Dictators fall when they’re overconfident; they stay in power when they’re paranoid.
Masha Gessen
Dictators are allergic to reform, and they are cunning survivors. They will do whatever it takes to preserve their power and wealth, no matter how much blood ends up on their hands. They are master deceivers and talented manipulators who cannot be trusted to change.
North Korea’s rulers have always had strong views on art. Kim Il Sung, the regime’s founding despot, said artists should “arouse burning hatred for the enemy through their works”. His son and successor, Kim Jong Il, was such a cinema enthusiast that he kidnapped a South Korean director and his actress ex-wife and forced them to make propaganda films, including a (surprisingly good) revolutionary Godzilla-style monster flick. Kim Jong Un, the current ruler, demands “masterpieces pulsating with the sentiment of the times”, by which he means praise for himself.
The president of South Korea probably has views on the arts, too. But because it is a democracy, its artists do not have to care what he thinks. Which helps explain why South Korean pop culture has spread joy across the globe, whereas North Korean “people’s culture” has not.
On YouTube, “Gangnam Style”, a South Korean rap video, has been viewed 5bn times—nearly 60 times as often as “Kiss”, a popular children’s song from the North. On imdb, an online film database, the top South Korean films have hundreds of thousands of ratings; the top northern ones, hardly any. The gulf is so vast that only a logarithmic scale can illustrate it (see charts).
Cultural success translates into cash. Half of the top ten bestselling albums in the world last year were South Korean, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group. The country’s pop-culture exports were a whopping $13bn in 2022, up from just under $5bn in 2013. This sum dwarfs North Korea’s official exports of all goods and services combined.
The two Koreas share 5,000 years of history and were only separated after the second world war. So a comparison of their modern pop culture offers a useful insight into the effect of politics on creativity.
The first difference is freedom. In the South, artists are allowed to criticise, satirise and expose uncomfortable truths. “Parasite”, the first foreign film to win Best Picture at the Oscars in 2020, presents a bleak picture of inequality in South Korea (which is not especially bad by rich-country standards). “Squid Game”, a television series, offers a gory and original take on the same theme: cash-strapped contestants in an imaginary game-show compete for a huge jackpot—and face death if they lose.
North Koreans are only free to criticise the South. One northern newspaper called “Parasite” a “masterpiece” for its examination of working-class woes in Seoul. But any art about North Korea must glorify the regime and vilify its enemies. This makes for dreary, predictable fare.
The sole feature film North Korea has released in the past five years is “A Day and a Night”, a tiresome yarn about a humble nurse exposing counter-revolutionaries. Whereas South Korean shows depict complex protagonists facing difficult moral choices, characters in North Korean ones must simply be good (heroic workers) or bad (traitors, spies). Foreign characters are either evil (Americans, Japanese) or implausibly devoted to the Kim family.
Furthermore, all parts must be played by actors who have never displeased the regime. This applies retroactively, which can be awkward. The lead role in “The Taehongdang Party Secretary”, a television drama about a land-reclamation project to grow potatoes, was originally played by Choe Ung Chol, who later fell from grace for unclear reasons. (Rumour has it that he was associated with Kim Jong Un’s uncle, who was executed for treason in 2013 and more or less airbrushed out of history.) When the show was recently rebroadcast, Mr Choe’s face and voice had been digitally removed from every scene and replaced with those of a new actor.
Ideological conformity extends to music, too. “Leader, Just Give Us Your Order!” is a typically bombastic anthem, with a video of soldiers goose-stepping and charging into battle through sheets of fire. Few foreigners enjoy such tracks, and many North Koreans only pretend to. Choi Il-hwa, who escaped from North Korea when she was 14, recalls that she and her friends would “twist the lyrics” of state-approved songs, substituting “love” and “friends” for “glory” and the Kim dynasty, thus risking horrific punishment for a few moments of artistic freedom.
. . . .
The second big difference concerns foreign influence. South Korean artists borrow widely. Film directors such as Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho draw inspiration from Hong Kong gangster movies, Taiwanese neo-realist flicks and American classics. Blackpink, the first female k-pop group to top America’s Billboard Top 200, reimagine American hip-hop and pop in a style that is uniquely their own. On their debut song, “Whistle”, they rap in a mix of English and Korean over skittering trap-style hi-hats. South Korean music firms make 80-95% of their profit from new releases, estimates Suh Bo-kyung of Bernstein Research, so they are always after new sounds to plunder.
North Korean artists, by contrast, must pretend that good ideas come only from North Korea, and especially from the Kim family. The state ideology is “juche” or self-reliance. Citizens can be sent to the gulag merely for possessing foreign films or music. Kim Jong Il warned that the “corrupt pop music” of foreigners would “stimulate vulgar and unhealthy hedonism”.
Only a few trusted artists are allowed access to foreign material, and typically disguise their borrowing. Thus, many North Korean mobile games are uncredited rip-offs of Western titles like “Angry Birds” and “Bejewelled”, which are unavailable on North Korea’s walled-off internet. Its most famous original game, “Pyongyang Racer”, is an uninspired driving simulation. Its main virtue is verisimilitude: the streets are as empty as those of the capital, where only the rich own cars.
The third difference is capitalism. Pop culture in South Korea is produced by a variety of private companies. These firms are scandal-prone and notorious for micromanaging stars’ lives. But they never forget that fans have choices.
Mindful that their country has only 52m people, they have striven to please a global audience, just as South Korean industrial firms have aimed to export cars and mobile phones. k-pop groups often feature members with different styles, who speak different languages and sometimes come from different countries. Lyrics and videos tend to be less raunchy than their Western counterparts, making them palatable to censors and parents in more of the world. South Korean artists have been swift to embrace new technology. For example, the country is a pioneer of webtoons, a form of comic designed to be scrolled downwards on a phone screen. Koreans now dominate the Japanese webtoon market.
Most important, South Korean artists have grappled with universal themes. The way that television series such as “Squid Game” and “The Glory” (which deals with bullying) explore economic and social injustice resonates with global audiences, who “share similar agonies”, says Jin Dal-yong of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
North Korean pop culture, by contrast, is state-directed and aims to please one man. Since Kim Jong Un’s life experiences are a trifle unusual—he was raised to be a god-king and can have anyone who annoys him put to death—this does not always yield content to which normal people can relate.
On “Grandfather’s Old Tales”, a kids’ show on North Korean television, an “imperialist” wolf rips apart a rabbit.
In addition to being losers economically and socially, dictatorships don’t do fun. Here are two popular South Korean K-pop videos that sandwich a North Korean video, “Leader, Just Give Us Your Order.”
You can decide which nation has a more danceable culture.
To help you recover from “Leader, Just Give Us Your Order” here’s a K-pop hit from BlackPink:
One of the pleasures of reading 19th-century novels is that authors write openly about money. Take for instance Mr. Bennett, the patriarch in Pride and Prejudice, whose £2,000 a year makes him amongst the wealthier members of the gentry. With that sum, he can comfortably maintain a large household, with a full complement of servants and carriages. On the other hand, he is no Mr. Darcy, who with his £10,000 a year has an immense manor house and accompanying grounds.
This attention paid to money accelerated as Romanticism gave way in the mid 19th century to Realism. In Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a man from the provinces sees exactly how the machinery of the arts world works to create celebrated authors. As late as 1891, we have a protagonist in George Gissing’s New Grub Street plotting how he’ll use his small inheritance to secure literary stardom.
But after World War I, writers started to use a kind of code. Look at, say, The Sun Also Rises. We know that Brett Ashley, Jake Barnes, and Robert Cohn all travel in the same social circles, but we’ve much less idea of their relative means. In an aside within Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty theorized that the high inflation of the post-war period is what led writers to stop using dollar amounts in their fiction—but I would say this increasing vagueness is about more than amounts, it’s also about our understanding of what’s at stake for characters and of what their futures hold. Money forms a backdrop to The Sun Also Rises, but it’s pretty light on the specifics of how much of it each character has.
Jake presumably has no money, as he must work as a journalist (a low-class occupation), but he knows Cohn from Princeton. Lady Brett Ashley alludes to having married money, but in a 19th-century novel we would understand her precise financial situation, while in The Sun Also Rises these form no part of the plot. We understand that these people belong to some sort of demimonde, where the classes mix, but we’re given much less information about their money woes and worries than we would’ve had even thirty years earlier.
This vagueness becomes an endemic part of Anglophone letters after WWII, as novels develop an intensely interior quality that divorces them from the world of money and manners. Take the work of Donna Tartt. Her scholarship boy in The Secret History is debauched through his association with the upper-class kids at pseudo-Bennington, but none of the characters are particularly legible in terms of their income. Their falling-out with Bunny, who has social class but not status, is particularly perplexing: if they’re truly upper-class and moneyed, they ought to be alert to the existence of poor cousins. Their sensitivity to being sponged off seems a bit declasse and at odds with the way they’re portrayed. These kids are rich New Englanders, but they have a kind of status anxiety—a fear of being poor and being seen as poor—that’s at odds with the rest of their old-money portrayal.
. . . .
The Secret History at least attempts to discuss money. Most modern novels elide the subject entirely, even when it’s seemingly quite relevant. Take Ben Lerner’s Leaving Atocha Station. He’s in Spain on a Fulbright, but I know, from my friends who’ve done Fulbrights, that the stipend isn’t particularly generous: between about $2,000 and $3,000 a month, give or take. If you’re a student in Madrid on a Fulbright and you have other money coming in and you don’t have outstanding student loans, your life is very different than if you’re relying on that stipend to make ends meet. But in the case of Lerner’s protagonist, we simply don’t know, even though the novel is intensely concerned with whether or not the protagonist should pursue some kind of future in the arts (a decision that surely has money implications).
The same is true for Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. We know that he lives alone, and that studio apartments in Brooklyn cost, what, $2,000 a month in 2013? Somewhere in that ballpark. He got a big book advance, and he’s dating a newspaper reporter in her thirties. When I was in my thirties, dating women with real jobs, living off a big book advance, the constant subtext was, “Will this last? Will you be able to support a family?” But in Nathaniel P it’s not a major conflict.
A similar issue dogs Detransition, Baby, whose intricate comedy of manners is marred by the complete economic illegibility of one of its main characters: Ames works an upper-middle-class office job, but we’ve no idea if he has debt and can’t guess his salary to within even an order of magnitude. When he and his pregnant boss, Katrina, consider entering into a co-parenting relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Reese, the obvious question never comes up: since she earns the least amount of money and isn’t particularly career-oriented, will Reese stay home with the child? If so, how we will she be compensated? If she isn’t going to take care of the child, then what will their childcare situation be, and how can they afford childcare while maintaining three separate child-ready households in New York City?
What is the reason for this increasing vagueness? One possibility is that modern people simply aren’t as legible, in financial terms, as people in the past. In Jane Austen’s day, the size of a man’s income was a source of open discussion—this is no longer the case.
It could certainly be the case that in modern America we simply do not notice how much money a person has, or how much they’re likely to come into. But this flies in the face of my own and, I think, most people’s experience of daily life. Because the truth is that while we don’t openly discuss how much money people have, we certainly spend a lot of time thinking about it.
For instance, a friend once told me the easiest way to know if a college-educated person has rich parents is to ask if they have student loans. Does the MC in Leaving Atocha Station have student loans? Does Bunny in The Secret History have student loans? Which characters in Nathaniel P have student loans? This is a simple and extremely legible financial marker that one would expect to appear routinely in novels, but it doesn’t.
Let’s start with the Dictionary definition of euphemism:
A mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.
Dictionary.com definition
Euphemism is a powerful linguistic tool used in writing to navigate sensitive topics with tact and diplomacy. It allows writers to convey information effectively while maintaining decorum and respecting cultural norms.
By understanding and utilizing euphemisms appropriately, writers can enhance the clarity, sensitivity, and aesthetic appeal of their communication.
However, it’s important to use euphemisms cautiously, ensuring that they serve their intended purpose without sacrificing clarity or honesty in communication.
It can be hard to figure out when and how to use them, but let’s deep dive more reasons why you should use them.
Why Use Euphemisms in Writing?
The use of euphemism in writing serves several important purposes:
Politeness and Sensitivity
Euphemisms allow writers to address delicate or distressing topics with greater sensitivity, showing respect for the audience’s feelings. For instance, using “passed away” instead of “died” can soften the impact of discussing death.
Avoidance of Offense
Euphemisms help writers navigate potentially offensive or controversial subjects without causing unnecessary discomfort or conflict. For example, saying “physically challenged” instead of “disabled” is considered more respectful.
Cultural and Social Norms
Different cultures and societies have varying levels of acceptance toward certain topics. Euphemisms adapt language to align with prevailing cultural sensitivities.
Adding imagery
Certain euphemisms can help give imagery where plain language won’t do the same trick.
Professional Communication
In professional settings such as business or medicine, euphemisms are used to convey information objectively while maintaining a professional tone. Terms like “downsizing” for layoffs or “in a meeting” for unavailable can be less jarring.
Aesthetic Appeal
Euphemisms can enhance the literary quality of writing by adding nuance and subtlety. They can make writing more elegant and sophisticated.
Used to define time
You can help frame a story around its time period when you use certain euphemisms. You can insert ones that were common during that time period, especially in dialogue.
Euphemism Examples in Writing
Each of these examples showcases how euphemisms can be used to soften the impact of words or phrases, making them more palatable or less confrontational depending on the context.
Senior citizen – Euphemism for an elderly person.
Letting you go – Euphemism for firing someone from a job.
Correctional facility – Euphemism for prison.
Pre-owned – Euphemism for second-hand or used (e.g., pre-owned car).
Ethnic cleansing – Euphemism for genocide.
Visually impaired – Euphemism for blind.
Enhanced interrogation techniques – Euphemism for torture.
Domestic engineer – Euphemism for housewife or homemaker.
Revenue enhancement – Euphemism for tax increase.
Sleeping together – Euphemism for sexual relations.
In a better place – Euphemism for deceased.
Economical with the truth – Euphemism for lying or being dishonest.
Collateral damage – Euphemism for civilian casualties during military operations.
Revenue shortfall – Euphemism for financial losses.
Correctional facility – Euphemism for prison.
On the streets – Euphemism for homelessness.
Restroom – Euphemism for toilet or bathroom.
Developmentally delayed – Euphemism for intellectually disabled.
Life partner – Euphemism for spouse or significant other.
Special needs – Euphemism for disabilities or challenges.
Gentleman’s club – Euphemism for strip club.
Vertically challenged – Euphemism for short in height.
Under the weather – Euphemism for feeling unwell.
Alternative facts – Euphemism for falsehoods or lies.
In a family way – Euphemism for pregnant.
Revenue enhancement – Euphemism for tax increase.
Comfort woman – Euphemism for a woman forced into sexual slavery.
Couch potato – Euphemism for a lazy person.
Substance abuse – Euphemism for drug addiction.
Reproductive rights – Euphemism for abortion.
Freedom fighter – Euphemism for insurgent or rebel.
Surgical procedure – Euphemism for operation or surgery.
Final resting place – Euphemism for cemetery or burial ground.
Unwanted pregnancy – Euphemism for accidental pregnancy.
Unconventional warfare – Euphemism for guerrilla warfare.
Vertically challenged – Euphemism for short in height.
Previously loved – Euphemism for second-hand or used items.
Golden years – Euphemism for old age or retirement.
Domestic engineer – Euphemism for housekeeper or stay-at-home parent.
Differently abled – Euphemism for disabled.
Freedom of expression – Euphemism for free speech.
Climate change denier – Euphemism for those who reject climate science.
Conscious uncoupling – Euphemism for divorce.
Enhanced interrogation techniques – Euphemism for torture.
Economically disadvantaged – Euphemism for poor or impoverished.
Youthful indiscretion – Euphemism for youthful mistakes or misbehavior.
Quality time – Euphemism for spending time together.
Strategic withdrawal – Euphemism for retreat in battle.
“What do you do with the old magazines when the new issues come out?” I asked the librarian.
“At the end of the year, we donate them to neighborhood schools so kids can cut them up and make collages,” she replied.
Our small public library is relatively new, sparsely filled with only the most popular items: a smattering of pregnancy and parenting books, mostly on sleep training; the latest mystery novels; DVDs on how to build your own she-shed; and a few shelves of history and religion to round it out. We live in a master-planned community filled with parks in a kid-friendly city, so the children’s section is by far the biggest part of the library.
This library is very different from the Rochester Public Library close to where I grew up in New York. I can remember our mom bringing my older brother, Phil, and me to the main branch downtown during school breaks to pass the time. The children’s room was so tucked away you had to crawl through a tiny child-size secret wooden door to get to it. That was my favorite part. The library, which opened in 1936, was massive, dark, and quiet, but inside that small room, there were tall windows where the sun splashed from the Genesee River onto the colorfully illustrated book covers. I wanted to check out dozens of books but knew that my mom would get frustrated trying to find the overdue items missing somewhere in our messy room while late fees piled up.
Phil and I loved reading. We shared a bedroom until our sister went off to college. We had bunk beds; he slept on the bottom. This way, we could each stay up reading with our own flashlight and not disturb the other—though, of course, we found plenty of other reasons to complain about this setup.
Phil loved the Encyclopedia Brown books, and he read a lot of Hardy Boys. He really enjoyed a good mystery, especially if it was funny. He had a lot of favorite movies, but I would say one of his absolute favorites, even as an adult, was The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), with Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, and Madeline Khan. In one scene, Gene Wilder, playing Sherlock Holmes’s younger brother, Sigerson, is about to meet the foreign secretary, Lord Redcliff. Sigerson walks into the room alone. Checks his fly to be sure it’s closed. Spies a box of chocolates. Puts one in his mouth. He is startled, and spills the box clumsily to the floor. Just as Lord Redcliff walks in, Sigerson decides the best course of action is to hide all the chocolates in his mouth. With his mouth full and chocolate smeared all over his hands and face, he attempts to hide the empty candy box behind his back. Lord Redcliff spends the rest of the scene shuffling back and forth, peeking around to try and see what Sigerson is hiding.
I could swear that Phil based much of his acting technique on watching Gene Wilder scenes like this over and over as a kid. The physical comedy is subtle in that the main character is unaware of his buffoonery—only the audience is in on the joke. Phil did this a lot: we would know that something was up, but the character himself was often clueless. This was true both of Phil’s comedic scenes and more dramatic ones: Sandy Lyle sharting at the party in Along Came Polly, Scotty J. trying to kiss Mark Wahlberg’s character in Boogie Nights, and the CIA agent Gust Avrakotos smashing the window in Charlie Wilson’s War. All three characters possess the same loud, obnoxious physicality. And then you see it in more nuanced ways, like when the brother in The Savages sneaks a cookie before the support group meeting is over, or when Freddie Miles plucks the piano keys in The Talented Mr. Ripley, or when Truman Capote takes tiny bites from the baby-food jars in Capote. These gestures brought his characters to life, and made us empathize and identify with their excitement, embarrassment, anger, and heartache.
Even now, when I watch Phil playing these parts in films that now capture a distant past, in roles that have become familiar to us, I can see so much of who he was. He was a cuddly person, much more so than me. He loved to sit close on a couch, walk arm in arm down the street, and hug big. We grew up like two hamsters making nests out of blankets and books. We burrowed together, especially when things felt scary or loud. We made up stories that took us away from the chaos of our house and into building forts in the woods, rowing boats together on Keuka Lake, or walking to The Brick Oven to eat pizza by ourselves like we were grown-ups.
And then there were the loud parts. My brother had a lot of loud parts, like his laughter and big gestures of annoyance. The way he would jump up and dance around when teasing you—even after you’d pleaded for him to stop, he just couldn’t help poking fun one last time. He knew it was wrong, but he was going to do it anyway, and laugh until you were laughing too. And then do it again, until you weren’t laughing, because we Hoffmans are not good at knowing how to stop. We know when to stop, we can tell the mood has shifted, but we always take things one step too far.
Shortly after Phil died, I scoured the library shelves for every periodical that even mentioned him. Early in my twenties, I’d begun saving every magazine or newspaper article Phil was ever featured in—at least the ones I knew about. I even had all his interviews on VHS. And here were the final magazine stories detailing his life cut short. At first, I just wanted to be sure I collected all the glowing obituaries reviewing the life and unexpected death of this talented young actor who mesmerized us with his art. But then I became obsessive. Even the weekly TV Guide put his name in the crossword: 15 down, twenty letters, “Oscar overdose.” I added it to my pile.
“So, these magazines will just get cut up by little kids?” I asked the librarian.
“Yes. Or recycled.”
“What if someone wanted to keep them when the library was done with them?”
“We can’t do that. It’s just too hard to keep track of requests like this.”
I didn’t want to read these articles. But I didn’t want children cutting them up in class next year. More importantly, I didn’t want one of my children to be sitting in art class and get handed one of these magazines and open it up to see their uncle Phil.
So I scooped them all up, handed her my library card, and checked them out. I took them home and went up to my room. I hid in the small space between my bed and the dresser with a pair of scissors I’d stolen from my daughter’s backpack. I sat on the floor and cut all the articles and photos of Phil out of each magazine. I tried to make the missing pages look inconspicuous. But there was no way to really hide it, especially when he was on the cover.
Magazine clippings were everywhere. Our lives had been cut into tiny pieces and gobbled up, and we spent a lot of time trying to hide it all away, including from each other. Eventually, I tucked all the clippings into an old cigar box, which I carefully placed up high on a shelf in my closet. I returned the cut-up magazines to the library, slipping them into the book deposit slot and hoping the cameras wouldn’t catch me.
As of May 2023, the American Booksellers Association’s membership included 2,185 companies with 2,599 locations; of those, 693 have opened their doors since January 2021. Many of these new booksellers see bookselling both as a career and as a means to advance personal priorities. They’re stocking shelves with books from BIPOC, LGBTQ, and global perspectives, seeking out local and underrepresented authors, and creating spaces for historically marginalized customers. We spoke with several up-and-comers about why they got into bookselling, how they’d like their businesses to evolve, and what the industry can do to support rising generations.
For some young entrepreneurs, bookselling is a business and a way to live according to ideals. “When people visit my store, they often think I got into bookselling because I read all the time,” says Halley Vincent, 15, owner of Seven Stories in Shawnee, Kans. “I do enjoy reading, but the real reason was my love for my community, interaction, and sales.” She likes handselling because people “come back to talk about the title. I love that our store creates an environment that welcomes conversation.”
Starting around age 12, Vincent gave books away, delivered titles from a riding-lawn-mower bookmobile, and sold books from her mother’s studio. Last November, she opened Seven Stories in a former barbershop. While she’s at school, her mother minds the store. Vincent emphasizes BIPOC titles—“forty percent of my area is brown and Black families,” she says—and carries bilingual books in Spanish and Chinese, as her dad came to the U.S. from Taiwan, and “half my family speaks Chinese.” Bilingual books spark emotion for customers: “They’ll stand there at the shelf, and they’ll be happy, but sometimes they’ll also cry.”
Seven Stories is Shawnee’s only indie bookstore, and Vincent says she feels a responsibility “not only to carry diverse titles but to invite local authors,” including self-published teenage novelist S.B. Sheets. Vincent also strives to set up accounts with publishers and reps, though her store is tiny. Wholesale ordering is “quick and easy,” she says, but “there’s no personality to it.”
Vincent is an uncommonly young proprietor, but booksellers in their 20s recall similar aspirations.
Owning a bookstore “has been a lifelong dream,” says Keeley Shay Malone of Ink Drinkers Anonymous in Muncie, Ind. “A couple of years ago, my mom was like, ‘If this is what you want to do, do it.’ That’s literally all it took.”
Within a week, Malone had her business license. In 2023 she opened in a tiny storefront, and in January she moved into a larger location.
. . . .
Malone says she makes it her mission to stock books with BIPOC perspectives, “especially for young readers and teenagers.” She uses NetGalley’s “OwnVoices” search to find books by authors of color and does “deep dives on TikTok, and I get tons of diverse authors on my For You page.”
In nearby Indianapolis, YA author Leah Johnson started Loudmouth Books as an online shop to combat censorship and established a storefront location in 2023. She stocks banned books and work “for, by, or about marginalized people,” she says.
Voicing sentiments common to young booksellers, Johnson says she views “literature as a means of social change.” She appreciates her mentors at Semicolon Books in Chicago; the Novel Neighbor in St. Louis, Mo.; and Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin, Ind., whose advice has helped Loudmouth get louder. For her, bookselling is “all about collaboration, and not ‘how can we edge out the competition,’ which is antithetical to what capitalism would have us believe.”
To build goodwill, Johnson encourages staffers to attend local events and greet community members. “This is going to sound so woo-woo, but what are the vibes? What’s the energy in here?” Johnson asks. She wants store visitors “to feel like they’re being invited” into a friendly space.
Aysia Brown, co-owner of Protagonist Black in Pomona, Calif., says she and her husband, Kevin Brown, launched a mobile bookstore last year because the nearest bookstores were 30–40 minutes away. “As a parent, reader, and educator, I was disturbed by the implications of that lack of access,” Brown says. The store recently moved into a shared retail space maintained by an African-American nonprofit organization.
Brown sees bookselling becoming more “experiential and social,” and has constructed a business model with that in mind: the store pairs cocktails and mocktails with select titles, and its Friends of the Shop program encourages local BIPOC authors to sell their own books. “They interact directly with our customers,” Brown says of the program, which thus far has attracted self-published authors. “This helps us support indie authors while balancing our inventory budget.”
For Brown, being an indie bookseller means making books accessible to those from underrepresented communities. But inclusion must be sustainable and intentional: “Identify your growth points and create a plan for how you will measure your success,” she says, emphasizing “honesty and accountability” in business practices. “It does not serve anyone to bring a diverse group of folks into a toxic environment that’s not prepared for that level of engagement. No one will thrive.”
Scholars often say that no one doubted Shakespeare’s authorship until the 19th century. The response is a rote way of brushing off persistent questions about the attribution of the world’s most famous plays and poems – but it may not be true.
New scholarship suggests that doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship first arose during his lifetime – in a book called Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, published in 1598 by the theologian Francis Meres.
Roger Stritmatter, a professor at Coppin State University who has spent years studying Meres’ book, argues that Meres asserted “Shakespeare” as the pseudonym of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Stritmatter’s research has been published in the academic journal Critical Survey. Shakespeare scholar Graham Holderness, who edited the journal, worries that shutting down debate about the authorship endangers academic freedom. “When you come across traditional Shakespeareans comparing Shakespeare authorship doubt to conspiracy theories – anti-vaxxers or climate change deniers – I mean, I think that’s wrong … for all sorts of reasons”, he said.
Palladis Tamia is a “commonplace book” of sayings and comparisons. It has long been known to scholars as an essential text in Shakespeare studies. In a chapter titled, A Comparative Discourse of Our English Poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets, Meres compares English writers with classical writers using an as-so equation. For example: “As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagorus, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.” Meres mentions Shakespeare nine times, praising him as a poet and playwright and listing 12 of his plays.
While some scholars have dismissed Meres as a “mere copyist” who compiled lists, others have suspected that his work was more important. Meres may be following some kind of “critical formula” or even expressing “a hidden critical judgment on Shakespeare,” wrote the scholar Don Cameron Allen in 1933. Until recently, that judgment has remained obscure.
Stritmatter’s article, Francis Meres Revisited: Wit, Design and Authorship in Palladis Tamia, observes that Meres, who had published a mathematical treatise called God’s Arithmeticke in 1597, is committed to symmetry in his comparisons – for example, setting eight Greek writers against eight Latin writers and eight English writers. Among the 59 lists, a handful appear asymmetric but conceal a hidden symmetry. Six ancient epigrammatists are compared to five modern ones – “Heywood, Drant, Kendal, Bastard, Davies” – which seems like a discrepancy until one realises that “Davies” can stand for two persons: John Davies of Hereford and Sir John Davies, both well-known writers of epigrams.
“Essentially it’s a book of logic puzzles,” said Stritmatter. “When the lists aren’t symmetrical, there’s a reason for it.” Another imbalance appears in a list of comedic dramatists, in which 16 ancient writers are set against 17 English writers, including the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare. The question arises: “If one name [Davies] can stand for two persons, can two names refer to the same person?”
Drawing on the history of commonplace book arrangement, Stritmatter notes that the order of names in Meres’ list aligns each classical writer with his English counterpart: Plautus and Anthony Munday wrote comedies about braggart soldiers; Archippus Atheniensis and Thomas Nashe wrote satires involving fish. Why is Aristonymus aligned with Shakespeare? Nothing is known of Aristonymus, except that his name means, “the aristocratic name”. The Earl of Oxford, who aligns with no one, is the only aristocratic name on the list. Stritmatter argues that the alignment of “Shakespeare” with “the aristocratic name” points to Oxford. “It may be concluded that Francis Meres, using ‘Aristonymus’ as the mediating signifier, said that ‘Shakespeare = Oxford.’”
“I was sceptical, but Stritmatter’s scholarship on this matter is sound,” said the scholar Ros Barber, who teaches Introduction to Who Wrote Shakespeare at the University of London. “Stritmatter’s article doesn’t prove that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, but it does argue quite strongly that Meres believed he did. Given the ubiquity of anonymous and pseudonymous publication in the 1590s and the dangers of publishing things that upset the authorities, it’s neither surprising that he might believe this nor that he chose to express it so covertly.”
PG hasn’t read Professor Stritmatter’s work, but he’s skeptical.
One major point for Shakespeare’s reality is that Queen Elizabeth was Shakespeare’s patron for many years. As state papers attest, she liked his plays and watched a number of them. It was at her request that he wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is known that he was personally present in 1594.
Given all the gossips in the Elizabethan Court, it stretches credibility that everyone kept his true identity secret. Some people put forth Christopher Marlowe as the actual Shakespeare. However, Marlowe died in 1593, before Shakespeare’s greatest plays were performed – Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth.
Shakespeare was also an actor, a playwright, and a shareholder in an acting company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which became the King’s Men when James I became king in 1603. There are also many references to Shakespeare’s work by contemporary authors – see Shakespeare Documented for many of such references.
Shakespeare’s burial is recorded in Stratford’s parish register on 25 April 1616. He made a will on 25 March, almost a month before he died. It would have taken a lot of effort by someone in Shakespeare’s time to have convinced the keeper of the parish register to make a burial record for someone who did not exist.
What do we mean when we say a novel is a “sad girl novel”? I could list a dozen popular novels published over the last few years that have had this term slapped on them. What do they have in common? Most often a protagonist who is at times miserable and disaffected, who is suffering under capitalism, who is ambivalent about their sexual experiences and their relationships with others. Usually they are highly educated and frequently analyse their own situation. Sometimes they are grieving, often they are bored. By this metric Karl Ove Knausgaard is perhaps our foremost sad girl novelist, a master of the form. Brandon Taylor’s Real Life also meets many of these criteria, as does Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe. You might even call this type of novel the dominant mode in literary fiction – so why is it a girl problem?
The term sad girl novel is sometimes used interchangeably with “cool girl novel”, another dubious term that lambasts women for, among other things, dressing well and throwing parties. We’re free to like or dislike any of these books, and there’s no question that – just as in publishing more generally – middle-class and white stories continue to dominate, but lumping unrelated novels by women together whether their characters lie in bed all day or stay out all night is hardly identifying a coherent literary phenomenon. Describing Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts as sad would be like describing American Psycho as sad. When I read Natasha Brown’s Assembly, I don’t find sadness. I find glittering, righteous anger. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist’s detached register carries anger and grief. Indeed, a lot of what we’re identifying vaguely as “sadness”, is rage.
Perhaps we aren’t able to identify more complex emotions, in particular those that are unpleasant, like anger, in these novels, because of our increasingly infantilised view of women authors. Everywhere we look, women are being en-cutened, via “girl dinners” (meals, but smaller), “hot girl walks” (walks), “girl math” (inaccurate calculations). What seems to have begun as a self-deprecating in-joke has risen in popularity alongside frightening and reactionary ideas about women’s roles online (the surging popularity of tradwife content for example). I return again and again, pissed off, to this quote from Ursula Le Guin on the so-called cult of women’s knowledge:
All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
If things described as “girl” are cuter, smaller, sillier, then what does that mean a “girl novel” is? A novel, but not as important?
There are more novels being published by women than ever, and the readers of novels are also overwhelmingly female: according to YouGov, more than a quarter (27%) of women read daily, compared to a sixth (13%) of men. Men are also less likely to be readers overall, with 22% saying they never read, compared to 12% of women. But this is no guarantee that fiction by women about women garners respect. Instead, it is still variously considered to be frivolous, boring, overwritten, underwritten, too violent, too passive, unrealistic, thinly veiled autobiography, and so on and so on. Consider the Madievsky rule, the writer Ruth Madievsky’s theory that 3.5 stars on Goodreads is the best score you can get for contemporary literary fiction written by women about women (writing by men tends to sit comfortably around 4).
Fan-fiction writers have for decades parlayed their passion for writing stories based on movies, TV shows, and books into careers as best-selling genre authors. But they haven’t often advertised to readers their pseudonymous identities as fan-fiction writers when they were published under their real names: Naomi Novik’s fan persona as author and cofounder of the fan-fiction platform Archive of Our Own wasn’t part of the marketing of her best-selling “Temeraire” series, for example.
Yet there’s been an uptick in authors whose origin stories as fan-fiction writers are publicized as part of their appeal. Ali Hazelwood, the best-selling author of romance novels “The Love Hypothesis”and “Bride”(the No. 4 best-selling book in the US in February)and a former writer of “Star Wars” fan fictionis the most visible of this new crop of fic writers gone pro. Thea Guanzon, another author of “Star Wars” fan fiction turned her story “The Hurricane Wars”into a published book thanks to an editor who discovered it in its original form on Archive of Our Own.
As book sales skyrocketed during the pandemic, online fan communities emerged more starkly as proving grounds for potential best-selling writers, a place for agents and editors to identify new talent to meet demand for recreational book spending. As a result, the science fiction, fantasy, and romance markets are increasingly relying on the successes of fan fiction authors, which speaks to the growing power of fans in determining who makes it big outside the fan-fiction sphere.
“Publishers are mining self-publishing for new voices,” Kristen McLean, a publishing analyst, told me. She pointed to self-published authors who’ve gotten major deals, like Freida McFadden, as well as to other publishing trends that center the power of fans. Popular fantasy author Brandon Sanderson’s record-breaking $16M crowdfunding campaign, for instance, allowed him to self-release new works directly to fans.
Within the larger landscape of self-publishing, fan fiction has been a fruitful proving ground for authors in genre spaces. “There has always been a segment of writers who got their start in fan fiction who move into professional writing, especially in science fiction and fantasy,” said Diana Pho, an editor at science-fiction imprint Erewhon Books. Built-in audiences for particular fictional relationships, like Reylo (Rey/Kylo Ren) in “Star Wars,”can help writers get their work in front of huge numbers of readers — an act of brand-building that can greatly improve their professional prospects.
Consumer spending on books boomed in 2020 during pandemic lockdowns. Sales of romance and fantasy books have continued to surge — romance saw a 52% boost from 2022 to 2023 — and have stayed popular as the rest of the industry returns to the post-Covid mean, with both genres leading fiction growth in 2023. Romance and fantasy are favorites of BookTok, the digital juggernaut made up of thousands of book fans on TikTok that has sent authors like Sarah J. Maas and Colleen Hoover to the top of the charts.
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Kurestin Armada, an agent who represents science-fiction and fantasy authors, said she’s acquired new clients from fan-fiction websites. These authors already demonstrate a particular writing style agents are looking for, one that has a clear appeal to a large audience of hyper-engaged readers online.
“There is just a really bright voice that comes from fan fiction,” Armada said. “It’s just fun. It’s very contemporary leaning, even if it’s genre fiction, which is a really fun mashup. They tend to be really voicey authors. They tend to have a really good grasp of character.”
The visibility of the fan-fiction-to-published fiction pipeline began in 2011 with the publication of E. L. James’s explosive “Fifty Shades of Grey,”known to have begun life as a “Twilight” fan fiction called “Master of the Universe.” “Fifty Shades”has sold 165M+ copies and been turned into two feature films. Wattpad, a popular self-publishing platform with nearly 100M readers, is known for hosting fan fiction in the “self-insert” genre, which sees an original character the reader is meant to identify with paired up with a celebrity or fictional character. It has spawned several successful adaptations of its IP in the past decade, including the “After” series by Anna Todd, originally fan fiction about Harry Styles.
Increased recognition of the power of self-publishing, especially by fan authors, has led to author revelations that would’ve been unthinkable even a decade ago. SenLinYu is the pen name of the author behind the hugely popular “Harry Potter” fan fiction “Manacled,” with nearly 8M hits on Archive of Our Own. She announced she would be repackaging and republishing it as an original work with Penguin Random House, while keeping her fan author name on the cover.
When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists.
I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discuss, and describe him?
To address this question, we will first consider the distinctive conditions faced by contemporary Chinese authors.
I. Light and Shadows Beneath a Half-Open and Half-Closed Window
The entire world knows that China’s economy has recently undergone a process of reform and opening up, whereas the relationship between China’s advanced economic system and its conservative political system is like the fable in which the tortoise beats the hare who stops to take a nap. In the race between China’s economic and political reform, the economy is currently surging ahead while politics stops to take a nap.
In contrast to China’s economic tortoise, its political hare has not merely slowed down or stopped; it has even turned around and headed back whence it came. For instance, in discussing China’s freedom of expression and ideological emancipation, people sometimes refer to the nation’s prison house of language—and even if it is not technically a prison, it is at the very least a cage. Although the nation’s economic window is either open or in the process of being opened and its political window is either closed or in the process of being closed, its culture looks around in confusion at the resulting play of light and shadows. The nation’s literature—which is to say, authors’ writings—is also stuck in this intermediary zone. Meanwhile, the billion-plus Chinese people who gather beneath these windows to breathe and survive find that the brightness and warmth here are unpredictable; consequently, their souls, spirits, and hearts become increasingly variable, decadent, and dark.
For the past several decades, China has demonstrated that the success of a planned economy lies not so much in the planning of the economy itself but rather in the planning of people’s hearts. The ultimate objective of economic planning is not economic prosperity itself but rather control over the national and political aspects of people’s souls. In a market economy, the market includes not only the economy proper but also people’s souls and the freedom that must be banished for the sake of economic development. Because of the needs of power and politics, people’s freedom cannot strictly follow the rise and fall of the economy. When the economic window is open, the political window will be closed, and ideological power will be concentrated. People’s spirits will resemble a patch of grass struggling to grow in the intermittently light and dark area beneath these partially open and partially closed windows. Because there is insufficient light and irregular wind here (although it is certainly not the case that there is no light or wind at all), when this patch of grass manages to glimpse some light and wind, it will fight to secure them, and otherwise it will gasp and struggle in their absence.
This is the situation in contemporary China. The economic window is open and the political window is closed, and culture wanders in the intermediate zone between the two. Contemporary literature approaches the flourishing economy as though hugging a fireball and approaches the ubiquitous politics of contemporary reality as though embracing an enormous chunk of ice.
Politics expects that you write about the existence of that hot, bright, and visible so-called positive energy while also attending to the existence of that which, on the surface, appears to be a form of negative energy—including a reality that either cannot be seen or else doesn’t even exist. In this intermediate zone, all Chinese, including children from preschool forward (but excluding infants, who are of course innocent and pure), are influenced by what they see and hear. For instance, children all know that teachers will respond favorably if they are offered gifts. Meanwhile, if an old man collapses in the street, it is only natural that bystanders will help him, but when the old man responds by accusing the bystanders of having knocked him down and demands compensation from them, this becomes a special kind of incident—a legal case. Given that the frequency of these sorts of incidents has recently increased, we cannot help but suspect that these apparent victims must hold darkness in their hearts. Accordingly, now if someone collapses or is hit by a car, passersby will often hurry away as though they haven’t seen anything, and although we may find this situation unreasonable, at least we can understand it. This illustrates how, in contemporary China, people’s souls have become numb and dark.
What is bred under the open window of the economy is capital, desire, and evil, and what is bred under the closed window of politics is corruption, greed, and contempt for others. People’s hearts become deformed, distorted, and absurd. If an author wants to realistically describe people’s deepest souls, this is his God-given responsibility, and if the author gives this up, he will no longer have any need to exist. Meanwhile, the people who control when, how, and to what extent the two windows should be open or shut also control authors’ pens and remind them what they can and can’t write. These people constantly remind authors that the light of one person’s heart has positive energy and should be discussed in detail, but the darkness of another person’s heart cannot be discussed because such a conversation might touch on the underlying reason why their heart is dark in the first place.
Meanwhile, for the sake of their survival, honor, and status, the authors living under these partially open and partially closed windows (and under the supervision of the people overseeing the windows) must adopt one of the following three writing methods.
First, there is writing that welcomes light. When you see and obtain light, you write to welcome it. The more you write about light, the brighter your writing will become, and the more prestige and status will illuminate your life—the same way that sunlight shines into your room when you open a window in the morning.
Second, there is writing that borrows light. People who write to borrow light are all talented Chinese authors with a certain degree of conscience and wisdom. Because these authors are unwilling to write to welcome light but are also unwilling to give up their internal artistic sentiment, they have no choice but to borrow light from others. As a result, they always have a feeling of guilty gratitude and don’t attempt to explore the reality behind that half-closed window. They know that behind that window there lies the greatest truth, but because they have borrowed light, they resemble someone who—after using someone else’s tools or eating someone else’s food—naturally won’t excavate the foundations of that other person’s house. Therefore, these authors reach a tacit agreement that they will remain in the boundary zone between light and darkness and will use an artistic balance to complete a “literary idea” that belongs to both regions.
Third, there is writing that transcends light to reach the truth of darkness. This kind of writing is risky because you not only betray light after transcending it but also betray all the authors and works positioned in the intermediary zone between light and darkness. Furthermore, everything located in the light and at its margins is visible, whereas the truth of that darkness remains invisible and can only be felt. Therefore, your writing is not something everyone can recognize, and instead it leads people to doubt, argue, and spurn. This is also why writing that transcends light to reach darkness, and which proceeds from the illuminated window to the area beneath the dark window—this kind of writing requires not only courage but also talent and creativity. You need to know that the closed window is truth but that the open window is also truth. If you hope to perceive truth and existence in darkness, you must also see truth and existence in light. The question you should most care about involves not only the joy and propitiousness that people experience in the light together and the way they gasp and struggle in darkness, but also the anxiety they experience in the boundary zone between these two sets of windows.
II. The Unregulated Expansion of the Censorship System
When it comes to literature, a censorship system is like a cruel father admonishing his disobedient child. China’s authors are as familiar with the nation’s censorship system as a frequently beaten child knows the rules of his father’s anger—and it is as though every author who has memory and experience knows the system as intimately as they know the palm of their own hand.
China’s literary censorship system can be divided into three levels.
1. The national censorship system. For literary works, national censorship is a kind of ideological trial that involves a set of policies, rules, and regulations derived from ideology’s service to the regime. Although all laws and regulations are determined by individuals, their impetus and implementation ultimately relies on the nation’s reputation. Following a lengthy series of meetings and notifications, virtually every department and individual in contemporary China responsible for culture, news, literature, and art with ideological implications can consciously grasp censorship’s policies and framework, its bottom line, and its outer margins. They understand what can and can’t be written, what can be addressed in a vague fashion (like the Cultural Revolution) and what definitely cannot be mentioned at all (like June Fourth). However, what really leaves authors at a loss is the censorship operators: the individuals who implement specific cultural provisions on behalf of the Party.
2. Censorship operators. The censorship regime includes an array of different types of institutions that help implement literary policies. At the top level, these include the Central Propaganda Department, the General Administration of Press and Publication, and other high level departments; at the middle level, they include provincial-level institutions; and at the bottom level, they include specific journals and presses.
Two dominant characteristics of contemporary China’s censorship system include the abuse of power on one hand and publishers’ increased caution and expanded self-censorship on the other. Publishers were originally the most direct drivers of the publishing industry and of grassroots culture, but now that censorship has become stricter and bans have become more and more common, censorship operators are increasingly required to attend not only to a work’s subject matter but even to the use of specific “sensitive” words. As a result, it is very common for publishers and editors themselves to be examined, interrogated, suspended, and transferred.
Censorship operators frequently adopt a policy of punishing one author to serve as an example to others, following the logic that if you are bitten by a snake one morning, you will remain terrified of ropes for years to come. Accordingly, publishing organizations have become censorship operators on the principle that “all citizens are soldiers.” After a manuscript arrives, the first thing editors consider is not the work’s artistic or market value but whether it is sensitive and whether the author has attracted the attention of the higher-ups. In this way, editors become the book’s first censors. The publisher’s second, third, and final round reviewers serve not only as the manuscript’s artistic referees but also as its political censors. In the case of works that have artistic value but also carry a certain degree of risk, the publisher may extend the review process and allow the National Press and Publication Administration to make the final call.
3. Self-censorship. The national censorship system uses power and policies that supervene the letter of the law to call for the implementation and oversight of the censorship operation. Over time, however, this sort of operation ultimately succeeds in encouraging a process of self-censorship on the part of the authors themselves. If censorship operation is a kind of power and oppression, then authors’ self-censorship is simultaneously conscious, unwitting, and reflexive.
Like many works, my own Dream of Ding Village underwent a process of self-censorship. I have already discussed this process at length elsewhere, but what I would like to add here relates to the conscious and reflexive nature of this process. The harm it causes is far greater than the processes of censorship, editing, and banning that people can see—because it involves literary elements that are excised before they are even born. Like a fetus that is subject to One Child policy family-planning restrictions, these elements can disappear before they even have a chance to appear in the first place. Before they have even become a fetus, they are consciously and reflexively “planned” out of existence.
Over a stunning career, which has lasted more than half a century, the historian Richard Slotkin has devoted himself to documenting the stories we tell ourselves about nation, violence, inclusion, and exclusion. From his trilogy on the place of guns in American culture—starting with Regeneration Through Violence in 1973—Slotkin has defined the study of American mythmaking. Over these same 50 years, he has witnessed the massive transformations of the late 20th century and the uneasy opening of the 21st. In his new epic, A Great Disorder, Slotkin uses foundational myths like the founding, the lost cause, the frontier, and the good war, to explore how such stories shape the limits and possibilities of our current-day political imaginaries.
Over a stunning career, which has lasted more than half a century, the historian Richard Slotkin has devoted himself to documenting the stories we tell ourselves about nation, violence, inclusion, and exclusion. From his trilogy on the place of guns in American culture—starting with Regeneration Through Violence in 1973—Slotkin has defined the study of American mythmaking. Over these same 50 years, he has witnessed the massive transformations of the late 20th century and the uneasy opening of the 21st. In his new epic, A Great Disorder, Slotkin uses foundational myths like the founding, the lost cause, the frontier, and the good war, to explore how such stories shape the limits and possibilities of our current-day political imaginaries.
Kathleen Belew (KB): Let’s start by queuing up the four big myths you talk about and why you felt it was important to bring them together in one story now, having addressed some of these themes in your earlier work.
Richard Slotkin (RS): Over the longer term, I’ve been thinking about the theory of national myth and the way in which national myths are a crucial part of the culture that holds nation states together.
National myths are developed through long-term usage in every medium of cultural expression: histories, school textbooks, newspapers, advertisements, sermons, political speeches, popular fiction, movies. They are the form in which we remember our history. But they are also, and most critically, the means through which we turn history into an instrument of political power. In any major crisis, one of our cultural reflexes is to scan our memory archives, our lexicon of myths, for analogies that will help us interpret the crisis, and precedents on which to model a successful or even “heroic” response.
Four mythologies have been central to the development of American nationality. The myth of the frontier is our oldest myth, tracing the origin of our society to the settler states of the colonial period and its phenomenal growth to the exploitation of abundant natural resources. The myth of the founding deals with the establishment of national independence and constitutional government. The myth of the Civil War arose from the existential crisis that overtook the nation in the 1860s, over slavery and Southern secession. This myth has three significant variants: the liberation myth, centered on Lincoln and emancipation; the reconciliation myth, which emphasizes the postwar coming together of whites from North and South; and the lost cause myth, which sanctifies the Confederate cause and the postwar struggle to restore white supremacy. Finally, the myth of the good war emerged in the 1940s, as the nation for the first time embraced its racial and ethnic diversity, to unite its people in a struggle for the Free World.
My past work had focused on the myth of the frontier, which was really the earliest and the most basic myth. It deals with national character and race. It deals with economic development. But then I had neglected other myths that have equal or similar power in shaping the way in which we think about our nationality specifically, that is, who counts as an American and what it is that the political structure of America is supposed to do. It seemed to me that the Civil War was certainly one of the things that was most critical to talk about. So, I wrote about the Civil War as well.
What really crystallized the idea for the book, though, was the demonstrations in Charlottesville. I realized that the Civil War was very much alive and that the banners that people were carrying on both sides were really like the headlines from myths. Behind each banner was a version of what the United States was supposed to be. If you looked at the antidemonstrators, the ones who were opposing Unite the Right, they had standard American flags, flags expressing Black Power, rainbow flags—the flags of liberalism and leftism in a sense.
On the other side, you had flags with the Confederate stars and bars, the Gadsden flag—the yellow flag with the rattlesnake that says Don’t Tread on Me, which has come to represent a gun rights flag—and right-wing paramilitary flags. It seemed to me that what we were getting there was a war of symbols, and that behind the symbols were stories, and that each of the stories amounted to a different version of what the United States was about. That’s why the book had to bring all four together.
To be clear, nobody really sits down and composes each myth, though Hollywood has at times come close to doing so.
Rather, they emerge from the rationalization of a historical crisis. They almost always have an ambivalence, a contradiction built in.
For example, there’s a white side and a Native side to the frontier story. There’s a Union side and a Confederate side, and a Black side and a white side to the Civil War story. Those ambiguities or contradictions remain embedded in the story.
Or take the lost cause. I could see somebody, a populist but not necessarily right-wing person, thinking of the Confederacy through the lens of, “That’s what you do. You rebel against the established order, when the established order gets too oppressive.” The myth makes itself available for that thing. And that’s why myths retain their power—they can serve a number of different purposes and play both sides of a contradiction.
KB: As someone who has written about this over several chapters in what we would call the culture wars, do you see this as more of a continuity across the years you’ve been writing? Or is today really different in some tactile way?
RS: Both of those things are true. Certainly, these wars are continuous. If you follow any one of the stories—the story of the founding, the story of the frontier, the story of the lost cause and then the liberation myth of the Civil War, the good war myth—they run pretty much throughout the period with greater and lesser periods of activity of intense usage.
But starting in 2000, the Civil War became really a live term explicitly, where people were saying, “We’re in a civil war.” You saw that analogy being made not only on the right in the American Conservative, but also in Sean Wilentz’s writings about how our contemporary moment resembles the 1850s. So the Civil War was very alive in mainstream culture even before Charlottesville.
With Charlottesville, what happened is what was implicit suddenly became the front and center drama. We’re now actually fighting about the legacy of Robert E. Lee. We’re actually arguing with the president about the legacy of Robert E. Lee. It turned out that in order to defend Robert E. Lee, Trump could reach back and compare him to George Washington. Washington was a slave holder too. Now, all of a sudden, the founding of the nation is involved.
What the modern gun rights movement has done is to make the Second Amendment the center of their myth of the founding, in which the right to bear arms—and not the legal protections of the Bill of Rights—is “the palladium of our liberties” because it enables citizens to resist a tyrannical government. The original “palladium doctrine” was put forward by Supreme Court Justice Story in 1833; but it held that the potential for resistance was to be held by “well regulated” state militias. But the modern movement has asserted this as an individual right and used it to justify the threat or use of armed force to resist the government. NRA spokesman Fred Romero says it directly: “The Second Amendment is there as a balance of power. It is literally a loaded gun in the hands of the people held to the heads of government.” And that power can be used to check the ordinary operations of government. As the antitax activist Grover Norquist said, “Once [the government] get our guns, they don’t have to argue with you about taxes anymore.”1 The logic of this Second Amendment myth leads straight to the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021.
The past becomes infused into modern life and politics.
KB: Do you think that originalism in that context is more a legal theory or a retelling of a cultural myth? Does originalism have the uptake or purchase that it has because it has that story power? Or is it just a legal doctrine?
RS: It’s the story’s power that gives its appeal beyond the narrow circle of legal specialists. I would argue that the legal specialists thought themselves into the mystique of the founding. They have fetishized the founding as a way of undoing the world of precedent that has been developed since the founding or since major amendments were passed.
So it is definitely a fetish, and you can see it most clearly in Clarence Thomas’s opinion in Bruen where he says that you can’t interpret the Second Amendment in any way other than the way in which it would’ve been interpreted in 1791. In a sense, it is patently absurd.
First of all, even as a historian, you can’t figure out authoritatively how the amendment would have been interpreted back then. You can’t truly be authoritative about what the common state of opinion was about that. Second, and more importantly, we’re not in the same world.
KB: One of the unresolved tensions in teaching US history that comes up over and over for me is the conflicting mythos argument articulated by Jefferson and Hamilton, that asks: Is violence by the mob justified because it seeks to restrain the tyrannical state or is state violence justified because it seeks to restrain the revolutionary anarchist mob? In so many ways, and especially while studying lynching or vigilante groups, it seems to me that we collectively never resolved this question at all.
I’m wondering how much you think there are tensions like that, tensions that exist in one of these stories or crossover between several of these stories?
RS: You can examine the question if you contrast the two halves of the founding myth, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence is about the right of revolution. It’s a moral statement that people always have the right of revolution. The Constitution, on the other hand, doesn’t acknowledge a right of revolution. That’s really the core, because that’s the fundamental question about government. At some point, government may become tyrannical, and a revolution may be needed to overthrow it. In a practical sense, the point of contradiction that seems to me most meaningful is the Civil War version. I talk about this when I talk about Lincoln and Lincoln’s response to Southern secession.
The Southern states used their militia to resist what they say was a tyrannical government. In response, Lincoln says, okay, you have the right of revolution. Any people, any civil community has the right of revolution. But there are two questions, morally: Why are you rebelling? Are you rebelling to establish freedom or slavery? And Lincoln thinks the answer to that is clear, which is the latter. The South disagrees. But Lincoln’s other question is, okay, you have the right of revolution. Does the government have the right to suppress you? And if so, on what moral basis? Clearly, Lincoln argues, the government has a legal basis to suppress the South’s rebellion. The Constitution says you can suppress an insurrection. The moral basis of this right, Lincoln argues, is free elections—if you have a free election, that’s the essence of the Republican state. If you overthrow a free election, if you substitute bullets for ballots, that’s the end of the republic. It’s the end of Republicanism. And therefore, to defend the principle of free government, it’s necessary to repress the Southern Revolution. That’s the way the reasoning actually works out. That’s the story that justifies saying no to this revolution.
The author of the book is a history professor at one of the so-called “Little Ivies,” expensive small colleges located in New England, the Northeast United States where the Ivy League Universities are sited. The students at the Little Ivies tend to come from wealthy families and fall into contemporary “privileged” status.
PG hasn’t read anything written by Dr. Slotkin, but what’s an American History professor going to publish when all the history professors who have come before him have worked over all the interesting and useful American History topics?
He can discover widely accepted myths that his many predecessors have failed to discern. Many of these myths have undoubtedly been published by less-enlightened and perceptive historians who lacked the intelligence to see all those myths sitting right in front of their noses.
The fact that earlier historians may have personally failed to see these myths in the wild or interviewed older individuals who had witnessed the events that the diligent professor has discovered are nothing more than American mythology.
PG’s gaze was caught by the Professor’s statement that
“The Declaration of Independence is about the right of revolution. It’s a moral statement that people always have the right of revolution. The Constitution, on the other hand, doesn’t acknowledge a right of revolution.”
PG is merely a humble recovering lawyer not a Professor of American history with tenure, but, for him, The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written for two very different purposes:
The Declaration of Independence was written to give notice to one and all that the thirteen colonies would no longer be subject to British rule and refused to be governed by British law and/or its King or the designated representatives of either. Its purpose was to start a revolution.
The Constitution was written and approved well after the Revolutionary War was concluded. Its purpose was to set the rules for an entirely new and different form of government, one without kings, hereditary nobility, etc.
The Constitution was also written to delineate what the leaders of the new nation had the power and authority to do, and what powers the individual states retained to be exercised under the laws the states would write and approve. Each state would organize its own separate government with elected officers and representatives elected by the people living in the state.
The Civil War was necessary to resolve the right of revolution issue. States and their citizens, while exercising broad areas of independence, were still part of the United States and subject to the laws passed by the democratically elected representatives from all states in Congress, enforced by a President and the nation’s designated officials, and supervised by the President.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
The closing lines from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Cairo, a town at the southern tip of Illinois founded in the early 19th century, was given that name because it was expected to grow into a huge metropolis. Located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, it was the transport hub of a region that became known as “Little Egypt” because of its huge deltaic plains where farmers could grow anything.
Today, however, the name is redolent of lost civilisations. To walk around is a strange experience. Turreted Victorian houses gently crumble, being reclaimed by the weeds. What was once downtown (pictured) resembles an abandoned film set. Cairo has no petrol stations, no pharmacies and no hospitals. It has gone from six schools to two, both half-empty. “When I was growing up in the 1970s, we had two grocery stores, we had two gas stations. You know, a lot of businesses were still open,” says Toya Wilson, who runs the city’s still operating and beautiful Victorian library. One modest grocery store remains, but it is run at a loss by a charity and, when your correspondent visited, was deathly quiet, with many bare shelves.
Cairo is on its way to becoming America’s newest ghost town. Its population, having peaked above 15,000 in the 1920s, had fallen to just 1,700 people by the 2020 census. Alexander County, Illinois, of which it is the capital, lost a third of its people in the decade to 2020, making it the fastest-shrinking place in America
Unfortunately, Cairo (pronounced like the Karo in Karo Syrup) is not an isolated case.
PG grew up in rural Colorado and rural Minnesota. Every place PG lived during his K-12 years has a smaller, usually much smaller population than it was when PG was living there. The elementary schools and the high school where PG was a student have been demolished and not replaced. Today, the students who live where PG lived are bussed to school, riding at least 30 minutes each way.
The American Midwest contains some of the most fertile soil in the world, but farming finances are becoming worse and worse for family-owned farms. They’re simply too small and undercapitalized to support a family these days. So the owners, often quite old, are selling out to investment banks and other large financial enterprises, typically located on the coasts of the United States.
Somebody needs to operate the farms, so the large financial owners hire professional farm managers are hired to handle that task. Because of their size and financial strength, the large banks and financial enterprises have access to financing on far better terms than an individual farmer can obtain, they can purchase expensive new farm equipment that is far more sophisticated and efficient than anything a small farmer can afford.
Large finance enterprises hire a professional farm manager to handle all their holdings. The farm manager then hires a few middle managers to supervise the hiring and supervision of low-cost labor, importing such workers from other countries to handle the day-to-day work.
Laborers are likely organized in work groups to be moved about regularly so they can do the manual work of operating a large number of former family farms. Basically, farming is run like a factory, and nobody has roots in the many small farm towns that previously survived by providing goods. services and education needed by family farmers, spouses and their children.
‘I’m a liar. I’m a thief. I’m emotionally shallow. I’m mostly immune to remorse and guilt. I’m highly manipulative. I don’t care what other people think.” Thus opens “Sociopath: A Memoir,” by Patric (short for Patricia) Gagne, psychologist, former therapist, happily married mother of two—and, she would say, an “advocate” for others like her.
In grade school, Ms. Gagne tells us, she jammed a pencil into the head of another little girl and took money from the collection tray at church. As a college undergraduate, she drove stolen cars around Los Angeles. “Sociopath” is the story of Ms. Gagne’s obsessional effort to understand these impulses—to understand herself. Her divorced parents were loving, and her home was nice, defying the stereotypical origin story of family dysfunction. In the author’s case, the problem seemed innate. “I was simply different,” she writes, and it “often felt like a life sentence in emotional solitary confinement.”
As a teen, Ms. Gagne conducted little experiments on herself: “Wouldn’t it make more sense to engage in smaller acts of ‘bad’ behavior more frequently,” she surmised, “than larger acts less frequently?” She concluded that apathy was the culprit—a lack of engagement and interest that led her to misbehave and thus elicit an experience of colorful emotion. So she put herself “on a diet,” she writes. “I did exactly what I needed to give myself necessary ‘jolts’ of feeling. I never took it any further—even when I was tempted, which was often. I scheduled my mischief like I would have a doctor’s prescription.”
Eventually she understood that people like her—people, that is, who are sociopathic—“just had a harder time with feelings. We act out to fill a void.” Today she knows how much she has to lose if she acts on desires to violate social norms or harm people. The guiltless possibility of doing harm to others points to another key aspect of her condition: an inability to imagine the experience of others.
In a way, Ms. Gagne was lucky. Many people with her condition—most are men—would have landed in prison for committing some of the same trespasses. And few recover or cope as well as she has. Her life, in aerial view, has followed a fairly standard trajectory of education, employment and then doctoral training to become a therapist.
. . . .
But “Sociopath” does present an arresting story of a person who had to build an intelligible moral code from scratch—psychiatrists, apparently, were of little help. Ms. Gagne says that she wrote the book for the other estimated 15 million sociopaths in America. “Who has empathy and compassion for them?” she once asked her husband. She does, and she wants to “allow people like me to see themselves in healthy, everyday situations, and provide the single thing I knew they needed most: hope.” If she can truly help others like herself, then she will have accomplished what the psychiatric profession has largely failed to do.
. . . .
While borderline pathology and sociopathy differ—sociopaths suffer emotional numbness whereas borderlines are often flooded with inchoate anxiety and rage—psychiatry regards both conditions as very difficult to treat.
Borderlines are manipulative people who are apt to violate personal and professional boundaries. They experience panicky feelings of emptiness and engage in “splitting” (judging others as all good or all bad, appraisals that can change over the course of a day); they commit impulsive, often self-destructive acts when faced with overwhelming emotion and harbor an erratic sense of self.
To be fair, most borderlines don’t harm animals. It is just that kind of operatic portrayal, in fact, that Alexander Kriss decries in “Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder,” a well-researched and compelling account of an often baffling condition. As an assistant clinical professor of psychology at Fordham University, Mr. Kriss seems to have immense empathy for borderline patients, putting him in a select group of therapists.
In “Borderline,” he charts the six-year (and counting) treatment of Ana, a young woman who—true to form—introduced herself to him out of the blue, via email, by demanding: “Call me ASAP.” Chapters alternate between sessions with Ana and scholarly excursions into the history of the concept of borderline. Experts, from the ancients to Freud to today’s trauma gurus, have tried to explain the pathology. The answers have ranged from hysteria, disruptions of the pre-Oedipal stage, parental neglect, biologically driven mood and impulse dysregulation, and child abuse. At its core, the problem seems to be one of continuity—in emotional control, identity and relatedness. Borderlines are overwhelmingly women who have been abused in childhood, and their clinical prognosis is guarded. Although most people do age out of the condition eventually, their mature years can be marked by depression, drug abuse and rocky relationships.
Thus far, Ana has made progress. Her treatment, Mr. Kriss says, is a continuing story “of how one moves from chaos to stability; from a black-and-white worldview to a more complex one; from a life defined by desperation to one defined by a sense of who we are.” It is clear from Mr. Kriss’s chronicle that Ana has made these moves but also backtracked at times. Mr. Kriss acknowledges that he must make concerted efforts to handle the emotions that Ana’s provocations stir within him.
But what of other people with character pathology who do not have the financial means to afford several sessions a week? (Mr. Kriss treats Ana for a steeply reduced fee.) Today a shorter-term therapy conducted in a group-therapy format, called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is the most common treatment for borderline personality disorder. It helps people regulate strong emotions by, for example, getting them to think about whether a particular emotion is justified by circumstances and by improving their communication skills so that they can defuse tense situations.
A short teaser for the newest Boston Dynamics humanoid robot.
PG has blogged about earlier models of Boston Dynamics robots, but, even from the short video below, it’s obvious that the company has been hard at work. Thanks to several regulars on TPV or the tip.
Here is a video of earlier models of Boston Dynamics robots, including some robot fails.
The Tokyo District Court on Thursday ordered the operator of a now-defunct manga piracy website to pay ¥1.7 billion in compensation to three major Japanese publishers.
Presiding Judge Masaki Sugiura recognized that the site operator and his associates had uploaded the manga for people to read for free, without approval from the publishers, thereby inflicting financial damage.
The plaintiffs — Kadokawa, Shueisha and Shogakukan — said the ¥1.7 billion sum was most likely the highest ever granted by the court among other similar cases, and they hoped the lawsuit would help deter other manga piracy site operators from uploading content illegally.
They originally sought ¥1.9 billion from piracy website Manga-Mura, which was shut down in 2018 after a criminal investigation for violating copyright law. The damages were calculated by multiplying the average number of views by the sales price of the claimed work.
Shueisha executive Atsushi Ito welcomed the ruling. “We will continue to take every possible measure to protect (authors’) works by enforcing their rights not only in Japan but also in other countries where serious damage is still occurring,” he said.
Ito added that eradicating piracy remains difficult. One issue is domain-hopping, where operators can change domain names every two weeks or a month, to avoid anti-piracy measures in place for specific domains, he said.
Eliminating piracy sites where the operators are based overseas is another challenge. “It’s quite challenging for foreign authorities to act in the interest of Japanese companies,” he said.
In addition, many works are translated into English, with the Authorized Books of Japan (ABJ), which monitors illegal digital publications, identifying 1,207 such piracy sites.
According to the ABJ, 10 major English-language manga piracy sites have been accessed around 500 million times.
He also said that the creative works are being translated into other languages. Translations into Vietnamese make up the largest share of pirated content after English.
Link to the rest at The Japan Times and thanks to C. for the tip.
Microsoft is working on a major new AI feature for Windows 11, which it plans to unveil during an event on May 20.
The feature, dubbed AI Explorer internally, will be able to document and organize everything you see on your PC, and turn everything you do into a searchable memory with natural language.
It looks like AI Explorer will launch first on new Arm PCs, as its system requirements list Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite NPU as a baseline.
This would omit Intel’s new AI PCs from taking advantage of this year’s blockbuster AI feature.
It’s an open secret that Microsoft is working on a significant AI update for Windows 11 this year, timed with new “AI PCs” that are set to begin being made available in June. In fact, Microsoft is holding a special event on May 20, where it intends to unveil its plans for AI in Windows 11, along with new Arm-powered Surface hardware.
We already know that the big new AI feature coming this year is something called AI Explorer, which I detailed earlier this month. AI Explorer turns everything you do on your computer into a searchable memory using natural language. It works across any app and enables the ability to search for previously opened conversations, documents, web pages, and images. It can also understand context and streamline tasks based on what’s currently on screen.
Now, we’re starting to learn more about the system requirements for AI Explorer. Spotted by @thebookisclosed on Twitter, the current system requirements for AI Explorer are set to an ARM64 CPU, 16GB RAM, 225GB storage, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite NPU. This suggests that AI Explorer will be exclusive to new Arm PCs that are shipping this summer.
If we had to take an educated guess, an ARM64 CPU is required because Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform outputs 45 TOPS for its NPU, whereas Intel’s NPU is around 10 TOPS and AMD is 16 TOPS, making them far weaker compared to Qualcomm’s. Indeed, Qualcomm’s NPU is so powerful it could be considered a ‘Gen 2’ NPU, as that is where Intel and AMD will go next with their next-gen CPUs, due in late 2024 and early 2025.
Turns out Windows 11 build 26100 (purported 24H2 RTM) contains the AI Explorer requirements 📃 baked into the OS💠 ARM64 CPU💠 16GiB of RAM💠 225GiB system drive (total, not free space)💠 Snapdragon X Elite NPU (HWID QCOM0D0A)I guess that’s one way to drive ARM64 adoption
Link to the rest at Windows Central and thanks to F. for the tip.
Authors employ different literary devices to create plot twists and conflicted characters. One of these devices is the unreliable narrator—a storyteller who withholds information, lies to, or misleads the reader, casting doubt on the narrative. Authors use this device to engage readers on a deeper level, forcing them to come to their own conclusions when the narrator’s point of view can’t be trusted.
What Is an Unreliable Narrator in Writing?
An unreliable narrator is an untrustworthy storyteller, most often used in narratives with a first-person point of view. The unreliable narrator is either deliberately deceptive or unintentionally misguided, forcing the reader to question their credibility as a storyteller.
4 Types of Unreliable Narrators
An author typically assigns different characteristics to a first-person narrator to compromise their credibility and fuel their unreliability. Unreliable narrators can fall into four categories based on those qualities:
Picaro. The picaro is a character who has a knack for exaggerating. Moll Flanders, the main character in the book Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, was born to a mother in prison, but lies about her social standing in order to wed wealthy men and inherit their money.
Madman. The madman is unreliable because they are mentally detached from reality. In Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Patrick Bateman is a self-proclaimed serial killer—or is he? The Wall Street investment banker narrates his killing spree until it’s revealed that one of his supposed victims is alive and well, forcing the reader to question Bateman’s story.
Naif. The naif’s narrative abilities are impacted by inexperience or age. In Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 15-year-old Christopher weaves the tale of his supposedly deceased mother and the murder of his neighbor’s dog. Both his age and his Asperger’s syndrome color his narrative, and how he comprehends the world around him. Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, is another famous example of a naif narrator due to his youthful ignorance.
Liar. The liar is the most deliberate of all the unreliable narrators. The character fabricates stories, often to paint a better picture of themselves or achieve a desired outcome. In Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Dr. James Sheppard narrates as he helps detective Hercule Poirot investigate the murder of a mutual friend. WIth a reputable prefix before his name, Sheppard is a trusted confidante. But, as Poirot solves the crime, the reader realizes they’ve been fooled—Sheppard is actually the killer.
. . . .
5 Examples of Unreliable Narrators in Literature
Literary critic Wayne C. Booth first coined the phrase “unreliable narrator” in his 1961 book Rhetoric of Fiction, but authors began using this literary technique long before that. Here are some famous examples of books with unreliable narrators:
Gillian Flynn,Gone Girl. When Amy Dunne takes on the role of the narrator halfway through Gone Girl, it comes as somewhat of a surprise. Readers have spent the first half of the book thinking she is dead thanks to the novel’s first unreliable narrator, Amy’s husband Nick. With two unreliable narrators—Amy and her husband, Nick—Flynn doubles down on the novel’s conflict and dismantles the story’s moral compass.
Daphne du Maurier,Rebecca. The narrator’s unreliability in this 1938 novel comes from her highly subjective retelling. When Mrs. de Winter talks about her predecessor, the first Mrs. de Winter, and the mystery surrounding her death, it is all speculation, with a touch of jealousy. The reason for her jaded perspective is finally exposed when the tragic truth comes to light.
Winston Groom,Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump’s tales of becoming a ping pong champion and NASA astronaut are questionable, but his earnest unreliability, due to a low IQ, allows the reader to forgive his possible embellishments. Groom creates a very likable narrator in Forrest Gump but lets the matter of his credibility rest solely with the reader.
Chuck Palahniuk,Fight Club. From page one, Palahniuk hints at the fact that the enigmatic Tyler Durden is not just a friend of the narrator—he is the narrator. Palahniuk ultimately pits the narrator’s alter ego against him, creating a satisfying narrative conflict.
The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon.com, Inc. alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.
The complaint alleges that Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance. Amazon’s far-reaching schemes impact hundreds of billions of dollars in retail sales every year, touch hundreds of thousands of products sold by businesses big and small and affect over a hundred million shoppers.
“Our complaint lays out how Amazon has used a set of punitive and coercive tactics to unlawfully maintain its monopolies,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The complaint sets forth detailed allegations noting how Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon to reach them. Today’s lawsuit seeks to hold Amazon to account for these monopolistic practices and restore the lost promise of free and fair competition.”
“We’re bringing this case because Amazon’s illegal conduct has stifled competition across a huge swath of the online economy. Amazon is a monopolist that uses its power to hike prices on American shoppers and charge sky-high fees on hundreds of thousands of online sellers,” said John Newman, Deputy Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Seldom in the history of U.S. antitrust law has one case had the potential to do so much good for so many people.”
The FTC and states allege Amazon’s anticompetitive conduct occurs in two markets—the online superstore market that serves shoppers and the market for online marketplace services purchased by sellers. These tactics include:
Anti-discounting measures that punish sellers and deter other online retailers from offering prices lower than Amazon, keeping prices higher for products across the internet. For example, if Amazon discovers that a seller is offering lower-priced goods elsewhere, Amazon can bury discounting sellers so far down in Amazon’s search results that they become effectively invisible.
Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain “Prime” eligibility for their products—a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon—on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service, which has made it substantially more expensive for sellers on Amazon to also offer their products on other platforms. This unlawful coercion has in turn limited competitors’ ability to effectively compete against Amazon.
Amazon’s illegal, exclusionary conduct makes it impossible for competitors to gain a foothold. With its amassed power across both the online superstore market and online marketplace services market, Amazon extracts enormous monopoly rents from everyone within its reach. This includes:
Degrading the customer experience by replacing relevant, organic search results with paid advertisements—and deliberately increasing junk ads that worsen search quality and frustrate both shoppers seeking products and sellers who are promised a return on their advertising purchase.
Biasing Amazon’s search results to preference Amazon’s own products over ones that Amazon knows are of better quality.
Charging costly fees on the hundreds of thousands of sellers that currently have no choice but to rely on Amazon to stay in business. These fees range from a monthly fee sellers must pay for each item sold, to advertising fees that have become virtually necessary for sellers to do business. Combined, all of these fees force many sellers to pay close to 50% of their total revenues to Amazon. These fees harm not only sellers but also shoppers, who pay increased prices for thousands of products sold on or off Amazon.
The FTC, along with its state partners, are seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that would prohibit Amazon from engaging in its unlawful conduct and pry loose Amazon’s monopolistic control to restore competition.
Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin joined the Commission’s lawsuit. The Commission vote to authorize staff to file for a permanent injunction and other equitable relief in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington was 3-0.
PG has posted about this matter previously. When this complaint was originally filed, the public consensus from independent antitrust attorneys was that the FTC was unlikely to succeed.
From The United States Department of Justice, Antitrust Division:
The Antitrust Laws
The Antitrust Division enforces federal antitrust and competition laws. These laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition.
The Sherman Antitrust Act
This law prohibits conspiracies that unreasonably restrain trade. Under the Sherman Act, agreements among competitors to fix prices or wages, rig bids, or allocate customers, workers, or markets, are criminal violations. Other agreements such as exclusive contracts that reduce competition may also violate the Sherman Antitrust Act and are subject to civil enforcement.
The Sherman Act also makes it illegal to monopolize, conspire to monopolize, or attempt to monopolize a market for products or services. An unlawful monopoly exists when one firm has market power for a product or service, and it has obtained or maintained that market power, not through competition on the merits, but because the firm has suppressed competition by engaging in anticompetitive conduct. Monopolization offenses may be prosecuted criminally or civilly.
The Clayton Act
This law aims to promote fair competition and prevent unfair business practices that could harm consumers. It prohibits certain actions that might restrict competition, like tying agreements, predatory pricing, and mergers that could lessen competition.
An illegal merger occurs when two companies join together in a way that may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in a relevant market. This reduction in competition can harm consumers by potentially leading to higher prices or fewer choices for products or services. It can also harm workers by potentially leading to lower wages or fewer choices for employment.
An illegal tying agreement happens when a company forces customers to buy one product (the tying product) in order to purchase another product (the tied product). The two products are bundled or “tied” together, which gives the tying agreement its name. This practice restricts a customer’s choice and can limit competition. In a fair marketplace, business compete on price and on how good their products are. If an illegal tying arrangement is in place, a seller can use its strong market power on a popular product to force customers to buy a second, lesser product.
Predatory pricing is when a company sets its prices very low, often below cost, to drive competitors out of business. Once the competition is gone, the company can raise prices because it has less or no competition left. This practice harms competition and, in the long run, it can result in higher prices for consumers and lower wages for workers.
The Clayton Act also prohibits an individual from sitting on boards of competing corporations. This illegal practice can lessen the competitive vigor that would otherwise exist between truly independent rivals. By sharing a board member, the two companies might synchronize pricing changes, labor negotiations, and more.
The goal of the Clayton Act is to maintain a fair marketplace where various companies can compete, giving consumers more options and better prices, and giving workers a fair market for their labor. This law also protects individuals and small business from being unfairly treated by larger companies. Overall, it works to keep markets competitive and ensure that businesses play fair.
For nearly a decade, workers in a warehouse in Seattle’s Denny Triangle neighborhood have shipped boxes of shoes, beach chairs, Marvel T-shirts and other items to online retail customers across the U.S.
The operation, called Big River Services International, sells around $1 million a year of goods through e-commerce marketplaces including eBay, Shopify, Walmart and Amazon AMZN -1.11%decrease; red down pointing triangle.com under brand names such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss. “We are entrepreneurs, thinkers, marketers and creators,” Big River says on its website. “We have a passion for customers and aren’t afraid to experiment.”
What the website doesn’t say is that Big River is an arm of Amazon that surreptitiously gathers intelligence on the tech giant’s competitors.
Born out of a 2015 plan code named “Project Curiosity,” Big River uses its sales across multiple countries to obtain pricing data, logistics information and other details about rival e-commerce marketplaces, logistics operations and payments services, according to people familiar with Big River and corporate documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The team then shared that information with Amazon to incorporate into decisions about its own business.
Amazon is the largest U.S. e-commerce company, accounting for nearly 40% of all online goods sold in the U.S., according to research firm eMarketer. It often says that it pays little attention to competitors, instead focusing all its energies on being “customer obsessed.” It is currently battling antitrust charges brought last year by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 17 states, which accused Amazon of a range of behavior that harms sellers on its marketplace, including using anti-discounting measures that punished merchants for offering lower prices elsewhere.
The story of Big River offers new insight into Amazon’s elaborate efforts to stay ahead of rivals. Team members attended their rivals’ seller conferences and met with competitors identifying themselves only as employees of Big River Services, instead of disclosing that they worked for Amazon.
They were given non-Amazon email addresses to use externally—in emails with people at Amazon, they used Amazon email addresses—and took other extraordinary measures to keep the project secret. They disseminated their reports to Amazon executives using printed, numbered copies rather than email. Those who worked on the project weren’t even supposed to discuss the relationship internally with most teams at Amazon.
An internal crisis-management paper gave advice on what to say if discovered. The response to questions should be: “We make a variety of products available to customers through a number of subsidiaries and online channels.” In conversations, in the event of a leak they were told to focus on the group being formed to improve the seller experience on Amazon, and say that such research is normal, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Senior Amazon executives, including Doug Herrington, Amazon’s current CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, were regularly briefed on the Project Curiosity team’s work, according to one of the people familiar with Big River.
Some aspects were more Maxwell Smart than James Bond. The Big River website contains a glaring typo, and a so-called Japanese streetwear brand that the team concocted lists a Seattle address on its contacts page. Big River’s team members list Amazon as their employer on LinkedIn—potentially blowing their cover.
The LinkedIn page of Max Kless, a former eBay executive who led Big River in Germany before moving to a senior role on the team in the U.S., says that he “developed and led a research subsidiary for Amazon in Germany that prototyped and researched new experiences for Small Business sellers and developers.” Kless didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“Benchmarking is a common practice in business. Amazon, like many other retailers, has benchmarking and customer experience teams that conduct research into the experiences of customers, including our selling partners, in order to improve their experiences working with us,” an Amazon spokeswoman said. Amazon believes its rivals also carry out research on Amazon by selling on Amazon’s site, she said.
. . . .
Virtually all companies research their competitors, reading public documents for information, buying their products or shopping their stores. Lawyers say there is a difference between such corporate intelligence gathering of publicly available information, and what is known as corporate or industrial espionage.
Companies can get into legal trouble for actions such as hiring a rival’s former employee to obtain trade secrets or hacking a rival. Misrepresenting themselves to competitors to gain proprietary information can lead to suits on trade secret misappropriation, said Elizabeth Rowe, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who specializes in trade secret law.
Amazon for years has had what it calls a benchmarking team that sizes up rivals to ensure the best experience for people who shop on its site. The team has placed orders on websites such as Walmart.com for delivery around the U.S. to test things such as how long it takes competitors to ship. Other companies also have teams to compare themselves to rivals.
In late 2015, Amazon’s benchmarking team proposed a different sort of project. The business of hosting other merchants to sell their products on Amazon’s platform was becoming increasingly important. So-called third-party sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace, which the company started in 2000, surpassed half of the company’s total merchandise sales that year, and rival retailers had started similar marketplaces.
Amazon wanted to better understand and improve the experiences of those outside vendors. The team decided to create some brands to sell on Amazon to see what the pain points were for sellers—and to sell items on rival marketplaces to compare the experiences, according to the people familiar with the effort.
The benchmarking team pitched “Project Curiosity” to senior management and got the approval to buy inventory, use a shell company and find warehouses in the U.S., Germany, England, India and Japan so they could pose as sellers on competitors’ websites.
The benchmarking team reported into the chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, for years, but this year changed to report to Herrington, the consumer chief. Olsavsky and Herrington didn’t respond to requests for comment made through Amazon.
Once launched, the focus of the project quickly started shifting to gathering information about rivals, the people said.
In the U.S., the Big River team started by scooping up merchandise from Seattle retailers holding “going out of business” sales. Some of its first products were Saucony sneakers from a local retailer that was closing. The company registered for a licensing agreement with the popular Marvel superhero franchise to sell Marvel-branded items, and bought items including Tommy Bahama beach chairs from Costco to resell.
In the pitch, Project Curiosity leaders identified online marketplaces that they wanted to sell on, including Best Buy and Overstock.
The top goal was Walmart, Amazon’s biggest rival. But Walmart had a high bar for sellers on its marketplace, accepting only vendors who sold large volumes on other marketplaces first. Big River initially couldn’t qualify to be a Walmart Marketplace seller, but it did sell on Jet.com, which Walmart acquired in 2016 and later closed in 2020. And in India, it sold on Flipkart, the giant Indian e-commerce marketplace in which Walmart owned a majority stake.
In order to meet Walmart’s revenue threshold, the Big River team focused on pumping products through Amazon.com to bolster its overall revenue, some of the people said. Big River’s goal wasn’t to do massive amounts of volume on the competing platforms, but to simply get on them and gain access, they said.
The Amazon spokeswoman said that in 2023, 69% of Big River revenue worldwide was on Amazon.com.
In 2019, Big River finally got onto Walmart’s website. This month, Big River had around 15 products listed on Walmart.com under the seller name Atlantic Lot, including Tommy Bahama beach chairs, cooking woks and industrial-size food containers. In 2023, Big River had more than $125,000 in revenue on Walmart.com alone, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Walmart wasn’t aware that Amazon ran the seller accounts on the Walmart and Flipkart sites before the Journal told it, according to a person familiar with the matter.
. . . .
Atlantic Lot is listed as a “Pro Seller”—a distinction Walmart says is for “top-performing Walmart Marketplace sellers.” Listings show that Walmart Logistics, another Amazon rival, handles storage and shipping for it.
Amazon at the time also was building up its logistics business to store and ship items for sellers for a fee to compete with FedEx and United Parcel Service. The business has boomed over the past decade. Amazon’s total revenue from what it calls third-party seller services has grown nearly twelvefold since 2014 to $140 billion last year, accounting for nearly a quarter of Amazon’s total.
To get information about rival logistics services, the Big River team stored inventory with companies including FedEx. Other targets, according to an internal document, included UPS, DHL, Deliverr and German logistics company Linther Spedition.
FedEx in 2017 launched FedEx Fulfillment, a competitor to Fulfillment by Amazon, for offering logistics to sellers. Big River was accepted into the FedEx Fulfillment program as an early customer, and the team received early details about pricing, rate cards and other terms as a result of the partnership, according to the people. FedEx had several phone calls and email exchanges with Big River team members who represented themselves as Big River employees and didn’t disclose their employment at Amazon, according to some of the people.
The team presented its findings from being part of the FedEx program to senior Amazon logistics leaders. They used the code name “OnTime Inc.” to refer to FedEx. Amazon made changes to its Fulfillment by Amazon service to make it more competitive with FedEx’s new product as a result of the information it learned from the partnership, according to one of the people.
For such meetings, the team avoided distributing presentations electronically to Amazon executives. Instead, they printed the presentations and numbered the documents. Executives could look at the reports and take notes, but at the end of the meeting, team members collected the papers to ensure that they had all copies, the people said.
. . . .
Amazon took other measures to hide the connection with Big River. Staffers were instructed to use their second, non-Amazon email address—which had the domain @bigriverintl.com—when emailing other platforms to avoid outing their Amazon employment.
“We were encouraged to work off the grid as much as possible,” said one of the former team members, about using the outside email.
Amazon’s internal lawyers reminded Big River team members not to disclose their connection to Amazon in their conversations with FedEx, according to an email viewed by the Journal.
Staffers, who worked in private areas of Amazon offices, were told not to discuss their work with other Amazon employees who weren’t cleared to know about the project. In the early days, some Big River team members had to take time away from their Amazon desk jobs to go to the warehouses to fulfill orders and pack them in boxes to send out.
When gaining access to rival seller systems, Big River members were instructed to take screenshots of competitor pricing, ad systems, cataloging and listing pages, according to the people. They weren’t allowed to email the screenshots to Amazon employees, but instead showed the screenshots to the Amazon employees on the Marketplace side of the business in person so they didn’t create a paper trail, some of the people said. Amazon then made changes it believed improved the seller experience on its site based on the information.
The Amazon spokeswoman said the team was secretive so that it wouldn’t get any special treatment as a seller on Amazon.com.
Still, there were telltales. Registration documents filed with the Washington Office of the Secretary of State for Big River Services, while not mentioning Amazon, list a management team made up of current and former Amazon employees, including lawyers. The management team lists its address as 410 Terry Ave. in Seattle, which is Amazon’s headquarters.
. . . .
Some team members were uncomfortable with the work they were doing, according to some of the people.
Among the anxiety-inducing activities was representing themselves as employees of Big River in person while attending conferences thrown by rivals. For instance, team members attended eBay’s Las Vegas conference for sellers, according to some of the people. EBay describes the event as a way for sellers to meet with eBay management and learn of planned big changes coming for sellers and “exclusive information.”
Benchmarking-team leadership ordered up what Amazon calls a PRFAQ that would outline what to do if competitors or the press discovered the project. In the event of a leak, leadership was to say that the group was formed to improve the seller experience on Amazon.com, and that Amazon pays attention to competition but doesn’t “obsess” over it. They were also told to act like this was normal business behavior in the event of a leak, according to one of the people.
In 2017, Amazon formally changed the name of Project Curiosity to the Small Business Insights team to make it sound less cryptic, some of the people said.
The Big River team invented its own brands to sell on the competing sites, including “Torque Challenge” and “Crimson Knot.”
Teams often changed the brand name once they sold out its inventory, creating new brands when they received new products.
In India, Amazon gained access to e-commerce giant Flipkart in March 2018 with the Crimson Knot brand, around the time rumors of a Walmart acquisition swirled in local media. Walmart bought a majority stake in Flipkart in May of that year.
Crimson Knot makes wooden home goods, with its website’s “About Us” page saying: “Based in a small wood workshop in Bangalore, our dedicated team of 8 skilled craftsmen work consistently to handcraft each piece from scratch, transforming them into stunning showstoppers.”
PG found the WSJ article to be very interesting. It’s been a very long time since his law school antitrust class, but he suspects that Amazon’s lawyers have set some bright-line boundaries on what Amazon does while watching its competitors.
Any business entity as large as Amazon will attract attention from competitors, and competitors can talk to antitrust enforcers. These people—the Attorney General and the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission—are presidential appointees and, hence, have political connections and sensibilities.
That said, paying attention to competing businesses and what they’re doing is as old as business itself.
If two lemonade stands are set up on the same block, one advertising a glass of lemonade for 25 cents and the other offering a glass of lemonade for 50 cents, how long will it be before one of the stands adjusts its price? Is there anything evil if the operator of one stand walks over to see the offering price of the other stand?
In 1909, the year before his death, Leo Tolstoy was visited at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, by the Count S. Stackelberg. Stackelberg was on a mission — persuade Tolstoy to write an article on Abraham Lincoln for The New York World. Tolstoy declined the commission but told Stackelberg a story:
Once while traveling in the Caucasus I happened to be the guest of a Caucasian chief of the Circassians, who, living far away from civilized life in the mountains, had but a fragmentary and childish comprehension of the world and its history. The fingers of civilization had never reached him nor his tribe, and all life beyond his native valleys was a dark mystery. Being a Mussulman he was naturally opposed to all ideas of progress and education. I was received with the usual Oriental hospitality and after our meal was asked by my host to tell him something of my life. Yielding to his request I began to tell him of my profession, of the development of our industries and inventions and of the schools. He listened to everything with indifference, but when I began to tell about the great statesmen and the great generals of the world he seemed at once to become very much interested.
The conversation continued. Descriptions of the Czar. Napoleon. Frederick the Great. But the Circassian chief was clearly unhappy. Something was missing.
‘…You have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.’
Remember who is telling the story. Not some run-of-the-mill humdrum storyteller, but the supreme master of Russian literature. Indeed, the Circassian chief as quoted by Stackelberg sounds more like Tolstoy than how I imagine a Circassian chief might sound. Regardless. Tolstoy told him everything he knew about Lincoln. But the Circassian chief was not satisfied. He wanted something more. The story tells us that mere words are often not enough. He needed a photograph.
I can hardly forget the great enthusiasm which they expressed in their wild thanks and desire to get a picture of the great American hero. I said that I probably could secure one from my friend in the nearest town, and this seemed to give them great pleasure…
One of the riders agreed to accompany me to the town and get the promised picture, which I was now bound to secure at any price. I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend, and I handed it to the man with my greetings to his associates. It was interesting to witness the gravity of his face and the trembling of his hands when he received my present. He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer; his eyes filled with tears. He was deeply touched and I asked him why he became so sad. After pondering my question for a few moments he replied: ‘I am sad because I feel sorry that he had to die by the hand of a villain. Don’t you find, judging from his picture, that his eyes are full of tears and that his lips are sad with a secret sorrow?’
This is a question that Perplexity suggestedfor itselfto answer: What is the meaning behind Shakespeare’s Sonnet 136?
Perplexity’s Answer to its own question:
Sonnet 136 by William Shakespeare, often referred to by its first line, “If thy soul check thee that I come so near,” is a complex and layered poem that uses wordplay and puns to convey the speaker’s desire and emotional plea to the Dark Lady, a character in Shakespeare’s sonnets known for her captivating but elusive affection 125.
Themes and Interpretation
Wordplay on “Will”
The sonnet is notable for its clever use of the word “Will,” which serves multiple purposes within the text. It refers to the poet’s own name, William, to the concept of will or desire, and potentially to a sexual pun, common in the Elizabethan era, where “will” could also mean sexual desire or even the genitals themselves. 247. This punning serves to create a playful yet earnest tone as the speaker attempts to persuade the Dark Lady to reciprocate his love or at least acknowledge his presence among her many admirers.
Desire and Acceptance
The speaker expresses a deep yearning to be accepted by the Dark Lady, not just as another lover but on a more personal and intimate level. He implores her to accept his “will” in both senses—his identity (name) and his desire. The repeated entreaties to “make but my name thy love, and love that still” suggest a plea for enduring affection based solely on his identity, an identity that he feels should be sufficient for her to return his love. 125.
Inclusion Among Many
There is also a theme of inclusion and enumeration in the sonnet. The speaker acknowledges that the Dark Lady has many lovers and uses the logic that adding one more (himself) would not be significant in terms of number but would be meaningful to him. This is encapsulated in the lines “Among a number one is reckoned none” and “Then in the number let me pass untold,” where he suggests that his inclusion would not disrupt her life but would immensely satisfy his desire to be close to her. 125.
Literary Devices and Structure
Shakespeare employs several literary devices in Sonnet 136, including alliteration, metaphor, and rhetorical questions, enhancing the lyrical quality of the poem and emphasizing the emotional depth of the speaker’s plea. The sonnet follows the traditional Shakespearean form with three quatrains and a concluding couplet, using the rhyme scheme ABABCDCDEFEFGG. The meter is predominantly iambic pentameter, which lends a rhythmic, persuasive quality to the speaker’s arguments 24.
Conclusion
Overall, Sonnet 136 is a poignant reflection on unrequited love, identity, and the desire for acceptance. Shakespeare uses linguistic cleverness and structural nuances to craft a sonnet that is both intellectually engaging and emotionally resonant, revealing the complexities of human desire and interaction
PG’s Comment
Of the various experiments he tried with Perplexity, this one was the most impressive because Perplexity suggested the prompt itself.
Plus, as with other experiments, the AI appears to be quite careful to provide links to the web resources it used for its analysis and response. No plagiarism for this AI.
Prompt: Write a Shakespearian Sonnet about a 16-year-old boy named Tom who is very anxious about asking a girl named Susan to a school play, Much Ado About Nothing
Perplexity’s Response:
When youthful Tom beholds fair Susan’s grace, His heart doth race within its bony cage. Forsooth, he longs to ask her to a place Where players tread the boards, the Bard their stage.
In iambic beats, his pulse doth pound, A sonnet’s rhythm in his chest doth play. The words to woo, in anxious loops abound, Yet fear doth grip his tongue, leads thoughts astray.
“Much Ado About Nothing” is the play, A tale of love that’s tangled in its weave. Tom wishes Susan by his side to stay, If courage he can muster up to heave.
To conquer dread, the question he must pop, Ere curtain’s rise and lights do finally drop.
Perplexity’s Explanation of What It Did:
In this Shakespearean sonnet, we follow the traditional structure of three quatrains followed by a couplet, with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The poem captures the anxiety of a 16-year-old boy named Tom, who is nervous about asking a girl named Susan to join him at a school play, “Much Ado About Nothing.” The sonnet reflects Tom’s internal struggle and his desire to overcome his fear to express his feelings to Susan.
Prompt: Compare and contrast the factors that have resulted in bestselling authors J.K. Rowling and Stephen King’s success.
Note – The links in the response were inserted by Perplexity.
Response:
Writing Style
J.K. Rowling: Rowling’s writing style is often described as clear, accessible, and richly detailed, which has contributed significantly to her broad appeal. Her narrative style in the Harry Potter series combines whimsical fantasy with complex themes, making her books beloved by both children and adults. The progression in the complexity of language and themes throughout the Harry Potter series reflects her ability to grow with her audience.
Stephen King: King’s style is markedly different, known for its directness and vivid, often graphic, descriptions. His storytelling is characterized by an ability to transform the ordinary into the terrifying, using the horror and supernatural genres to explore the depths of human psychology and societal issues. King’s narrative style is often conversational, creating a sense of closeness between the reader and the characters35.
Genre
J.K. Rowling: Rowling is synonymous with the fantasy genre, particularly through her Harry Potter series. However, she has also ventured into adult fiction and crime writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, where she maintains her narrative depth with a more mature and gritty approach26.
Stephen King: King is a prolific figure in horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, and fantasy. His works often blend elements of the genres to explore the darker side of human nature. King’s ability to cross genre boundaries while maintaining a strong core identity as a horror writer demonstrates his versatility5.
Marketing
J.K. Rowling: The marketing of the Harry Potter series was a phenomenon, with midnight book releases and extensive merchandising. Rowling’s books also benefited from strong word-of-mouth and a growing online fan community. The later books were marketed with significant secrecy and hype, adding to their allure8.
Stephen King: King’s marketing has often played on his established reputation as the “Master of Horror.” His books frequently leverage his name recognition and the promise of high suspense and horror. King’s approach to marketing also includes his active social media presence and engagement with his fan base39.
Personal Background
J.K. Rowling: Rowling’s personal “rags to riches” story, in which she wrote the initial Harry Potter book as a struggling single mother, has become a part of her public persona and has endeared her to many fans. Her background and personal struggles have been well-publicized, contributing to her relatability and the rooting interest of her audience617.
Stephen King: King’s background includes a stint as a high school English teacher and a struggle with addiction, which he has openly discussed. These experiences have influenced his writing and are reflected in the depth and authenticity of his characterizations. King’s openness about his personal challenges has helped form a connection with his readers519.
Conclusion
Both J.K. Rowling and Stephen King have mastered the art of storytelling, albeit in very different ways. Rowling’s enchanting style and expansion from young adult fantasy to broader genres contrasts with King’s straightforward, often visceral horror narratives. Their marketing strategies reflect their unique appeals: Rowling’s shrouded in secrecy and magic, King’s straightforward and prolific. Their personal stories provide depth to their public personas, inviting readers not just into their books but also into the journeys that shaped them. Both authors have transformed their personal experiences, distinctive styles, and smart marketing into bestselling phenomena, albeit serving different tastes within the vast landscape of fiction.
Follow-on Prompt: what are the similarities and differences in the writing styles of j.k. rowling and stephen king
Response:
Similarities in Writing Styles
1. Rich Descriptions: Both J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are known for their rich and vivid descriptions. Rowling’s descriptions often bring the magical world to life with sensory details, as seen in her portrayal of characters and settings in the Harry Potter series2.
Similarly, King’s descriptions are vivid, particularly in creating atmospheric settings and building tension in his horror and supernatural stories3.
2. Character Development: Rowling and King both excel in character development. Rowling’s characters are diverse and evolve over the course of the Harry Potter series, with complex themes of friendship, family, and morality2.
King’s characters are also well-developed, often with intricate backstories that contribute to the psychological depth of his narratives3.
3. Engagement with Readers: Both authors have a strong ability to engage readers. Rowling’s narrative style is accessible and has a broad appeal, while King’s conversational tone creates a sense of closeness between the reader and the characters23.
Differences in Writing Styles
1. Genre and Themes: Rowling is primarily associated with the fantasy genre, particularly with the Harry Potter series, and her themes often revolve around magic, belonging, and humanity
King, on the other hand, is a master of horror, suspense, and the supernatural, exploring darker aspects of human nature and societal issues3.
2. Narrative Approach: Rowling is known for her use of a basic plot outline, allowing for some spontaneity in her writing process, which is evident in the structured yet evolving plot of the Harry Potter series1.
King is identified as a “pantser,” preferring to develop his stories organically without a fixed outline, which can be seen in the spontaneous development of his narratives1.
3. Writing Process: Rowling’s meticulous planning and outlining contrast with King’s more improvisational style.
King has been quoted as saying, “Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses,” indicating his preference for a more free-form approach to storytelling.
4. Literary Devices: Rowling’s writing includes the use of rhetorical devices, ethos, logos, and participles with connectives and active verbs, which contribute to her unique syntax and diction2.
King’s style, while also descriptive, often includes a more direct and sometimes graphic use of language, with a focus on creating a strong atmosphere through metaphors and vivid imagery3.
5. Influence and Inspiration: Rowling’s influences include a range of authors and genres, from the Arthurian legend to European folklore and authors like Roald Dahl and Jane Austen, which is reflected in her allusions and character names46.
King’s writing, while unique, has been compared to his pseudonym Richard Bachman, and his use of brand names and pop culture references is a noted feature of his style3.In summary, while J.K. Rowling and Stephen King share some similarities in their rich descriptive abilities and strong character development, they differ significantly in their chosen genres, narrative approaches, writing processes, use of literary devices, and sources of inspiration.
Prompt: How do J.K. Rowling and Stephen King differ in their approach to writing
Response:
J.K. Rowling and Stephen King, while both highly successful authors, have distinct approaches to writing that reflect their unique creative processes and methodologies.
J.K. Rowling’s Approach:
Planning and Outlining:
Rowling emphasizes the importance of planning in her writing process. She is known for her detailed planning and outlining before beginning to write her novels. For instance, she spent five years planning the Harry Potter series, plotting out the entire story arc and character development across all seven books before publishing the first12.
She also uses intricate, color-coded charts to organize her thoughts and plot details, ensuring a coherent and well-structured narrative13.
Writing in Spare Moments:
Rowling advises aspiring writers to write whenever they can find the time, highlighting the importance of utilizing spare moments to progress one’s writing. This approach was crucial during the early stages of her career when she was a single mother writing in cafes910.
Rewriting and Persistence:
Rowling places a strong emphasis on rewriting and the necessity of resilience in the face of rejection and criticism. She acknowledges the importance of informed feedback and the need for humility and resilience as part of a writer’s life14.
Stephen King’s Approach:
Organic Development:
King’s writing process is more organic and less reliant on detailed planning. He often starts with a situation and develops the story by following the characters and situations to see where they lead, without a fixed outline. This approach allows for a spontaneous development of the narrative3.
Daily Writing Routine:
King is known for his disciplined daily writing routine, emphasizing the importance of writing every day to maintain momentum and progress in one’s work. He believes in the power of routine to foster creativity and productivity1.
Revision and Rest:
After completing a draft, King advocates for setting it aside for a period before returning to it for revision. This break allows for a fresh perspective on the work, making it easier to identify areas for improvement15.
Avoidance of Adverbs and Passive Voice:
King advises writers to avoid adverbs and passive voice, promoting a writing style that is direct and active. He believes that strong writing should stand on its own without relying on adverbs for emphasis511.
Conclusion:
While both authors share a commitment to their craft and a disciplined approach to writing, their methodologies diverge significantly. Rowling’s methodical planning and detailed outlining contrast with King’s more spontaneous and organic development of stories. Rowling utilizes structured time management, writing in whatever time she has available, and emphasizes the importance of rewriting and resilience. King, on the other hand, follows a daily writing routine, advises a break between writing and revising, and focuses on the technical aspects of writing, such as avoiding adverbs and passive voice. These differences highlight the diverse approaches to writing that can lead to successful and compelling storytelling.
I was balancing a plate of honeydew in the green room of a book festival when I walked by a white man bemoaning the state of the publishing industry. The man wore a suit, and he spoke to a white woman; both of them looked to be in their 40s. As the man speared a clump of melon, he explained his frustration that editors kept buying memoirs. At this point, as a memoir-y writer, I had no choice but to sit down at the nearest table. To hear something like this, amidst casual eavesdropping, was like finding $20 on the sidewalk. I sipped my coffee, took out my phone, and pretended to gaze at the screen.
Why are memoirs still being published, the man asked. It was beyond him. It fed a nonsense cycle. Why do people keep reading them? Worse of all: Why are they being written at all? He leaned back, smug, as if he had just landed a well-placed punch against Big Memoir. The woman nodded politely, burrowing into her yogurt with a silver spoon. People are publishing them too young, continued the man. They are publishing too many. He paused, throat puffed with conviction: There’s no reason for that, unless you’re an admiral or something. He stabbed a strawberry. Eyes on the city skyline, he shook his head.
At that moment, the open tab on my phone was the Rachel Cusk profile of Nobel-prize winning memoirist Annie Ernaux. “Her art bears no relation to a privileging of personal experience,” writes Cusk. “What Annie Ernaux understood was that as a female child of the regional laboring classes, her self was her only authentic possession in this world, and thus the sole basis for the legitimacy of her art.” I was thinking about how the life we live determines our perceived authority around what we can write about, or rather, what we are allowed to be experts on, which is to say published experts on.
When I heard his line about the admiral, I stopped looking at my phone. I became very fixated on carving the melon from the rind. I needed a knife in my palm. I needed to separate that which was sweet from that which would lodge in my throat.
I am not going to tell you who this author was. Not out of any sense of protection, but because I realize I was not meeting him as an individual. I was meeting him as the vessel of a voice that had, until that moment, been only in my head. His was the voice that tripped me when I sat down to type, that hissed at me whenever someone (usually a man) asked “So you’re a journalist?” and I said “Well, not exactly,” then went on to explain, his face pinched into a pitying smile, that my nonfiction reliably included myself, too. When I heard this man at the festival, I became convinced that every ghost who haunted my writing desk would, one day, appear in human form. That they might be friendly in the elevator. That when I dropped my fork, they’d hand me another.
. . . .
The first-person writing that I love refutes—critically—this myth of neutral narrator.
A few months later, I was traveling for the book in a different corner of the United States when, on a morning jog, I came across a historic waterfront sign about “naval stories.” I immediately thought of admirals. And then I thought of my belly.
To think of the belly-button is to think of navel-gazing, which is to think of the charges brought against those of us who write about ourselves, a kind of writing allegedly so myopically focused on the self that it does not see the world beyond it. Ted Kooser defines a poet as someone who stands before a window, controlling the strength of the sun outside, but the metaphor extends to creative nonfiction as well: Your silhouette can fade when you make the world outside brighter, just as your reflection can sharpen when that world darkens. Every time I sit down to write, I find myself in front of this window, fiddling with the lights. Who, or what, do I want the reader to see most clearly?
It is true that a first-person author turns their own narrative presence up or down, but I have come to resent the idea that I must choose between seeing my navel or seeing the world. When I say I am omnivorous, I mean I am hungry to read and write about everything. I do not want to pick between writing about another subject—as my training in academia and journalism taught me—and writing about myself. I look at the world to understand my life even as I mine my experiences to learn about the larger world.
Writing is the act of making one’s thoughts visible to other people. My pencil scrawlings are, very literally, the bridge between my interior and exterior world. Writing is an art form that lends itself, then, to complicating—to detonating—the binaries between self and other; inner thought and outer action.
Let us think literally about the alleged insult of “navel-gazing.” Imagine writing about your belly-button, a puckered lint-specked innie that nobody else, ostensibly, should care about. Then consider how looking at one’s belly button is not only to consider the bridge to one’s mother, but the body’s first interaction with civic infrastructure.
. . . .
Can you see that each navel has a different story? That to tell a navel story is to tell a story of labor, not just of your own mother’s, but of a system around you? Can you see how this story might be as important as a story about the life of a naval admiral?
To imagine that writing about oneself is not also writing about these larger systemic inheritances is utterly wrong. The writer’s job is to make visible the structures which might otherwise be unseen. We live in a world of interconnection, but we exist in a society that often tries to silo us into our factions, our nations, our species, our careers. To make us forget, for example, that the money our government spends on war is money they don’t spend on education. It is the writers’ imperative to illuminate the linkages between us, and to the histories we all carry. Not as a mode of teaching the reader facts, but as a way of helping them see their own body in union with the world.
In 2019 a federal judge named Alan Albright gave a presentation to a group of lawyers. His courthouse in Waco, Texas, where he is the only judge, sits near a sweet shop. The talk was called “Why You Should File Your Next Patent Case Across the Street from the ‘Hey Sugar’”.
The intellectual-property lawyers who heard his pitch were apparently persuaded. Less than two years after being appointed to the bench, he had nearly 20% of the country’s patent cases, according to Lex Machina, a legal-analytics firm. By 2021, he had 23%. Trial teams of white-shoe attorneys from New York and California, representing clients such as Google and Intel, began streaming into Waco, a city of 140,000 people in central Texas.
Bill Wetterman, a real-estate developer and Waco native, spotted a business opportunity. In 2021 he opened up Legal Lawfts, rentable office space—“war rooms”, in the parlance—that come outfitted with security cameras, back-up internet and, by request, gluten-free Oreos.
In Waco Mr Wetterman’s competitors include Connect Litigation, a firm that runs a few war rooms downtown. But Connect focuses its operations about 200 miles north-east. The “patent docket” is a familiar term in Marshall, a faded but quaint town of about 24,000 people near the Louisiana border. Between 2000 and 2020, more than 17% of all patent cases filed in federal court were in the Eastern District of Texas—roughly 13,500. By comparison Delaware, where most big American companies are incorporated, had fewer than 10,000 cases; the Northern District of California, where Big Tech firms are based, had fewer than 5,000.
T. John Ward, Marshall’s federal judge from 1999 to 2011, is responsible for the town’s puzzling popularity. Patent cases are technical. Judges must referee the sharing of sensitive source code, for example: plaintiffs argue it will prove their case; defendants resist, fearing their secrets will leak. They also interpret what a patent’s words actually mean, which can be “outcome determinative”, says Mark Siegmund, a patent litigator in Waco. Cases can also take years to get to trial.
Mr Ward learned that Northern California’s court had implemented local rules to build what lawyers call “certainty”—a predictable process—into the unwieldy cases. He adopted similar ones, tweaking them to prioritise speed. Litigants reached trial in half the time it took in California. Around the same period, “it also happened that there was an explosion of patent-troll litigation,” says Paul Gugliuzza of Temple University, referring to plaintiffs who own bad patents and seek quick and cheap settlements. By the mid-2010s Mr Ward’s successor, Rodney Gilstrap, had about a quarter of the country’s patent cases.
Patentsville, USA
The caseload in Marshall books up the courthouse and boosts businesses downtown. One hotel bought a subscription to pacer, an online database for court records, to keep track of potential clients. In an apparent bid to make locals (read: jurors) like it more, Samsung, a frequent defendant, sponsored an ice rink across from the courthouse. TiVo spent $10,000 on a champion steer at a livestock auction, and named it TiVo.
This sits uneasily with some. Federal judges are meant to be generalists, and courts are not supposed to power their local economies. And the rules “tend to be more plaintiff-friendly”, says Andrew Russell, a patent litigator in Delaware. Defendants often try to transfer their cases elsewhere. But that is partly because the speedy tempo suits plaintiffs, as deep-pocketed defendants can afford to drag out litigation. Early on, verdicts in the Eastern District were lopsided, because the posh defence lawyers were “terrible” at arguing before juries, says Michael Smith, a longtime patent litigator in Marshall. Verdicts in the Eastern District now conform to national averages; in Waco, defendants actually win more, according to Lex Machina.
But the optics in Marshall were sufficiently bad that in 2017 the Supreme Court made it harder, in effect, for plaintiffs to file lawsuits there, by requiring defendants to have “regular and established” business where they are sued. Apple shut down its nearby stores. (Samsung did not and, despite the ice-rink, was hit with a $303m jury verdict in Marshall last year.)
By 2021 Waco’s patent docket—similarly speedy, thanks to local rules—was attracting scrutiny, too. John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, acknowledged senators’ concerns about the “extreme concentration of patent litigation” there. Starting in 2022 Waco patent cases were required to be put into a lottery, so that any of the Western District of Texas’s 12 judges could draw them. In 2023 fewer patent cases were filed overall, and Waco saw a steep drop-off.
PG isn’t going to deluge visitors to TPV with patent, trademark, trade secrets and other types of intellectual property beyond copyright, but the Waco story illustrates how intellectual property laws can be turned into something he doubts the creators of US intended as they have revised and updated IP laws over the years.
For the record, PG’s opinion is that the Supreme Court should have intervened earlier. While federal law and rules permit Federal District judges to hear patent infringement lawsuits, there is a specialized court located in Washington, DC, that would likely do a better job.
At present, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board is part of the US Patent Office.
The PTAB currently only reviews rejections made by examiners in proceedings called ex parte appeals and decides patentability questions for issued patents raised by third parties in proceedings called AIA trials.
While these duties are different from a patent infringement lawsuit, the judges in the PTAB are experts on patent law. To the best of PG’s knowledge, each of the judges are drawn from experienced patent attorneys. In order to become a patent attorney, an individual must have gained at least an undergraduate degree in a technology subject.
A patent attorney must have received a Bachelor’s Master’s or PhD in a Recognized Technical Subject. Examples of Recognized Technical Subjects include Aeronautical Engineering, Engineering Physics, Electrical Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, Marine Engineering, etc., etc
After obtaining a degree in a recognized technical subject, a patent attorney must then go to law school, graduate, then take and pass a difficult patent bar examination. Year in and year out, only about 50% pass the patent bar exam.
A federal district court judge is nominated by the President and confirmed by the United States Senate. How does the President decide who would be a good district judge?
Invariably, if there is an opening for a new District Judge in Wyoming, Wyoming’s Senators and the state’s single Congressional representative will recommend a Wyoming state judge or a Wyoming attorney to the President. If nothing nasty shows up on a background check, the President will be quite likely to nominate the person suggested by the Senators and Representative.
The new District Judge may have spent her/his legal career exclusively in Bankruptcy Courts, divorce litigation or medical malpractice lawsuits.
Does the new District Judge know anything at all about patent law? Nope.
It is possible the first patent case the District Judge hears will involve a patent infringement claim regarding a sub-system in a nuclear-powered electrical generation plant. Bankruptcy law will not be much help for the Judge.
As artificial intelligence (AI) moves beyond performing simple tasks to creating original content, it blurs the lines between humans and machines. In doing so, it challenges a core tenet of many traditional intellectual property (IP) frameworks: only works created by humans are protected by copyright laws.
The development and training of AI models also raise another important copyright issue: whether the use of third-party content in that exercise might infringe on the copyright of that content.
Emerging use cases around generative AI are disrupting traditional views of creativity, authorship and ownership and pushing the boundaries of copyright law. As the world catches up with innovation, the resulting legal ambiguity impacts all sides of the AI equation – developers, content creators and copyright owners.
Training and copyright infringement
To create content, generative AI learns from processing vast amounts of information. This training process can involve using copyright-protected content, raising a critical question: does training generative AI models constitute copyright infringement, exposing developers to related claims?
If so, is new legislation needed to address this issue in a manner that does not unreasonably impede innovation but still respects the rights of creators?
These questions have led some jurisdictions to consider amendments to existing text and data mining exemptions and/or fair use/fair dealing exceptions to cover the training of generative AI. Such exemptions permit certain activities that would otherwise constitute copyright infringement.
Other jurisdictions are still awaiting guidance, creating a drastically uneven regulatory landscape that will continue for some time. But, no matter where they stand, legislators need to consider this issue to incentivise innovation while protecting content creators’ rights.
Looking past the legal uncertainty at traditional means of creativity, humans constantly learn as we receive and process information. Typically, things we create are inextricably linked to what we have learned from others and our experiences. One could argue that AI is no different in that it learns from the underlying datasets to produce something new.
Copyright – ownership of content
Copyright law is a key means by which innovation and creation are rewarded – and thus enabled – raising the stakes for courts and intellectual property authorities to define copyright ownership in the context of generative AI.
Depending on where you are in the world, the definition of copyright varies, a significant legal consideration in its own right. But virtually everywhere, copyright requires meaningful human contribution.
Generative AI, which often involves little human input, shatters the mould of this traditional framework. It calls into question whether AI-generated content can be protected by copyright in the first place and, if so, then who owns this copyright?
Is it the developer of the AI model who arguably enabled the ‘creative’ process? Is it the owner of the AI model? Or is the person who considered and input the prompts that allowed the AI tool to generate the content? Of course, this depends on whether there was sufficient human contribution to justify copyright protection in the first place.
Currently, most generative AI tools provide that users own the content they generate in their terms of use. However, if the content is not copyright-protected in the first place, then the terms of use can’t change that position. There is less clarity around who is responsible if AI-generated content infringes someone else’s copyright in a protected work.
To answer these questions requires courts and intellectual property authorities to challenge the scope of traditional copyright law in relation to generative AI, which could lead to changes to existing legislation covering ownership of computer-generated content.
Eventually, it is possible that copyright law will need to be further reimagined and redefined to account for the possibility of recognizing a machine as its own entity with independent authority and the ability to own and protect content, though this does not appear to be on the horizon in the short term. In this more progressive scenario, it is unclear where liability would rest for negative consequences (including copyright infringement) caused by generative AI outputs.
To the best of PG’s knowledge, The World Economic is a non-profit NGO based in Switzerland that sponsors a variety of conferences and programs to make the world a better place. Its most high-profile program is a conference held annually in Davos, Switzerland.
Roughly 3,000 of the most powerful and wealthy leaders globally use over 1500 private jets plus a great many larger government jets to arrive and depart. Global warming has a regular place on each conference’s agenda.
Staff at technology company Meta discussed buying publishing house Simon & Schuster last year in order to procure books to train the company’s artificial intelligence tools, it has been reported.
According to recordings of internal meetings shared with the New York Times, managers, lawyers and engineers at Meta met on a near-daily basis between March and April 2023 to discuss how it could get hold of more data to train AI models. From the recordings, which were shared by an employee of the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company that owns Facebook and Instagram, the New York Times found that staff had discussed buying Simon & Schuster and some had debated paying $10 per book for the licensing rights to new titles.
Simon & Schuster is one of the English-speaking world’s major book publishing houses and is part of what is referred to as the “Big Five”, along with Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan. Simon & Schuster’s authors include Stephen King, Colleen Hoover and Bob Woodward.
In March 2020, Paramount Global, the parent company of Simon & Schuster, announced its intention to sell the publisher. After a much-criticised planned merger with Penguin Random House was blocked by US courts, Simon & Schuster was eventually sold to private equity firm KKR in August 2023.
According to the recordings, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, told executives that the company had used almost every book, poem and essay written in English available on the internet to train models, so was looking for new sources of training material.
Employees said they had used these text sources without permission and talked about using more, even if that would result in lawsuits. When a lawyer flagged “ethical” concerns about using intellectual property, they were met with silence.
. . . .
Maria A Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, does not believe that Simon & Schuster would have agreed to such a sale. “The fact that Meta sought to purchase one of the most important publishing houses in American history in order to ingest its venerable catalogue for AI profits is puzzling even for Big Tech,” she said. “Did Meta plan to trample the primary mission of Simon & Schuster, and its contractual partnerships with authors, by sheer power?”
As the OP makes clear, Simon & Schuster is anything but an independent company. America’s third largest trade publisher was owned by Paramount Global, which sold it to KKR in 2023 for $1.62 billion. Meta’s market value at the end of 2023 was almost $500 billion. Its annual revenues for the year were almost $135 billion, and its profit margin was 28.98% for the year.
Purchasing S&S to provide content for Meta’s AI would probably have been a smart move because S&S’s value as a publisher was far less than its value as one of many content providers to prime Meta’s AI program.
As PG has opined on previous occasions, he questions the claims of more than a few traditional publishers that using their books to train an AI system somehow violates the copyrights of the authors they publish. In part this is because PG’s understanding that creating an AI does not create copies of the original work. Regardless of the query to an AI program, it won’t produce a copy of any book or any other document to the person making the query.
PG is happy to receive information—likely originating with an experienced copyright attorney or long-time law school professor—that indicates his opinion regarding no copyright infringement in the creation of an AI is incorrect.
Spotify has revealed data showing that 25% of Spotify Premium users are engaging with its audiobooks offering. The Swedish tech giant said the data indicates that “Spotify is driving a meaningful incremental revenue stream for the publishing community”.
“Without Spotify, royalties for independent authors would have increased to 23% from the first quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2024, but with Spotify’s addition of audiobooks in Premium, independent authors have seen a 95% jump in their royalties,” the company added.
Released on Wednesday 17th April, the data also suggests a particular interest in Spotify’s audiobooks offering among users aged 18 to 34, who make up 57% of listeners. In the US, new audiobook listeners have contributed over 2.6 hours overall consumption per user in the first 14 days of starting a book.
Additionally, Spotify has more than doubled top-up purchase volume (through which users buy more audiobook hours) quarter over quarter since launch.
We receive a large number of enquiries and these often highlight a number of common misconceptions and misunderstandings about copyright law. The following attempts to dispel the ‘top 10’ copyright myths.
1. Copyright can protect my ideas
Copyright applies to a recorded work, it cannot apply to something as intangible as an idea. Within certain fields, (such as inventions) it may be possible to apply for a patent.
Because copyright applies to the actual recorded work – documents, music, artwork, etc., if a competitor used your copyright work, (i.e. copied or adapted your promotional literature or stole content from your website to promote their own product), this would be an infringement and you could certainly take action, but there is little you can do to prevent someone else creating their own work based on a similar idea as long as they are not copying your work to do so.
2. I can copyright a name or title
Copyright laws are actually very restrictive, and do not apply to items such as names and titles that may be duplicated coincidentally, or that may be legitimately used in unrelated instances.
From a copyright perspective, there is no reason why two works cannot have the same title. As long as the content of works themselves are not copied or adapted, no infringement has occurred.
This does NOT mean that there is no protection on the name, as it may be covered by other legislation: If the name was a trademark, or if it could be proved that that use of the title misleads or confuses the public, (this is know as ‘passing off’), then there can be issues.
While copyright will apply from the point a work is created, ‘passing off’ is based on the public perception of what the name implies, (i.e. you have a very clear idea of what you expect to be given if you ask for a ‘Coca-Cola’).
3. I can simply post a copy to myself as proof of copyright
This method (sometimes called ‘poor man’s copyright’), may help in some cases, but it is extremely poor evidence as it is very easy to fake – for example by replacing the actual materials inside at a later date.
The main problem if you send your work to yourself via courier or the postal service (including recorded/tracked and signed for services) or use any other system which requires you to store the work yourself, is that there is no verifiable evidence to say that the contents have not been swapped.
I keep hearing this from people who are finding it hard to access their creativity or justify making time to write.
This seems like a new challenge, partly because of the full-on speed of news stories hurtling at us in the digital age. But it’s not new. I would submit that:
A) the world has always been a mess and
B) creative works are the most powerful tool we have to oppose the black-and-white, them-versus-us, whataboutism lack of subtlety in the news.
The arts change hearts, and changed hearts can change the world.
Your creative work is important.
The world is a mess and nevertheless…we must find time to create.
It’s where we are reminded that people are complex; that we can love and hate a character; where we learn to understand why a person might make dubious choices and still be worthy of love; where we see the real, everyday impact of policy decisions made by politicians…and laugh along with characters who are living and loving and laughing amidst the consequences.
In Neil M. Gunn’s The Silver Darlings we follow the lives of displaced Scottish Highlanders forced, after the Clearances, to go from homesteading to learning to be fishermen. The social message lodges in our heats only because we fall in love with Catrine and Roddy and their communities.
In the 1960s in the US you could argue that music and movies helped end the Vietnam War. (SIng it with me: “War! What is it good for?”)
Musicians, artists, and yes, athletes, refusing to visit South Africa helped overcome apartheid.
I grew up in Thatcher’s Britain, where mainstream entertainment encouraged everyone to aspire to be Laura Ashley-clad yuppies. In reality most of us lived in or near towns dealing with miner’s strikes and teachers’ strikes and 10% unemployment and the decline of manufacturing.
Artists like Billy Bragg and Sinead O’Conner, The Specials, Pink Floyd and U2 made art out of those turbulent times.
We must now turn to the idea of a systems collapse, a systemic failure with both a domino and multiplier effect, from which even such a globalized international, vibrant, intersocietal network as was present during the Late Bronze Age could not recover.
The Bronze Age in the Near East and Aegean region began around 3000 B.C. It peaked in the 1500s B.C. and ended gradually, then suddenly, in the Late Bronze Age collapse of the late 1200s and early 1100s B.C. The Egyptian empire went into terminal decline. The Hittite empire fell, and the Assyrian and Babylonian empires faltered. The Mycenaeans, Minoans and Canaanites disappeared from the record. Mainland Greece’s population halved and its palaces collapsed, along with literacy and even the concept of a supreme ruler. Welcome to the age of ignorance, war and poverty that Hesiod called a “race of iron.”
Modern historians attributed the collapse to the Dorian Greek invaders whom the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples; a horde of them sailed into Egypt in 1177 B.C. These categories now seem to be a retrospective mirage. Various peoples came to the Eastern Mediterranean over a period of centuries, some by land, some in peace, and many driven by drought, but none understood themselves as Sea Peoples or Greeks. The crisis at Egypt’s southern border, the wave of tomb robberies attributed to “foreigners” and the partisan paralysis of Egypt’s administrators were consequences as much as causes of Egypt’s demise.
In his 2014 book, “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed,” Eric H. Cline attributed the Late Bronze Age collapse to a “systemic failure with both a domino and a multiplier effect.” Mr. Cline, a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University, applied complexity theory and systems analysis to the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. He detected a cascade effect of unpredictable interactions and nonlinear outcomes, often amplified by the sophistication and interdependence of imperial economies throughout the Mediterranean world. The Sea Peoples’ invasion of Egypt in 1177 B.C. remains a pivotal event, a proof of decline akin to the barbarian sack of Rome in A.D. 476. But the shift from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age was a “rolling” process. The mighty Bronze Age kingdoms and empires took decades to crumble, and the city-states of the early Iron Age took decades to cohere.
History is one sequel after another, and in “After 1177 B.C.,” Mr. Cline describes what happened next. These were, Hesiod wrote, times of “sore trouble,” but “even these shall have some good mingled with their evils.” Late Bronze Age societies adapted and transformed, or they faced eclipse and extinction. What did the dawning Iron Age do for us? Monotheism, coinage, innovations in iron-working, the Greek alphabet, the polis (city-state), the origins of democracy in Athens and the nation-state in Jerusalem, and, as Mr. Cline’s expert, ingenious and endlessly fascinating book shows, an ancient lesson in the lately rediscovered virtue of “resilience.”
Ramses III of Egypt saw off the Sea Peoples in 1177 B.C., but two decades later he was murdered, his throat cut in a “harem conspiracy” led by one of his wives and her son. His predecessor Ramses II became the “Ozymandias” of Percy Shelley’s poem, a “colossal Wreck” in the sand. Egypt went the same way through food shortages, palace intrigues, political schisms and pressure on the southern border. Neither adapting nor transforming, the Bronze Age superpower suffered a “rapid decline” in its standing and stability.
Around the same time the Hittite empire in Anatolia (modern Turkey) shattered. Attacked from the west by Sea Peoples and from the east by Assyria, the empire broke into as many as 15 small “Neo-Hittite” states populated by a “host of political entities and various ethnicities.” Hittite culture survived—the Israelite king David falls in love with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite—but the Hittite capital of Hattusa was leveled and the Hittites’ cuneiform language, a Bronze Age lingua franca, fell into disuse.
The Babylonian and Assyrian empires survived drought, famine and plague, and eventually revived in a new form. Babylonia’s population collapsed and Assyria’s record-keeping seems to have stopped in the mid-1100s B.C., but their “Neo-Babylonian” and “Neo-Assyrian” successor empires retained cultural continuity, governmental capacity and military strength. Nebuchadnezzar I of Babylonia defeated his Elamite neighbors so severely, Mr. Cline writes, that they left “no written records and little archaeological evidence” for centuries. When writing resumed at Nineveh in Assyria, it recorded victories over the Aramaeans, a nomadic people who, displaced by drought, were raiding Assyrian cities. Their language, Aramaic, would become the lingua franca of the Near East in the Iron Age.
The Mycenaean and Minoan societies of mainland Greece and Crete ended by the late 1100s B.C. Contact with the Near East dwindled, writing stopped and only “survivors or squatters,” Mr. Cline writes, lived amid the mainland’s ruined palaces. The Bronze Age was remembered in Homer’s oral legend, and Greek civilization took centuries to rebound. As everywhere, the collapse of large sociopolitical units gave space to city-states. The polis, which the Greeks would export across the region, was born from this power vacuum. The cities of Bronze Age Canaan were reborn as a mishmash of Phoenician cities, an Israelite state in the southern hill country, and, after a Sea People called the Peleset had annexed Canaan’s coastal strip, a league of Philistine cities.
When I won a teaching award at my university, I was asked to write a brief description of my pedagogy. I proudly wrote — and my provost read aloud at the awards ceremony — that I incorporate themes of racial justice and gender equality into my composition classes. Today, if I were in Indiana, I would be afraid of losing my job if I admitted such a thing.
Under Indiana’s Senate Bill 202, known as the “Intellectual Diversity” law, the trustees for public colleges will evaluate faculty every five years on the following:
Whether they “foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”
Whether they teach “a variety of political or ideological frameworks” within their disciplines.
Whether they “subject students to political or ideological views and opinions” unrelated to the course.
Faculty, regardless of tenure, can be fired if the board determines that they would be “unlikely” to foster intellectual diversity, “unlikely” to incorporate a variety of ideological or political frameworks, or “likely” to talk about their own political views.
According to its supporters and its Republican sponsor, State Sen. Spencer Deery, the law is needed to help politically conservative students feel more comfortable expressing their views on campus. But Indiana’s law is a solution in search of a problem. Survey data analyzed by the political scientist Ryan Burge show that most conservative students feel about as comfortable sharing their views as liberal students. The difference in comfort level is small and mostly due to perceptions of how other students might react, not faculty.
Critics say the law will chill both free speech and academic freedom. But no one is talking about the self-contradictory nature of the law, nor how its built-in contradictions empower a biased policing of campus speech and thought.
When does presenting diverse ideological frameworks to students transform into subjecting them to one’s ideological views? Or is sharing one’s ideological views — which students may never have heard or considered before — part of fostering a culture of intellectual diversity?
Is allowing students to share their own ideologies tantamount to endorsing them to other students, or is it fostering a culture of free inquiry and expression? How does a professor foster “a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity” while also satisfying the requirement to teach “a variety of political or ideological frameworks”?
Does “free inquiry” mean exploring everything as though all ideas are equal, or does it require the exclusion of disproved ideas? What constitutes a sufficient “variety” of frameworks? Inquiry struggles to be free when one must treat all ideas and perspectives the same.
. . . .
One person’s “free inquiry” and “variety” of ideological frameworks is another person’s political indoctrination. The frameworks that a professor considers irrelevant to their discipline could be central to a trustee’s sense of “intellectual diversity.” Correcting a student’s misinformed statement with facts and sound reasoning could be portrayed as censorship. The clear message for Indiana faculty: Avoid saying anything that might cause complaints.
Just a few student complaints could be used to claim a professor is “unlikely” to foster a culture of intellectual diversity or “likely” to subject students to political rants, leading to termination of tenure and employment. As all faculty know, course evaluations tend to produce polarized responses: Students love you or they hate you. Sometimes, they project their own biases and assumptions onto you, a phenomenon that will now come with graver consequences.
It is tempting to ask rhetorical questions, as Diane Ravitch did, about professors teaching evolution, climate change, or the Civil War, and then giving equal time to “the other side” to comply with Indiana’s law.
. . . .
After George Floyd’s murder, I began using racial justice and gender-equality advocacy as examples of discourse communities in my composition courses. Students learned some of the key terms, concepts, values, beliefs, and rhetorical strategies of these communities, gaining the transferable skill of audience analysis in a relevant context. Most of my students seemed very engaged. Some students of color said they had never felt so “seen” in a class. Only two or three complained in course evaluations. But when only a couple complaints could lead to your firing, why risk it?
PG understands the frustration more than a few feel about the political/cultural monoculture that rules on many college and university campuses. In an era that privileges an individual’s “comfort,” it’s almost certain that students and professors who disagree with the dominant social/political environment that permeates higher education are likely to feel uncomfortable and isolated.
However, few individuals in the now-dominant culture will recognize and respect their feelings because intelligent individuals today know this is the new normal, and it’s the nonconformer’s responsibility to deal with it.
Many university campuses are replete with speech limits — free-speech zones that imply speech must be carefully censored on the rest of campus. You can only say what you really believe and how you really feel about what’s going on around you in a free-speech zone. But, you still might be drowned out by groups using the hecklers’ veto.
Students and professors must be very careful not to perpetrate microaggressions that may harm a single individual in a large classroom. This morning’s quip might trigger a single student and become a microaggression that brings down disciplinary sanctions on the microaggressor before the day is done.
PG has no idea how professors can recall and use the personal pronouns various individuals may have adopted for themselves –
Ze/hir/hir
Per/per/pers
The person’s name – Jack ate Jack’s food because Jack was hungry
And misgendering is offensive and disrespectful to anyone, but especially to trans and gender non-conforming individuals.
PG wonders if there is a list analogical to U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of universities and colleges that ranks institutions by cultural and political freedoms enjoyed by students.
A staff member at Vardag’s accidentally opened the file of a couple referred to in court papers as Mr and Mrs Williams, when trying to apply for a final divorce order for a different client.
Vardag’s applied three days later to rescind the order but judge Sir Andrew McFarlane dismissed the application.
The firm’s head Ayesha Vardag said the judge’s decision effectively meant “the computer says no, you’re divorced”.
Court papers say that Mrs Williams applied for divorce in January 2023 following 21 years of marriage.
The mistake was made by solicitors acting for Mrs Williams on 3 October last year on an online divorce portal operated by HM Courts and Tribunals Service.
In his summary, Judge McFarlane noted that “with its now customary speed”, the system granted the order just 21 minutes later.
Vardag’s did not discover the error until 5 October, thinking the order had been made for another client, but then promptly applied for it to be rescinded.
The husband became aware of the situation only on 11 October, the same day Vardag’s wrote to his solicitors to explain the situation, court papers say.
In the summary, Judge McFarlane, president of the High Court’s Family Division, said the issue arose against the background of “ongoing contested financial remedy proceedings”.
Ms Vardag has been nicknamed the “diva of divorce”, with her firm based in London, as well as offices in Cambridge and Manchester.
The firm describes itself on its website as specialising in “high net worth and ultra high net worth family cases”.
Lawyers for Mrs Williams argued that as the order had been made by mistake it should simply be “set aside”, describing the error as someone at the firm simply “clicking the wrong button”.
Mr Williams’ legal representatives argued a final order of divorce is a “once-and-for-all” order, which cannot be set aside by the consent of the parties and may only be rescinded by the court if found to be either void or voidable.
Judge McFarlane rejected the wife’s arguments that the order should be set aside, finding it was not “rendered voidable” by her lack of consent as her solicitors were “generally authorised to act for her and the court was entitled to accept the application for the final order made by them as being validly made on her behalf”.
He went on to say that even if the order was voidable, there was “a strong public policy interest in respecting the certainty and finality that flows from a final divorce order and maintaining the status quo that it has established”.
Recalcitrant judge and a likely-dismissed law staff member.
No mention of an attorney who directed the fired staffer to enter the order.
Interesting that Mrs. Williams is contending that the the mistaken order should be set aside while her husband is saying the divorce is final. Something is happening behind the scenes.
Vardag’s “high net worth and ultra high net worth family cases” appear to be their own little world.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “You know, the rich are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemingway is said to have responded, “Yes. They’ve got more money.”
A tech sector dedicated to boiling things down has raised temperatures in some quarters of the publishing world
Hungry for niche knowledge to impress your colleagues? Troubled by the size of a hefty new book? Doubt your abilities to understand complex arguments? Well, today an increasingly competitive industry offers to take away these problems with one product: a book summary app.
Since these digital services first promised to boil down a title, usually a nonfiction work, a decade ago, the marketplace has become crowded. So much so that authors and publishers are concerned about the damage to sales, as well as to the habit of concentrated reading.
Some successful writers, including Amy Liptrot, also fear that apps such as Blinkist, Bookey, getAbstract and the latest, Headway, may be undermining the book trade and misrepresenting content.
Liptrot has approached her union, the Society of Authors, for advice on how to take action. She was alarmed last week to find her acclaimed 2015 memoir, The Outrun, now a film starring Saoirse Ronan, being peddled in potted form on Bookey. “It was unnerving to see a totally fictional quotation purporting to be from my book,” she told the Observer. “These apps are very anti-literary. They’re for people who want to absorb the key ideas without reading the book. I don’t mind a bland, soulless summary, but I do mind a false quotation.”
Diana Gerald, chief executive of the charity BookTrust, is also disturbed by the influence of these apps on young readers. “Book summaries can be a useful starting point. However, it goes without saying that improvements in mental health, in sparking imagination, empathy and language acquisition that reading can have, come from reading the book itself,” she said.
Writer Susie Alegre also sees lurking danger. “The trend towards apps that summarise books so that you can ‘think better’ is likely to have the opposite effect – if we don’t use our minds to reflect deeply, we may lose our ability to think critically at all,” she said, citing research which showed that our reliance on satellite navigation was already rewiring our brains and “destroying our ability to navigate the physical world”.
“Relying on summaries of big ideas might do the same for our capacity for deep thought,” added Alegre, whose forthcoming book Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI is published in early May.
“AI is famously prone to hallucinations: if you read an AI-generated summary of a book, there is no guarantee that it actually reflects the content,” she said, pointing out that writers’ “already meagre income” could be destroyed by the summary-app business.
The publishing industry is also on alert. Andrew Franklin, founder director of Profile Books, understands the worry: “These apps are potentially depriving authors of income and bookshops of custom. It is quite a serious way of infringing copyright, although not technically wrong, as you are allowed to summarise a text. These apps are really just the same as the adverts that pop up offering you an effortless way to lose weight without exercise.”
The new crib sites function a little like the York Notes study guide series for British students, (or Cliffs Notes in the US), but have less analytical content and tend to compete over the niche business areas they cover.
Not all in the book world are concerned. Toby Mundy, executive director of the prestigious Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, wonders if these apps might prove a gateway for readers to actual books.
He said: “When people want to know about a subject, they might start with Wikipedia or a precis app, but publishing is fundamentally about voices. If you want to know about the Russian Revolution – and I mean really know – then most people will turn to Orlando Figes’s masterpiece, A People’s Tragedy, rather than a dreary textbook, because it combines authoritative scholarship with tremendous literary verve. Precis apps might disrupt certain genres, business books perhaps, but they are intrinsically anti-voice and philistine.”
CliffsNotes are a series of student study guides. The guides present and create literary and other works in pamphlet form or online. Detractors of the study guides claim they let students bypass reading the assigned literature. The company claims to promote the reading of the original work and does not view the study guides as a substitute for that reading.[1]
History
CliffsNotes was started by Nebraska native Clifton Hillegass in 1958.[2] He was working at Nebraska Book Company of Lincoln, Nebraska, when he met Jack Cole, the co-owner of Coles, a Toronto book business. Coles published a series of Canadian study guides called Coles Notes, and sold Hillegass the U.S. rights to the guides.
Hillegass and his wife, Catherine, started the business in their basement at 511 Eastridge Drive in Lincoln, with sixteen William Shakespeare titles. By 1964, sales reached one million Notes annually. CliffsNotes now exist for hundreds of works. The term “Cliff’s Notes” has become a proprietary eponym for similar products.
IDG Books purchased CliffsNotes in 1998 for $14.2 million.
PG wonders if borrowing a copy of the notes for a class from a friend who Aced the class qualifies as a terrible moral failing.
What if the class is taught by a professor who reads her/his notes, putting nearly everyone to sleep?
What if the world’s worst literature professor teaches Shakespeare?
Do all students have to consume the academic version of Brussels Sprouts from professors who have gained tenure and use their status to force starving graduate students to update their class notes?
It doesn’t take more than being sentenced to one or two boring 500-student lecture classes for many students to realize they should choose the professor instead of the subject. Why? Because, unlike Education majors, professors have never been taught to teach effectively. Teaching skills are not nearly as professionally rewarding as the publication of a paper on an abstruse topic that perhaps 15 people will read in its entirety.
PG made a big change to his college major to a subject nobody had heard of so he would be taught by one of four superb professors for 90% of his classes, with each class typically comprised of 10-12 students.
His GPA reflected his enthusiasm for these classes, but never completely recovered from the terminally miserable experience of the giant auditoriums struggling to stay awake.
Last week, the American Library Association released its annual list of the top 10 most challenged books. Once again, it was dominated by books by LGBTQ authors or about the LGBTQ community. PW caught up with Sam Helmick, community and access coordinator at the Iowa City Public Library, to discuss the necessity of advocacy, the importance of allies, and how the library community is handling such an unprecedented challenge.
What was it like for you when Iowa’s book-banning law, SF 496, was enacted in 2023?
It was difficult. I was president of the Iowa Library Association at that time, ILA’s first nonbinary, aromantic, asexual president. And there was a wonderful book called Gender Queer that was quite a bit about people like me. And it was the most banned book in the state. At the same time, I was thinking about how we in Iowa are the founders of the Library Bill of Rights. Forrest Spaulding, then director of the Des Moines Public Library, wrote it in 1938.
So these two things were on my mind as I was being asked questions like what my favorite banned book is. And my answer became: my favorite banned book is yours. My favorite banned book is the one that you’re going to check out of my bookmobile today. My favorite banned book has yet to be written. Because the only way books like Gender Queer—which I needed as a teen but didn’t get until my 30s—are written is because library workers before me have defended a process, and invited the public to ruminate on books and to recognize that we as a free people should read freely.
What that was meant to impress was the importance of gently holding people accountable to the process, because library workers cannot single-handedly paint themselves out of the corners that pernicious policy puts them in. When I think about the Freedom Riders, when I think about Stonewall, I think about the brave folks who are part of those communities but also of the allies that came together to support them. It’s going to require the public—the public that resources us by policy, goodwill, and funding—to paint us out of this corner.
Last December, freedom to read advocates scored a victory when a federal court blocked SF 496, but the censorship onslaught continues. How are librarians in the state managing?
We are pulling for each other more than we might have in the past. I’m very pleased that we now have built an affinity coalition inside and outside of library circles, and that we’re much tighter with the school library and college and research library associations than we ever were before. But it’s also complicated and stressful.
I think the solace that I take is that if what we did was irrelevant, the book banners would leave us be. They obviously believe we have the power to support people reading and thinking freely, and there’s something heady about that, even during the hard days. I get to stand up for something important.
On April 2, Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which critics say will legitimize discrimination against the LGBTQ community. Did that feel like déjà vu after fighting SF 496?
I would love to say it’s déjà vu, but it’s been more of a deluge. Iowa had the second-most library-averse bills in the nation last year. Library workers have had two full-time jobs for a very long time: the first is to be incubators of access, opportunity, and hope. The second is to constantly fight for the ability to be that.
This month’s column describes Mensch Publishing’s transition from a mixture of traditional print and distribution to a wholly digitally driven model.
The Downsides
Change is hard and frequently expensive.
The files I’d created for the traditional route and held by my publishing partner were, it turned out, formatted to the first, normally hardback edition. This master file was used to hold any corrections or changes.
In moving to a print-on-demand solution, paperback is the preferred format for reasons of cost and author and customer pressure. I only discovered the problem when proofs, and in a couple of cases of finished book, were reformatted with illustrations in the wrong place and new pagination. We had to re-typeset most of the titles.
I was grateful that I’d taken an early decision that Mensch titles wouldn’t have indexes. If anyone really wanted help in finding a name or whatever, they could buy the ebook and search to their heart’s content, which would have entailed even more work and cost.
Even where there was no change in format, the paper used in on-demand printing is likely to be of a different thickness, meaning that cover artwork had to be revised to take account of a changed spine width.
The next downside is the reluctance of retailers, both traditional and on the Internet, to stock print-on-demand titles because of perceived, although not actual, non-immediate availability; limited returnability; and typically lower discounts, lower retailer margins—all valid reasons from the retailers’ point of view: They’ve enjoyed increased discounts; increased stock security; and improved delivery schedules over the last few decades. They were obliged to resist, even at the expense of reducing the range available to their customers.
Of course there’s nothing about print-on-demand requiring a firm sale or lower discounts to retailers—these are publisher choices but my choices were and are driven by a commitment to reducing waste; maximizing author income; and focusing on marketing to drive sales rather than positioning in terrestrial bookshops.
The corollary of this lack of retail support has been a certain amount of author discomfort at not finding his or her books where they’d like to see them. My riposte that the proportion of new titles prominently displayed at traditional independent and chain bookshops is very small. Ask even the major publishers how many copies of non-automatic best sellers are subscribed into brick-and-mortar stores.
However, there are always exceptions, and launch parties in bookshops can happen if strict discount and returns policies are temporarily waived. The downside of this is that these special arrangements need to be separately accounted, thus undermining the overall pure simplicity of the new model by adding accounting complexity.
And of course right now, print-on-demand books cost more per copy to print, but the savings elsewhere in the supply chain are significant.
Upsides
Every book is available in every market simultaneously without the need for special shipments or inter-warehouse arrangements. In a world of international media, this is, in my view, an essential service to authors. What would an author think of a great review in, say, the Guardian in the United Kingdom, a review downloaded hugely in the United States—but Americans couldn’t purchase the book because the US publication date was later than the UK’s?
With print-on-demand, there are no are no out-of-stock issues. Every book is constantly available. No need to cogitate on the size or practicality of a reprint. No need for the inevitability of the last reprint of a book never selling out (by definition). No stock wastage as there is no stock except where held and made available by retailers and wholesalers. Fewer trees need to be cut down.
Printing takes place mainly in the country of purchase: There are no shipments by sea or by air between continents; no unnecessary handling costs.
Most importantly perhaps, there are no unnecessary CO2 emissions. Production quality is superior to traditional litho. This came as a surprise to many of our authors but a pleasant surprise.
As part of this, I’ve signed up to automated advertising for the books in order to drive sales, rather than rely on retail displays.
Daily access to sales performance is a boon. Daily changes to metadata are feasible.
Most important of all to me is that I now have control and transparency, and this allows me to communicate with authors without having to adapt to any other organization’s time frame.
This question has been bouncing in my brain ever since the digital revolution began and especially after working for various publishers that asked me to help them with social media and website text.
Do you think that being forced to focus on SEO when writing articles, promos, headlines etc can negatively impact your non-journalism writing? My sense is that SEO flourishes from a writing style that is different from the style I use when writing creative works, especially fiction. And I don’t want my brain to be steered down that path.
Good question! Short answer: yes, writing for SEO purposes will affect your prose style!
But don’t panic yet. It’s not all doom and there’s much more to say.
First, a brief explanation, so we understand the difference between SEO writing and the kind of writing we do in our books and other creative domains, the kind of writing that Mark is talking about.
What is SEO writing?
SEO is writing that’s meant to be read by machines, specifically search engines. You do this with keywords and key phrases. Ideally, you imagine what words or phrases a reader might type into Google, and make sure they’re used a lot in your blogpost or article. And especially in your headline because that sums up the whole piece.
Here’s an example from a piece I edited for the Alliance of Independent Authors. If you’re writing about William Shakespeare, perhaps to promote a book you’re publishing, you might post a piece about the 10 best quotes for Valentine’s day. If you’ve got an ounce of soul, you’ll get creative with the headline. ‘When love speaks… Timeless lines from the Bard.’
Will that get the attention of humans? Yes. Will it get the attention of search engines? Probably no, so the humans won’t get to see it. You’re much more likely to get hits if you call it ‘My 10 top Shakespeare quotes about love.’ Dull but true. ‘Top Shakespeare quotes’ is what a reader will ask a search engine to find, so those are the words (the key words) that will get you the most hits. The searching person just wants an answer, and they won’t think of the many inventive or witty ways to enjoy expressing the question.
Here’s where I’m wholeheartedly agreeing with Mark. I want to live in a world of headlines that are intriguing, evocative, stylish, haunting. I love how language can do that. If I ruled the universe, we would all use our words with grace and panache.
SEO, though, isn’t about that. It’s about communicating with machines first, humans second. Labels rule; not a love of language.
Many authors would rather chew off their own arm than stand in the spotlight promoting a book. They say things like, “I don’t want to seem narcissistic,” “I hate being like, ‘Me, me, me!’” or “I just want to write.’” If this describes you, I am here to explain why — and I know this sounds a little harsh — you need to get over it immediately.
(An aside: I get it — finding language that bridges the gap between authentic and promotional can take some thought, and I empathize. But I also hate to see an author not get their due because they are nervous about putting themselves out there. All of this book publicity advice comes from a place of love!)
Below are three ideas that might help you think about leading a book promotion campaign for your book with confidence:
Conduct this thought experiment.
Conjure a smart and talented friend, and imagine they’ve been working on a creative project — maybe an indie film or an art show—for many years. They’ve poured their heart and soul and thousands of hours into bringing it into the world. It’s finally completed, and the premiere, opening, or launch is coming up.
Now, imagine they say to you, ‘Ugh, I don’t want to email my friends and family about it,’ or ‘I don’t want to look like a narcissist,’ or ‘I’m hoping people find out about it organically.’
You would likely tell them, correctly and emphatically, that’s wild, they must let their people and, if possible, the wider world know about their work. How will their ideas and talent be known otherwise? You and your book deserve the same championing you would insist upon for a loved one.
Put on your business hat when promoting a book.
Authors tend to bristle at this idea but once you have a publishing deal or pub date, you need to think of your book as a product. It’s a smart, creative, thoughtful, excellent product, yes. But it is still a new thing that you want people to know about and buy. No (successful) business in the world launches a product and just waits for people to stumble upon it.
Would a band release a new album and neglect to alert their fans? Would a playwright open a show and make a single social media post about it? Of course not. There’d be a launch party, emails to mailing lists, a website, many social media posts, media outreach — a slew of promotional efforts.
Authors need to do the same.
You might be thinking, isn’t that the publisher’s job? That would be nice, but in-house publicity and marketing teams have slim budgets and are way overstretched. They’re often handling an impossible workload. That includes managing every season’s soon-to-be and newly published books. Plus any longer-term interest in books published in past seasons. Today’s media environment, by and large, requires too much in-the-weeds research time for them to lead robust and highly personalized campaigns for all their books.
Publishers expect authors to be active partners in the promotion of their books — running their own social media (occasionally with marketing help provided), building and maintaining an author website, curating a broad contact list for personal outreach, and more.
No one will be paying as much attention to your promotional emails or posts as you.
Remember, people get hundreds of emails a day and see who-knows-how-many social media posts. It may feel like a heavy lift for you to hit send, but it’s going to land as just one in a ton of other messages. When you post about it online, the vast majority of your followers will miss it.
In this era of overwhelm — with the nonstop churn of social media posts, the proliferation of mailing lists, Substacks, and more clogging your inbox, the reduction in book coverage across the print and digital media landscape, and the pick-and-choose format of personalized news intake—you have to make as much noise as possible.
You need to post about it — and then post about it again! You have to email people — and then you need to follow up with them. I cannot tell you how many top national media hits Press Shop PR has landed for authors on a third follow-up. People miss emails all the time. Sometimes they mark them as unread and forget to go back to them. Sometimes, it just gets pushed down into the depths of the recipient’s inbox too quickly. Don’t let the success of promoting a book depend on other people’s email management skills!
More than two decades have passed since we published an academic paper linking the legalisation of abortion to the enormous decline in American crime since the 1990s. The underlying theory is straightforward. Children who are unwanted at birth are at risk of a range of adverse life outcomes and commit much more crime later in life. Legalised abortion greatly reduced the number of unwanted births. Consequently, legalised abortion will reduce crime, albeit with substantial lags.
Our paper created much controversy, which was further stoked by a chapter on the topic in the best-selling book “Freakonomics”, written by one of us with Stephen Dubner, published in 2005. For many, it was more important to spin a political response to our hypothesis than to evaluate whether it was correct.
The data available at the time strongly supported our hypothesis. We showed, for instance, that crime began falling sooner in the five states that legalised abortion in advance of Roe v Wade, the US Supreme Court decision that made abortion available legally nationwide. We documented that crime in states with high and low abortion rates followed nearly identical trends for many years, then suddenly and persistently diverged only after the birth cohorts exposed to legal abortion reached the age at which they would commit crime. Consistent with our theory, looking at arrest data, which reveal the age of the offender, the declines in crime were concentrated among those born after abortion became legal.
These data patterns do not, of course, make an open-and-shut case. No randomised experiment has been conducted on this topic. We also didn’t help our own case by mislabelling the set of control variables included in one of the specifications in one of our tables—a regrettable mistake (later corrected) which led some people to dismiss all of the paper’s findings. One of the most vocal and consistently sceptical voices arguing against our findings has been The Economist, which has written about our study on three occasions (most recently last month), each time taking a critical and dismissive stance.
We concede that reasonable people could disagree about how convincing the findings were in our initial paper. The analysis was retrospective, and there is always the concern that researchers have cherry-picked their findings, or that perhaps it was just pure coincidence that the patterns emerged.
There is, however, something unique about our hypothesis, which allows a second test of the theory that is far closer to the ideal of the scientific method. There is a long lag between abortions being performed and the affected cohort reaching the age at which crime is committed. Thus, we could already at the time of our first academic paper in 2001 make strong predictions about what our theory would predict should happen to future crime. Indeed, at the end of that paper, we made the following prediction: “When a steady state is reached roughly 20 years from now, the impact of abortion will be roughly twice as great as the impact felt so far. Our results suggest that all else equal, legalised abortion will account for persistent declines of 1% a year in crime over the next two decades.”
It is rare—almost unprecedented—in academic economics to be able to make a testable prediction and then to go back and actually test it decades later. That’s what we did in a paper published in 2020. Our methodological approach was straightforward: mimic the specifications reported in our original paper, but limit the time period to the years that were out of sample, ie, those after our original data ended.
The results provided stunning corroboration of our predictions. For each of the seven different analyses we had presented in the initial 2001 paper, the results for next two decades of data were at least as strong as the results in our initial dataset, and in most specifications even stronger. This included what the main critics of our 2001 paper called the “crucial” test, showing that the abortion rate at the time of any birth cohort negatively correlated with the age-specific arrest rate for that cohort years later as it moved through ages 15–24, while perfectly controlling for whatever other factors were influencing crime in a given state and a given year. We would argue that, short of a randomised experiment, this is some of the most compelling evidence one could present.
The magnitude of the implied impacts we are talking about is huge. If you look over the entire sample, violent-crime rates fell by 62.2 percentage points in high-abortion states whereas they rose by 3.1% in low-abortion states.
Though there is not complete acceptance of our hypothesis among academics, all agree that if our paper is not correct, then there is no viable explanation for the enormous drop in crime in America that started in the early 1990s. Indeed, there is not even an arguable theory to supplant the abortion-crime link. Exposure to lead in the environment might, perhaps, be the next best hypothesis. But as we showed in our 2020 paper, when one controls for both environmental lead and abortion, the coefficient on abortion remains large while the coefficient on environmental lead is greatly reduced and loses statistical significance.
It seems fair to ask why, in spite of strong supporting evidence, no academic contradiction of any of the findings of our 2020 paper and support for the abortion-crime link from international evidence, so many observers remain sceptical of the hypothesis. Not surprisingly, those whose livelihoods came from fighting crime during the great crime drop were not keen to conclude that their approaches—whether more police, more incarceration or particular social programmes—however important they might have been, were not the dominant factor in the decline. Another possible explanation is that people across the political spectrum were uncomfortable with our conclusions. Many people would prefer that our hypothesis not be true—perhaps not recognising that the core finding is that when women can control their fertility the life outcomes of their children are greatly enhanced.
As somebody who, in my second marriage, insisted on a prenuptial agreement, I can also testify that sometimes it is an act of love to chart the exit strategy before you enter the union, in order to make sure that not only you, but your partner as well, knows that there will be no World War III should hearts and minds, for any sad reason, change.
The first page of your novel is vitally important, but not necessarily because the action starts there. The first page, and first several pages, should:
set your tone and reader expectations. In a thriller, that means establishing a rhythm that will push forward rather than linger, and maybe having some sort of stakes already in play, even if they’re unrelated to the central plot. (Your protagonist is running late to get to a meeting and is running to catch a bus pulling away from her bus stop.)
make your reader care to continue on: have a hook that grabs the reader’s attention, makes them think, “now that’s interesting,” and pulls them from one paragraph to the next. Make them interested in solving a mystery from the first paragraph, even if it’s a minor question only pertinent to your opening scene. (Why was she running late? Where was she rushing off to? What are the consequences of her tardiness?)
introduce some important aspect of character or theme; setting can be introduced here but is easy to overdo. Don’t make setting the only thing you talk about; it is impersonal exposition and therefore doesn’t make the reader care. In a thriller this is especially true; don’t describe setting with any more words than you need to unless it can be worked into what the character is doing or is itself inherently thrilling.
be without flaws. It’s early, you don’t have to defend or overcome structural weaknesses here– but you do have to polish your writing to a mirror finish.
. . . .
The first page (and first sentence, and paragraph) is important in the same way your first meeting with somebody new is important. An agent or publisher (or indeed a customer thinking of buying your book) is going to read the opening line, the first paragraph, the first page to see if they like your style of writing, and see if you know how to begin a story and get the reader engaged.
They want to see if you make dumb mistakes (typos, grammar, clichés, other beginner errors like opening with a fight in progress, or opening with an info-dump, or detailed character descriptions, or the history of your setting, etc).
Agents (and the readers for publishers) reject 95% (or more, seriously) of the books or queries they receive, which means (practically speaking) they have to make snap decisions, and they do. Otherwise they’d have no time to do work that actually pays them money. They expect you to put a great deal of care into the opening sentence, the first page, the first ten pages (which many request).
They expect your most careful and attentive work there, and if it sucks, they don’t need to read the rest. They aren’t there to fix your work, or critique work, or help you get better, or see a promising young talent, or spot a diamond in the rough, they are there for one thing: to find writers that are already good writers, and represent already good writing, and make their 15%. That’s it!
The service agents do for the publishers is screening, searching through the flood of dreck to find some gold nuggets.
No, it is not advisable to move the “thriller” to the first page.
The opening of the book is expected to be an engaging introduction to the main character(s) and the setting, a setup for a story to come. The setup usually lasts for 10% to 15% of the book, before the big problem of the book appears.
Nevertheless, this first 10% is supposed to be engaging. One way to do that is to introduce your character(s) by giving them a “little” or “throwaway” problem of some sort, not necessarily a problem important to the plot but a kind of problem they might encounter in their everyday life. This gives you a chance to talk about setting, show us some of their personality in the process of dealing with their little problem.
The problem with opening in the middle of action is closely related: If you do that, readers don’t really care, because they don’t know who is fighting, whose side they should be on, or anything else. In the opening pages, readers don’t care because they don’t have any context for understanding what is going on.
That is why nearly every movie and story begins with “The Normal World” of the hero; and the main problem first appears 10% or 15% of the way in. If the setting is complex (with magical, fantasy or scifi elements) the main problem is delayed somewhat, until the reader/audience is “up to speed” and has a basic grasp of what the heroes and villains can do, or what their ships can do, etc.
In some series (movie or TV or books) we can cut “The Normal World” quite short, since the audience is up to speed from the first book and doesn’t need much reminder. But in a “from scratch” novel, don’t rush the main conflict, it doesn’t make the book more exciting at all, it makes it boring.
Your query letter, the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first page, the first ten pages, the first chapter: This is how you will be judged, quickly and ruthlessly, by agents and publishers. Nobody is going to invest the time to read your whole book or story if these alienate them.
