total cost of £24.99, which would be about €29.
  • If you live in North America (Canada, USA, and Mexico), the shipping is £16, for a total cost of £29.99, which would be about $52 Canadian, $38 US, or about 645 pesos.
  • If you live in Australia or New Zealand, the shipping is £18.65, for a total cost of £32.64, which would be about $63 Australian or about $68 New Zealand.

. . . .

I wish I could lower the shipping costs, especially for my overseas fans but unfortunately I’m just a writer in a humble abode and I don’t have the economies of scale of a giant corporation. I know it’s the most frustrating thing when shipping costs more than the item itself. If I ate the shipping costs, I would make next to nothing. I love writing, but I need to keep the lights on.

Link to the rest at Crazy Classic Rock

Yes, PG agrees that the author of the OP doesn’t seem to understand how KDP actually works.

Why Does Every Famous Woman Have a Book Club Now?

From The Cut:

On Tuesday, in a characteristically delightful interview with Bustle, Dakota Johnson launched her “TeaTime” book club, announcing that her first pick was Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino. It’s a quiet, lyrical book published in January by FSG, about a working-class girl named Adina who is born in 1977 and soon starts being visited each night by aliens from another galaxy who use her to glean information about life on Earth. It’s exactly the kind of slightly off-kilter thing you’d expect Dakota Johnson to be drawn to if, like me, you are a semi-scholar of the queen nepo baby who made a fool of Ellen DeGeneres and has claimed both to love and to be allergic to limes and simply will not promote her wannabe-blockbuster movie, Madame Web, which is what she’s really supposed to be doing interviews about right now. Instead, here she was talking about her book club. “Our book club is literary fiction. It’s not beach reads. It’s not silly,” Johnson told Bustle. “It’s not all female authors, but it is female-forward, and it’s a lot of first-time novelists.” She wants to use the club to bring a bit of gravitas to Instagram: “People need to deep dive into knowledge about specific things rather than talking about what f***** face serum they’re using and thinking that that’s the most important thing in the world.” She then went on to say that she loves face serum.

Every single thing about this announcement piqued my interest. It also got me wondering about why it is, exactly, that so many actresses want to become bookfluencers. For Johnson, it’s not solely about material gain: She hasn’t optioned Beautyland yet, merely thought about how she’d go about adapting it while acknowledging that adaptation is hard. (“I know Margot Robbie’s company is making My Year of Rest and Relaxation. But how the f***? I don’t know how you do that.” Me neither, Dakota!) For others, of course, it’s all about the cash. Reese Witherspoon has been canniest about monetizing her taste in books, creating a business where her monthly picks are sent out in a newsletter and proclaimed on a website, as well as optioned by her production company, Hello Sunshine, which she recently sold to Blackstone Group for $900 million. Making her book-club picks into movies and TV shows is clearly the driving force behind Witherspoon’s club. But she’s also used the idea of being bookish to burnish her image. Being a guru with industry clout on the production side gives Witherspoon a plausible next chapter at 47, an age when acting roles begin to become scarcer for women.

. . . .

Beyond the realm of clubs, there are also celebrities who simply want to be seen reading books, ideally good ones. In this category we find the professionally gorgeous people Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner. Gerber technically has a “book club,” which consists of her hosting chats with authors like Emily Ratajkowski on Instagram Live, and she’s also often photographed with books, including titles by Dolly Alderton and Annie Ernaux. But the queen of being photographed with books that both are good and also coordinate with her swimwear is Jenner, and the books she’s seen with are notably obscure, often published by small presses with limited print runs.

In 2019, the author of one of these books, Darcie Wilder, decided to investigate how a Kardashian family member ended up being photographed reading her memoir, Literally Show Me a Healthy Person. After Jenner was shot reading the book, it sold out on Amazon. Wilder got to the bottom of how the book ended up in Jenner’s hands relatively easily by finding Ashleah Gonzales tagged in Jenner’s IG post. Gonzales, who is also a published poet, is now widely acknowledged to be Jenner’s book concierge, tasked with supplying the model and reality star with ’grammable literature, often annotated throughout with turquoise Post-it notes.

Link to the rest at The Cut

New Concerns at Albert Whitman

From Publishers Weekly:

Three years after Albert Whitman & Company came under fire from authors and illustrators over delayed royalty payments, numerous agents are saying that the 105-year-old Chicagoland children’s publisher has once again fallen behind on its obligations.

PW spoke with more than a dozen authors and agents over the past month who all shared similar complaints and concerns after agreeing to speak on condition of anonymity. One agent said that the publisher managed to get current after its troubles in 2020–2021, but has since slipped. Another agent offered a more blunt assessment: AW&C is “up to their old games” and “not behaving like a reputable publisher.”

“Frankly, their schedule of paying five months after sending the royalty statement is frustrating,” one agent said, while another added that the company owes payments on multiple illustrator contracts as well as royalty payments for other clients. “They have always been slow to pay, but they have become unresponsive, and that is quite concerning.”

In an interview, AW&C v-p and co-owner Patrick McPartland acknowledged the publisher’s recent difficulties and told PW that executives have been reaching out to author and agent groups, including the Association of American Literary Agents, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and the Authors Guild. McPartland cited a tough 2023 in terms of sales and cash flow—a common theme among many indie presses. Those challenges were exacerbated, he said, by the death of business director Joseph Campbell in August 2022.

“We’re doing our best to get out in front of this and make sure that everyone is aware that we are aware,” McPartland said, adding that the company is also “slowing down acquisitions” to prioritize paying author advances and royalties.

Still, the latest round of troubles has shaken the confidence of some authors and agents. One author (whose agent succeeded in reverting the rights from AW&C to a series she’d created) reported that a royalty check dated November 15 did not arrive until the end of January. A second author, who spoke with PW about the publisher’s troubles back in 2020 and 2021, complained of a continuing lack of transparency: “I don’t know what they’re doing with the royalties, and I don’t see any way I can find out. With a publisher you have to have some sense of trust. I absolutely have no trust in Albert Whitman after struggling with them for over a decade.”

A third author, a former children’s book editor at various New York City houses who has published more than a dozen books with AW&C, concurred. “The editorial staff is lovely and I have done some very nice books with them, but the payment stuff is just a sin,” the author said. “Not only do they not pay but they offer zero explanation. Each time, one person will say, ‘I am going to check on that,’ or, ‘It’s waiting for an okay from the people in charge.’ No one wants to have to scream and shout to get their money. It’s not respectful.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG says that this sort of problem with a publisher is a massive headache for authors, who rightly feel trapped by their publishing contracts. No other traditional publisher is likely to be interested in purchasing a basket full of headaches represented by this small publisher.

PG has no inside information about the publisher, but bankruptcy is often the ending for companies that cannot pay their bills on time over a period of years.

Everyone says: why the rule about dialogue tags isn’t cast iron

From Nail Your Novel:

I’ve seen dialogue tags discussed a few times recently on writing forums.

The discussion goes like this.

‘When writing a piece of dialogue, do you need synonyms for “said”? Doesn’t it get boring for the reader? What about words with a bit more expression, such as exclaimed or spat or shouted or yelled?’

‘Noooo,’ comes the reply, overwhelmingly. ‘Only use “said”.’ 

I agree, mostly.

I also disagree.

Yes, ‘said’ will do most of the time. It’s almost invisible to the reader, so it doesn’t get boring. You’re using it merely to convey who’s talking. And if you feel you’re overusing ‘said’, consider doing without it. In a conversation between two people, the order of speakers might be obvious by the give and take of the paragraphs. There are also other ways to slip in a clue to who’s talking. You can use actions. Eg ‘Molly began to peel the orange.’

On the subject of actions, don’t forget that other things are going on in the scene as well. A common problem with dialogue is that writers get obsessed by the characters’ verbalisations, so they forget to include other sensory details. The rest of the scene disappears, as if the narrative has become a radio play. 

The solution? Write the dialogue, then go back and add other stuff. That’s what most of us have to do.

So remember your characters are also sitting or standing or walking or driving. All of these non-spoken ingredients can help you establish who’s talking.

Link to the rest at Nail Your Novel

Stories about the Dongbei rust belt are resonant in China

From The Economist:

IT DOES NOT sound like an easy place to live. Scorched cars litter a desolate landscape. The city’s factories are struggling; workers are being laid off in droves. Worst of all, a serial killer is sowing terror.

“Moses on the Plain”, a novella of 2016 by Shuang Xuetao, offers an unsparing portrait of life in China’s industrial north-east in the 1990s. It inspired a film adaptation in 2021 and a television series in 2023. (It has also been translated into English in a collection called “Rouge Street”.) In its various formats, the story is part of a phenomenon called the “Dongbeirenaissance”. Dongbeiis a collective term for China’s rust belt: the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. The region, once known in the West as Manchuria, has become a byword for urban decay. Yet precisely because of that, it is pushing to the forefront of Chinese popular culture.

The provinces were once the country’s main manufacturing hub. In the 1950s a third of China’s biggest industrial projects originated there; workers enjoyed job security and good wages. But in the 1980s economic reforms broke the region’s monopoly on production; state-run outfits downsized to make way for private firms. Mass redundancies followed in the 1990s. In 2001 8.3% of the north-east’s labour force was unemployed.

Many Dongbeistorytellers witnessed these ruptures firsthand. Mr Shuang, Ban Yu and Zheng Zhi, the genre’s most prominent novelists, all grew up in Liaoning and have chosen disaffected workers as protagonists. Their stories focus on hardscrabble lives shaped by crime, poverty and unrest. Mr Zheng has adapted one of his own novels about the murder of teenage girls into a television series, “Nobody Knows” (2022). Last year “The Long Season”, a drama about a murder case, was hugely popular. “The fascinating part of the story,” said one reviewer on Douban, a website, is “the destiny of factories and the north-east.”

The trend echoes the rise of Hollywood noir in the mid-20th century, which evoked Americans’ anxieties in the wake of the Great Depression. As Kevin Grant, a film historian, has noted, the genre was characterised by its “misanthropic ethos and strong sense of fatalism; persistent motifs including entrapment and inescapability, treachery and retribution”.

Dongbeifiction also articulates wider concerns about the social and economic malaise that millions of Chinese are experiencing. Characters are listless; some find solace in the bottle. Family relations are strained. In this way, the stories also share themes with “Hillbilly Elegy”, a memoir of growing up in a depressed steel town in Ohio by J.D. Vance, who elegised his way into the US Senate.

Stories about the Dongbei rust belt are resonant in China.

. . . .

Recently a bookshop in Quanzhou, in the south-eastern province of Fujian, hosted an event dedicated to the genre. “We hope to use reading to battle forgetting,” the flyers read. For many Chinese, the things depicted in the pages of books are not distant memories but vivid and realistic.

Link to the rest at The Economist

I got some jam on her new couch

I got some jam on her new couch,
But Grandma doesn’t care.
I lost my toothbrush, dropped a glass,
My old jeans have a tear.
I tipped the cat dish on the floor,
My feet are always bare,
The way I look is a disgrace,
But, Grandma doesn’t care.
She’s very busy, then she sees,
The tangles in my hair
She gets a brush, I make a fuss,
But, Grandma doesn’t care.
When I am grown, and on my own,
When visits become rare,
I won’t forget the love I’d get
When Grandma didn’t care.

Author Unknown

Character Type & Trope Thesaurus: Matriarch

From Writers Helping Writers:

DESCRIPTION: A female elder who rules over her family, tribe, or clan.

FICTIONAL EXAMPLES: Catelyn Stark (A Song of Ice and Fire), Lady Jessica (Dune), Mother Abagail (The Stand), Madea Simmons (the Madea franchise), Abuela Alma (Encanto)

COMMON STRENGTHS: Adaptable, Ambitious, Analytical, Bold, Calm, Cautious, Confident, Decisive, Disciplined, Discreet, Focused, Inspirational, Just, Loyal, Nurturing, Organized, Persuasive, Protective, Resourceful, Responsible, Traditional, Wise

COMMON WEAKNESSES: Confrontational, Controlling, Cowardly, Fanatical, Humorless, Inflexible, Manipulative, Obsessive, Oversensitive, Paranoid, Perfectionist, Pushy

ASSOCIATED ACTIONS, BEHAVIORS, AND TENDENCIES
Being a wise guide and counselor
Teaching her family about moral standards
Taking care of the needs of her family
Knowing what she believes and standing firm on those ideals
Making important decisions for her family
Being able to make hard choices that are best for the group
Not being afraid to take risks
Clinging too tightly to her beliefs and not listening to other points of view
Seeking to hold onto her power rather than consider changes that should be made
Being unwilling to ask for help when she needs it

SITUATIONS THAT WILL CHALLENGE THEM
A family conflict that makes it difficult for her to maintain objectivity
A family member rejecting the matriarch’s vision or leadership and striking out on their own
An external threat that must be overcome, such as an epidemic or war

TWIST THIS TROPE WITH A CHARACTER WHO…
Is an authoritarian traditionalist instead of a wise and nurturing counselor
Loves to meddle in the personal lives of her family and friends
Is blind to deep personal flaws, such as being manipulative or closed-minded
Has an atypical trait: Timid, Playful, Callous, Violent, Sleazy, Quirky, etc.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

How can firms pass on tacit knowledge?

From The Economist:

LAST MONTH Odysseus became the first American spacecraft to land on the surface of the Moon in more than 50 years. The mission, a collaboration between NASA and a private firm called Intuitive Machines, can be counted a partial success: the craft did send back images even though its landing did not go to plan. Things might have gone better still if it had not been so long since NASA last visited the Moon. Experience usually makes things go more smoothly.

NASA does have an archive of materials from the Apollo missions. Sometimes, however, knowledge is lost for good. Gino Cattani of NYU Stern School of Business and his co-authors have looked at the violin-making family dynasties of Antonio Stradivari and others in Cremona, in Italy, in the 17th and 18th centuries. Modern players still laud the sound of the instruments made by these craftsmen. But there was a gap of about a century between the heyday of these dynasties and the rise of the public performances that showcased the instruments’ qualities. In that time the techniques of the Cremonese luthiers were lost.

Most organisations do not routinely blast into orbit or wait a century for customer feedback. But all organisations face the problem of storing and transferring knowledge so that newcomers know what’s what, lessons are learned from successes and failures, and wheels are not constantly being reinvented. An ageing workforce adds to the urgency of training inexperienced hires before the old hands leave the building.

Some knowledge is easier to codify than other. In the 1960s Corning, a glassmaker, had developed a particularly strong glass that was christened Chemcor. Plans to commercialise this material faltered—among other reasons, it turned out that this was not a great windscreen for motorists to hit at speed—and Chemcor was put on the shelf.

There it remained until 2005, when the firm started to wonder whether mobile phones might provide a use for Chemcor, which was renamed Gorilla Glass. In 2007 the boss of Corning took a call from Steve Jobs, who was hunting for the right kind of glass for a new smartphone. You presume that no one at Corning has since questioned the value of keeping good records.

The tougher task is capturing “tacit knowledge”. This is the know-how born of experience, which cannot easily be documented in the manuals and is not much thought about by those who have it.

Working alongside experienced colleagues is the best way to transfer tacit knowledge but it is not always possible. Sometimes you only want your very best people working on something, especially if the stakes are high. The most valuable employees are usually the ones with the least time to mentor others. When NASA was working on a Mars rover programme in the 2010s, it gave younger engineers a smaller, parallel project: to build a rover for use in educational programmes on Earth. It wasn’t the real thing, but it was a way to give them some hands-on experience. NASA also has an emeritus programme that gets retired veterans to mentor junior staff.

Technology is both an answer and a barrier to the transfer of tacit knowledge. It is easier than ever to record and disseminate the wisdom of older hands. Unfortunately, it is easier than ever to record and disseminate the wisdom of older hands: the podcast episodes proliferate, the hours of unwatched training videos pile up. Watching someone on a screen is often less stimulating than hearing from them face-to-face. A recent study by Niina Nurmi and Satu Pakarinen, two Finnish researchers, found that participants in virtual meetings feel drowsier than those meeting in person, which is saying something.

Christopher Myers of Johns Hopkins University is a fan of informal storytelling as a way of passing on tacit knowledge. He spent time with the crews on an air medical transport team in America, whose jobs include flying patients by helicopter from the scene of an emergency to a hospital. Crew members routinely shared stories—on shift changes, at mealtimes and at weekly meetings—in order to learn how to respond to unusual situations. (Top tip: in the event of a poisonous-snake bite, the local zoo is a good bet to get antivenom.)

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG was interested in the OP because serious authors have to either seek out or develop their own tacit knowledge about their business.

In traditional publishing circles, literary agents can be sources of tacit knowledge about traditional publishing for authors. Literary agents may have worked for one or more publishers in the past and have retained tacit knowledge from those experiences. New literary agents often learn from more experienced literary agents.

PG will share a bit of tacit knowledge he developed while helping authors with publishing contracts:

  1. A great many publishers of all sizes have poorly-drafted publishing contracts. Size is no guarantee of a quality publishing contract.
  2. Many literary agents value their contacts with publishers more highly than they regard a single author, even one with a respectable publishing record. These agents won’t risk getting on the bad side of an editor merely to help an author/client.
  3. An exception to the previous knowledge item may come into play if the author happens to be a one-of-a-kind celebrity of some sort. Taylor Swift is an example. Bill Gates is another. Whether such celebrity is much good at writing is of no concern to the agent.
  4. Publishers instinctively dislike lawyers who are representing authors. In fact, they would prefer to never have to think about or encounter a lawyer. Ever. Throughout all eternity. This attitude may explain why the staff lawyers working for publishers are not very good.

Kris on The Findaway Scam…

From Dean Wesley Smith:

A few weeks or so back, Kris did a post on her patreon page about what happened with Findaway and writers. I linked to it, but now she gave me permission to put it here to help writers understand another level of business.

The Fallacy of the Findaway “Victory”

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I do not know how to start this piece without using insulting language. I have literally deleted five first paragraphs which use the words “ignorant,” “stupid,” “dumb,” and certain swear words that should not be attached to people and organizations.

I can’t write this without using one of those words. Insert the one that offends you the least. But here it is: the average writer and average writers’ organization are so ignorant about business that they have no idea what just happened with Findaway.

For those of you who don’t know the story, in February, Findaway Voices released a new terms of service that will go into effect this month. It was the notification that users needed to have by law so that they would know what had changed. And believe me, a lot changed.

. . . .

Writers saw the changes and went up in arms about everything that Findaway asked for. So within hours, Findaway backtracked and released a new terms of service that, in theory, addressed all of the writers’ concerns.

Writers declared victory on social media. They did a happy dance all over their accounts. They kept their books on Findaway, because that was what Findaway wanted. The Authors Guild, never the smartest organization in the room, wrote this:

We appreciate Spotify’s responsiveness to our concerns and those of the author community. We will continue to review the terms and any future updates to ensure that they do not encroach on authors’ rights, and look forward to continuing a productive dialogue with Spotify.

If you actually read the new TOS, including the parts that the Authors Guild quotes in their “we approve and we won” post, you’ll see that the new terms are still objectionable. They’re just not as objectionable as the first TOS offered that day.

The final TOS, though, is much, much, much worse than the TOS writers initially agreed to when they agreed to be part of Findaway.

And therefore, the lawyers at Findaway have won the actual victory and are probably giggling (still) into their celebratory beers.

Here’s how it works, folks.

If writers and writers organizations understood anything about negotiation, they would realize they were part of a bait and switch that lawyers do all the time. In fact, lawyers are trained to do this for their clients.

First, you ask for everything, including the firstborn child and maybe all the children, as well as the stuff that’s objectionable but not as easy to understand.

Then you wait for the expected outcry.

When the outcry comes, you say, Oh, we didn’t mean to ask for children. Our mistake. Here, we’ll fix it.

Then they release their new terms in which references to children are gone, and the language that seems objectionable gets toned down.

The other party, so shocked by being told they’re going to have to give up their children to stay in this organization, say, oh, thank heavens, this TOS is just fine.

They compare the revised TOS to the horrid TOS, instead of comparing the revised TOS to the TOS that the clients initially agreed to.

It’s smoke and mirrors, and it worked beautifully.

There was a tell in Findaway’s gambit. They released the revised TOS within hours. Nope. Had this been a real mistake and these corporate attorneys truly misunderstood what they were asking for, they would have taken days if not weeks to revise the TOS.

The lawyers don’t make the decisions. They draft the TOS, and then the execs give their opinions, usually in writing. Then the changes go back to the lawyers, and the lawyers draft another TOS, which has to go to the execs, who then work it over, and finally, finally, someone will agree to something.

But not within hours.

This “capitulation” was planned. And since it was planned, the question you have to ask is what are they going to gain from this new TOS? If you read it with a jaundiced eye, you’ll see it.

There is so much wiggle room in their new language that they can still use your work to train AI models. They can change their permission structure so that you might give them permission to use those derivative rights or produce an AI audiobook without even realizing it. All it would take are a few words added or removed from their TOS.

So instead of getting a new TOS, which was what happened this time, you’ll get an email saying, we’re changing our TOS. Here’s your notice. We’re adding three words to clause 5, paragraph 2. You’ll glance at the three words which might seem random: like “grant” and “exclusive” and not look at the language of the new paragraph at all.

How many times have you done that, after all?

. . . .

So, writers, you did not “win” a victory over Findaway. You lost. Big time.

And not only did writers lose, but they’re bragging about the loss as if it were a great big victory.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

PG hasn’t checked the new Findaway TOS/publishing contract. He’ll do so in the next few days and let everyone know what he thinks about it. In the meantime, Kris is sharp enough that PG would steer clear of the company.

Even if Findaway fixes a bunch of things, if they’re taking any portion of the royalties an indie author could receive via KDP, Findaway would have to guarantee a boatload of additional sales – in writing – in their contract/TOS.

Oppenheimer Couldn’t Run a Hamburger Stand. How Did He Run a Secret Lab?

From The Wall Street Journal:

When he was named the director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory, J. Robert Oppenheimer was an improbable choice for the most important job in America. 

At the time, he was a 38-year-old theoretical physicist who had never managed anything more than a dozen graduate students, much less an operation with the fate of the world at stake. Leslie Groves, the Army general who hired him, said he received “no support, only opposition” for his decision. One close friend who would later win a Nobel Prize called Oppenheimer “absolutely the most unlikely choice” to run a secret lab that would build the atomic bomb.  

“He couldn’t run a hamburger stand,” said another colleague. 

So how did he transform into one of the most effective and consequential leaders in history? 

This weekend, “Oppenheimer” is expected to dominate the Oscars. But even watching a three-hour movie from a painstakingly meticulous auteur like Christopher Nolan isn’t enough to understand what made Oppenheimer tick. If you really want to get inside his mind, you have to read two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin and “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes. (PG notes that the Rhodes book is available with Kindle Unlimited.)

. . . .

Oppenheimer the recruiter

Before he could build the bomb, Oppenheimer had to build something else with the potential to blow up in his face: a team. 

Los Alamos hadn’t yet been selected as the site of his secret lab when Oppenheimer began hunting for talent. Once he identified scientists and decided to hire them, he did whatever it took to get them. When the physicist Richard Feynman turned him down because his wife was sick with tuberculosis, for example, Oppenheimer found a sanatorium close enough to Los Alamos that he could visit on the weekends. 

It’s a revealing story not because Feynman was a star but the opposite: The future Nobel winner was still merely a graduate student, “not anybody famous at all,” as he put it, and yet Oppenheimer still went above and beyond. 

. . . .

Oppenheimer the communicator

Once he got them, Oppenheimer knew how to get the best work out of his scientists. In his new book, Charles Duhigg writes about “supercommunicators,” people who are “capable of saying exactly the right thing, breaking through to almost anyone, figuring out how to connect in even the most unlikely circumstances.” Oppenheimer, as it turns out, was a supercommunicator. 

Others in Los Alamos were better physicists, chemists and engineers. But what he could do better than anybody there—and maybe better than anybody on the planet—was take scientists with different perspectives and bring them to a consensus. 

“He would stand at the back of the room and listen as everyone argued,” Bird said. “Then he would step forward at just the right moment, summarize the salient points that everyone had been making that were in common and point the way forward.” 

“He would walk in, quickly grasp what the problem was and almost always suggest some leads to a solution,” Rhodes said. 

. . . .

But what set him apart from the other geniuses at Los Alamos was his broad knowledge and breadth of interests, which allowed him to make connections across disciplines and see what others in the room couldn’t. They were specialists. He was a generalist. They were singularly focused on their narrow fields of research. He was curious about philosophy, literature, poetry and the Bhagavad Gita. “He was a good scientist precisely because he was also a humanist,” Bird says.

Groves was so impressed by Oppenheimer’s range of interests that he once declared: “Oppenheimer knows everything.” He also could explain everything he knew without condescending, another trait that distinguished him from other eminently qualified scientists who interviewed for the job. 

“He was able to speak in plain English,” Bird said. 

. . . .

Oppenheimer the collaborator

The scientists were willing to drop everything in their lives to work around the clock in the middle of nowhere. What they were not willing to do was wear a military uniform. 

Oppenheimer himself was so allergic to hierarchy that he objected to making a basic organizational chart. He was intense but informal, someone who commanded respect without demanding it, and the biggest difference between Oppenheimer and Army generals was how they believed teams should operate. 

The military relied on compartmentalization. He insisted on collaboration. 

By demanding a flatter structure, Oppenheimer might as well have asked the Army if everyone in Los Alamos could have a mullet. In fact, when Groves learned that Oppenheimer was in favor of instituting a weekly colloquium for hundreds of scientists, he tried to shut it down. Oppenheimer prevailed. He understood the value of gathering people from different parts of a project in the same place, encouraging them to discuss their work and combine their ideas.

“Very often a problem discussed in one of these meetings would intrigue a scientist in a completely different branch of the laboratory,” Bethe once wrote, “and he would come up with unexpected solutions.” 

The meetings also improved morale at Los Alamos, providing a weekly reminder that everyone on the Manhattan Project had a role to play. Oppenheimer was right to fight for their existence. 

“He won the loyalty of people inside the fence,” Bird says. “They could see that he was protecting them, allowing them to collaborate and talk freely, which was necessary to the success of the project.”

They worked six days a week, but Oppenheimer made sure they weren’t only working. On their off days, there was horseback riding, mountain climbing, skiing, hiking and some of the geekiest basketball games of all time. When a local theater group staged a performance of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” Oppenheimer brought the house down with his surprise cameo as a corpse. And he was especially famous for his parties, where Oppenheimer paired his deadly gin martinis with his favorite toast: “To the confusion of our enemies!” 

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Amazon must face narrowed lawsuit over eBook prices

From Reuters:

A federal judge on Monday heavily trimmed an antitrust lawsuit that accused Amazon.com, opens new tab and others of causing consumers to overpay for eBooks.

U.S. District Judge Gregory Woods in Manhattan accepted a recommendation from a U.S. magistrate last year that the case be narrowed to include, for now, only two plaintiffs who purchased eBooks directly from Amazon.

The judge completely dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims against Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishing Group, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, finding that the plaintiffs had not shown a conspiracy between Amazon and the book publishers.

The plaintiffs alleged Amazon and the book publishers restricted competition on price through what the complaint called “coercive contractual terms,” leading to higher eBook prices. The lawsuit said Amazon curbed the ability of publishers sell eBooks for lower prices on non-Amazon platforms.

The judge on Monday allowed the plaintiffs’ monopolization claims to proceed against Amazon alone.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and a lawyer for the plaintiffs had no immediate comment. The publishers also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

. . . .

Woods’ ruling dismissed claims by 13 individual consumers who purchased eBooks through Amazon competitors including Apple, Google and Barnes & Noble. The “indirect” purchasers have no legal standing to support their antitrust allegations, the court said.

. . . .

In one case, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission last year accused Amazon of operating an illegal monopoly that curbs merchants from offering better deals on other platforms. A trial is scheduled for 2026. Amazon has denied the claims.

Link to the rest at Reuters

Piracy in Italy: Study Shows Book Industry Losing €705 Million Annually

From Publishing Perspectives:

s the plans and programming for Frankfurter Buchmesse‘s (October 16 to 20) Guest of Honor Italy are being prepared, the chance to include book piracy as an internationally persistent challenge may well be worth organizers’ consideration.

When the Association of Italian Publishers (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE) commissioned the market research firm Ipsos to study piracy’s presence and impact on the book market, the results indicated that the cost of piracy is higher than a quarter of the market’s overall valuation, or 28 percent.

This, in fact, the third Ipsos study AIE has commissioned, and the organization this time has learned that as many as 4,900 jobs are being lost to piracy.

  • Thirty-one percent of the general Italian population older than 15 reportedly is using books, ebooks, and audiobooks illegally.
  • Much higher levels are being reported for students and professionals, who were tracked at 78 percent and 49 percent, respectively.
  • Some 70 percent of respondents who said they used illegally obtained publishing products also said that they don’t think they’re likely to be punished for it.
  • Nearly 300,000 acts of piracy are committed daily in Italy, according to Ipsos’ study, a figure that’s actually down eight percent from 2021
  • In economic terms overall, the loss to the country’s system is estimated to be some €1.75 billion (US$1.9 billion), with €298 million in lost tax revenue (US$326 million).
  • In a single year, the rep0rt says, there may be as many as 108.4 million acts of piracy committed in Italy.

As in the previous two studies commissioned by AIE in 2019 and 2021, researchers say it seems that many members of the public are ignorant about the seriousness of piracy and the consequences. There are observers in other parts of the publishing world, however, who say they remain skeptical of this, as consumer populations become increasingly media-savvy.

However authentic the claim of being unaware of the illegality of piracy from one consumer to another, the new Italian report indicates that things may be going the wrong direction: The percentage of those who have told Ipsos researchers that they are aware of the illegality of piracy is 79 percent in 2023—as compared to 84 percent in 2019.

AIE president Innocenzo Cipolletta during the course of the presentation clarified that he doesn’t see even the mild rollback on attitudes about piracy as real progress: “Italian publishing,” he said, “is experiencing a difficult economic context, characterized by rising costs that are only minimally offset by cover-price increases, while the demand stimuli present in past years are no longer present or have been scaled back.

“In this framework, the loss of a quarter of the potential value of sales because of piracy is an unsustainable cost that has repercussions on the number of companies that can no longer keep going; on employment; and on authors’ compensation.

“In 2023 we see the first signs of a reduction in acts of piracy, but there are many factors that can influence this, and I’d not yet speak of it as an established trend.

“Institutions and law enforcement have done a lot in recent years, and these data should spur us all to do even more and even better. We also consider stimulating public awareness to be fundamental: the number of people who consider this phenomenon to be not very serious is confirmed to be high, and in any case they say they are certain that the perpetrators will not be punished.”

. . . .

And the president of the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers, Andrea Riffeser Monti, pointed at the vendors and purveyors of pirated intellectual property, especially those online.

“Piracy of intellectual works is a central issue for the entire content publishing industry,” he said. “An ongoing economic and technological evolution today represents the most complex challenge for the authorities engaged in countering piracy.

“It must be made impossible for those who do business on illegal content to hide behind the anonymity of the Internet: people must be aware that they are committing an offence and must know that they can be punished for it.

“The phenomenon of digital piracy contributes to the growing and general impoverishment of publishing companies, but there are also risks for readers who, in the absence of quality information content, will be increasingly exposed to fake news and disinformation online.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG wonders if the Italian ebook market includes the equivalent of the 99-cent ebook or Prime Reading.

Authors Equity points toward the future of publishing

From Nathan Bransford:

Some pretty significant news arrived this week as some of the smartest and most experienced people in publishing are joining forces on a new imprint called Author Equity. Its business model says a lot about where we’re headed as an industry.

Essentially, Author Equity pledges to put authors first, and they won’t offer advances. They will instead offer the “lion’s share” (the former agent in me is shouting, “HOW MUCH IS THAT EXACTLY”) of the profits, and will maintain a lean staff that relies on freelancers for editing and production, with distribution by Simon & Schuster. Its author investors (including Atomic Habits author James Clear and The 4-Hour Workweek author Tim Ferriss) probably point the way toward the types of books they’re likely looking for. Namely, entrepreneurial bestsellers and bestsellers-in-the-making who are willing to forego the upfront investment of the advance in favor of making more on the backend.

Those of us who have been in this business for twenty odd years know that parts of this publishing model aren’t new. The no-advance-but-marketing-guarantees was adopted by the imprint Vanguard Press at the Perseus Books Group, which I profiled way back in 2008. (Vanguard was shuttered in 2012, and Perseus was acquired by Hachette in 2016). There have also been more behind-the-scenes deal structures like this that I’ve come across/heard about that I can’t really talk about specifically for confidentiality reasons, but trust me, they exist.

As Ron Charles notes, one thing imprints like this do is to shift more of the prospective investment of a new book onto the author. Which, again, has been around before, but I’ll be interested to see if it spreads more widely to the Big 5, where it’s never really caught on in a big way.

What feels new to me is the reliance on freelance labor. On the one hand, sure, I’m a freelance editor! I embraced the lifestyle even before the pandemic. If you offered me double what I make now, I’d still have a hard time imagining going back to a more traditional job.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford

PG notes that he hasn’t seen any Author Equity publishing contracts nor does PG know anything about the investors/managers the company has.

However, promising to give authors a percentage of the “profit” from the sales of her/his books is a system that’s perfectly set up to scam authors. Why might that be?

Gross revenue received by a business of any sort is not terribly easy to fiddle with. Basically, gross revenue is the money and other items with a monetary value the business receives. If a business receives payment in dollars, wheat, corn, gold, timber or diamonds, each of those has a market value that can be used as basis for calculating gross revenues.

Profits, on the other hand, are quite prone to fiddling. Salaries and benefits paid to staff are subtracted from the gross proceeds before profit is calculated. Business travel to exotic locations is a deductible expense that reduces profits.

Similarly, office rents, printing and shipping expenses reduce profits. Depreciation of equipment is another deduction that reduces profits. All sorts of things can be jammed into business expenses to effectively reduce profits.

Gross revenues from the sale of an author’s books are not susceptible to nearly as much “tweaking” as profits are. Auditing of royalties is also an easier process with gross revenues as the basis for royalties.

Museums have a hoarding problem

From The Economist:

BENEATH THE gothic main hall of the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is a labyrinth of curiosities. Only a tiny fraction of the museum’s collection is on display—around 40,000 objects out of some 80m. Much is consigned to the dim, crowded basement. Here is a tortoise once owned by Charles Darwin; there are hundreds of jars of giant fish and thousands of rare shells.

“We’ve outgrown this space,” says Clare Valentine, head of NHM’s life-sciences collection. (In addition to the basement, the NHM also relies on storerooms in undisclosed sites.) Many museums have a hoarding problem. The British Museum exhibits just 1% of its treasures; the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, only 0.007%. In storage treasures are usually protected, but the old vaults are dangerously full.

One solution is to move house. The NHM is undertaking the world’s biggest relocation of a collection, as 28m objects are shifted to a new centre in Reading. If you think packing up crockery and old photographs is tricky, imagine moving taxidermy: the bears, giraffes and lions require fibreglass moulds to protect their fur, as well as bespoke wooden frames. On arrival, they will be frozen for three days before being transferred into pristine, sanitised rooms. Ms Valentine reckons the whole move will take seven years.

The British Museum has already shifted some of its large sculptures and mosaics to a new storage centre, also in Reading. The Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum and Ashmolean Museum have been ferrying objects to fresh buildings, too. In France curators at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris are grumbling over a plan to move their collection to Dijon. Across the Atlantic, the MIT Museum is in the final stages of shifting 1.5m objects.

Moving may be stressful, but it can also afford the chance to rediscover, reassess and reorganise possessions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York admitted that its curator of Islamic art had never seen its collection of Persian rugs because they are trapped at the back of a storeroom.

And if no one knows what items are there, it can take a while to notice if some go missing. Last year it was revealed that a light-fingered curator had stolen up to 2,000 objects from the British Museum and sold some of them on eBay. Wales’s seven national museums are missing 2,000 artefacts; the Imperial War Museum in London more than 500.

Some institutions might never miss the odd coin or pottery fragment. Catalogues of goods are outdated and incomplete even at the most august museums. Teams employed to fill inventories are dwindling: the number of staff at the NHM has almost doubled in the past 50 years, but the proportion caring for and researching collections has dropped from 55% to 15%. With the current staff, the NHM reckons it would take 172 years to catalogue everything. But a new team, brought in for the move, will create a detailed database to register the relocated objects.

Modern buildings will shrink to-do lists in other ways. At one museum in Britain, a curator spends half their time checking that objects have not been infested with bugs. New facilities, by comparison, are climate-controlled and have quarantine zones to protect artifacts from pests.

Link to the rest at The Economist