“Everybody knew about Augusta, but they all knew her as a secret. … Because they met when she was so young, she was an abused child, she was a runaway, and Cormac was in his 40s, it was a situation that in many ways would look bad.” - The New York Times
Onion CEO Ben Collins's first thought was, "That’d be one of the funniest jokes of all time if we pulled this off." Once it became a serious possibility, Collins saw the opportunity to use Onion-style satire to expose the fear-mongering, guns-and-dietary-supplements-peddling scam that right-wing outlets like Infowars run. - New York Magazine
This year’s winner of France’s biggest book prize is being sued in Algeria over claims he stole the story from a patient of his psychiatrist wife. - BBC
When do we feel compelled to say “etcetera” or “ityadi” or even “blah blah,” not just literally or in a manner of speaking but in the way we experience and create the world? - LA Review of Books
"The formal 600-year-old word (has) been given new life by Olympians like Simone Biles, entertainers like Dua Lipa, and people across social media who increasingly use the word to describe channelling their dreams into successes." - CBC
Everett's revisionist riff on Huckleberry Finn continued its prizewinning streak in the fiction category; in nonfiction, de León's Soldiers and Kings pipped Knife, Rushdie's memoir of his stabbing and recovery. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's Something About Living took poetry honors; Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s Kareem Between won for young people's literature. - AP
A.I. chatbots can imitate famous poets like William Shakespeare well enough to fool many human readers, according to a new paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. In addition, many study participants actually preferred the chatbot’s poetry over the works of renowned writers. - Smithsonian
Nuanxed's approach, known as post-editing (PE), combines the use of AI translation tools with human editing and proofing. According to cofounder and CEO Robert Casten Carlberg, the company completes roughly 50 translations per month, and in total has worked with 150 authors to complete around 800 translations. - Publishers Weekly
Accepting the award for his Question 7, the Australian author said he would not take the £50,000 which comes with the prize until sponsor Baillie Gifford presents to the public a plan for divesting from fossil fuel companies and investing in renewable energy. - The Guardian
The kinds of speech that strike us as authentic, satisfying, and desirable change with time, and depend on our position in the world and on the conversations happening around us. - The New Yorker
To invoke language when talking about LLMs is to misunderstand the nature of language and miss its fundamentally lived and embodied character. LLMs may get better and better at sourcing certain kinds of information or completing certain kinds of tasks, but they are finders, not creators. - The Dial
"The bankruptcy judge overseeing the Chapter 7 liquidation of Infowars and Jones’ assets on Thursday temporarily halted the transfer of Infowars to The Onion and ordered an evidentiary hearing to review the auction — in which bids were submitted secretly." - Variety
The jury described the book as "a novel that floats, a beguiling association of memories, projections, and haunted instances through which the very notion of our mortality, of our resilience and desires, is interrogated in passages as impactful as they can be hypnotic." - CBC
Ten poets, from the medieval Geoffrey Chaucer to modern writer Dorothea Lasky, were successfully impersonated by AI chatbots, with most of the 696 participants slightly preferring the imitation to the real thing. - The Conversation
