Tag Archives: books

After six months of shooting, six months in postproduction, and nine months of concentrated editing, Dune was ready to be unleashed onto 1,700 screens worldwide simultaneously, a rarity then. There were four gala premieres scheduled for the film: Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Miami; and London. The DC premiere at the …

I meet with Walter Isaacson in a small conference room in the offices of book publisher Simon & Schuster. The walls are festooned with framed covers, including of course Isaacson’s mega-bestseller Steve Jobs. I’m sure somewhere else in the office are covers representing his other subjects—Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, …

Reaction videos started flooding TikTok this summer, all of them with the same question: Who is Quan Millz? The answer varied depending on the person, but each new response carried with it some variation of curiosity, shock, and excitement. “If you enjoy watching shows like Paternity Court,” one TikTok user …

I was grabbing a drink with an old friend when it happened. I told her I was excited about an upcoming reporting trip to Vancouver, to interview Naomi Klein. My friend wrinkled her nose, as if the bartender had just farted. Then she asked why I’d give my time to …

After OpenAI released GPT-3 in July 2020, independent artificial intelligence researcher Shawn Presser and a few of his fellow machine-learning enthusiasts set a challenge for themselves: Could they recreate it? “We were like, OK, there’s actually not that much standing in the way of us doing this ourselves,” Presser says. …

You really can't understand all the excitement surrounding personalized medicine without knowing a little bit about Gleevec. And once you know the full story of Gleevec, you really can’t help but see much of that excitement as wild and even dangerous exaggeration. Personalized medicine (sometimes it’s also called “precision medicine”) …

Now that we’ve all had experience with large language models, their limitations are all too visible. Yes, they can write. But their prose doesn’t explode in the mind like the words of Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, or David Foster Wallace do. Yes they can make music. But Taylor …

ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Kristen Ghodsee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Ghodsee outlines why the traditional nuclear family …

Hari Kunzru wasn’t looking for a fight. On August 7, the Brooklyn-based writer sat on the subway, scrolling through social media. He noticed several authors grumbling about a linguistic analysis site called Prosecraft. It provided breakdowns of writing and narrative styles for more than 25,000 titles, offering linguistic statistics like …

You've always wanted to read Infinite Jest, and now you finally have enough time on your hands to get through all 1,079 pages. Sure, you could grab it from a local bookseller, or order it on Amazon. But you might be able to read a digital copy for free by …