Tag Archives: books

They enter a small, bright office where two comfy-looking chairs and a blue couch surround an oval coffee table. In the corner stands a large Ficus tree of dubious vitality, and a quartet of framed diplomas presides above a coffee machine. Dr. Monica VanTyne, a tall white woman with dark …

Throughout the 1970s, the author Frank Herbert saw many producers and directors take stabs at bringing his Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning sci-fi novel Dune to the screen: Roger Corman (Battle Beyond the Stars), Arthur P. Jacobs (Planet of the Apes), Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo), Ridley Scott (Alien). Director David Lynch …

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Neither Warner Bros., which produced Wonka, nor the character Willy Wonka are actually affiliated with the disastrous viral Glasgow event known as Willy’s Chocolate Experience. It’s an easy mistake to make. Aside from the name, the event featured actors clearly costumed …

Of the 12.5 million works currently hosted on the fan fiction hub Archive of Our Own, SenLinYu’s Manacled ranks as the second-most-read on the entire site—but you won’t be able to read it there for much longer. A dark romance between Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy set in …

Deliver Us, a 2018 novel by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite, takes a hilarious look at the future of drone delivery. The plot revolves around a social media activist named Piper Prince who attempts to stop Amazon from taking over her Detroit neighborhood. “It’s written in a Coen brothers sort …

In her new memoir, Burn Book, Kara Swisher cites a 2014 profile that dubbed her “Silicon Valley’s Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist.” She might prefer to downplay the first and emphasize the second. Some people would switch that around. But there is no dispute about Swisher’s impact: When it comes …

While the finer points of running a social media business can be debated, one basic truth is that they all run on attention. Tech leaders are incentivized to grow their user bases so there are more people looking at more ads for more time. It’s just good business. As the …

Anyone who writes reviews for a living has heard it before, and plenty: “How much did you get paid to write this?” I’ve been a critic of many things over the years: movies, wine and spirits, and all manner of tech gear, for WIRED and other publications. And no matter …

Children of Dune, the third book in author Frank Herbert’s Dune series, explores the lives of Leto and Ghanima Atreides, the twin children of Paul Atreides, the hero of the first novel. TV writer Andrea Kail was impressed by the book’s thoughtful examination of complex ideas. “This is a very …

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, …