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OpenAI Says It Now Has An AI That Is “Really Good” At Creative Writing

 That it’s experimenting with writing could suggest OpenAI feels its latest generation of models vastly improve on the wordsmithing front. Historically, AI hasn’t proven to be an especially talented essayist. - TechCrunch

We’ve Been Missing The Point Of “The Great Gatsby” For A Century

“Gatsby is a more complicated book than its pop-culture footprint suggests. It’s big enough to survive all those turgid high school essays about color symbolism and the American dream, … all those mediocre movies and bad plays. Here’s the story of how The Great Gatsby has endured — and why we keep misreading it.” - Vox

The Enduring Allure Of Greece In Literature

For hundreds of years, we—broadly speaking, these books’ Anglophone-ish audience—have been reading too much into Greece. There were the philhellenes, like Nietzsche, who believed the ancients to be “the only people of genius in the history of the world.” - LA Review of Books

Bill Bryson: There Are Too Many Books (Blame Self-Publishing)

It is thought that about 90 per cent of self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies, although some self-publishing writers have become successful, notably Colleen Hoover. - The Times (UK)

Two Projects Aim To Check Academic Papers With AI for Mistakes

 “I thought, why don’t we go through, like, all of the papers?” The AI tool has analysed more than 37,000 papers in two months. Its website flags papers in which it has found flaws – many of which have yet to be verified by a human. - Nature

Xiaolu Guo Rewrites Melville

“I don’t have this need to consume ‘story': I need to have a debate, a dialogue with truth; to think more, write less, and to address issues not in a political way but in a philosophical way, a poetic way. Write less, in order to write stronger.” - The Guardian (UK)

Nobody Puts Writer Geoff Dyer In The Corner

Well - nobody but himself. "The feeling is most intense after dark, when the chair is bathed in the glow of a lamp, after I’ve locked the door of the flat from the inside, with the key in the lock.” - The Observer (UK)

Why We’re So Obsessed With Tales Of True Crime

“Feito turns up the volume in the new novel, ‘because it was fun, but also because they did drip belladonna into their eyeballs!’ (A poisonous Victorian beauty hack to make your pupils dilate.)” - The Guardian (UK)

The Writer Who Coined ‘Love Is Love’ Wins An Award

Writer Thalia Zepatos: “Oregon became the testing ground where we first discovered the catchphrase 'love is love' and realized the power of telling the stories of same-sex couples and their families.” - Oregon Artswatch

At The University Of Iowa, The Feds Cut Funds For The Famous International Writing Program

“It’s the end of a 58-year-old partnership, which has brought writers from all over the world” - including later Nobel Prize winners like Han Kang - “to be in residence at the university.” - Iowa Public Radio

Behind The Move To Get Rid Of Book Blurbs

There’s been a bunch of authors and publishers lately saying, “Hey, this is hugely time-consuming. It’s an incredibly emotional process. What would happen if we stopped doing all this?” - Marketplace

What’s A Bookstore To Do When An Author Becomes Problematic?

What to do about art we admire that is created by people we don’t? Most bookstores leave it in the hands of patrons. - The Star-Tribune

U.S. Book Industry Braces For Havoc Due To New Tariffs

“President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, as well as a 10% increase to tariffs on goods from China, went into effect on March 4 — and although the tariffs had been delayed once before, the publishing and printing industries are still left with questions.” - Publishers Weekly

Harper Lee’s Unpublished Short Stories To Appear In Print This Fall

“The Land of Sweet Forever compiles short fiction Lee wrote in the years before the 1960 release of her classic novel (To Kill a Mockingbird) and includes essays completed between 1961 and 2006. Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, will release the book Oct. 21.” - AP

Interjections — Those Little Junk Words We Toss Into Conversation — Serve An Important Purpose

“For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances” — mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like — “as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be. But these little words may be much more important than that.” - Knowable Magazine

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