This is an abridged version of the free newsletter that goes out on Friday mornings. If you’d like the whole thing, with paywall-free links, for free, we can help with that.
Corporate Update
A new development last week has me pretty excited: back in December, Jonathan Gibbs published this on his Personal Anthology newsletter, looking for contributors (I wrote about Personal Anthology back in November).
I sent him an email showing interest, and I’m in! I have no date set, but stay tuned.
As always, I’m going to overthink this to death – do I focus on indie/online authors? Only fiction? Do I avoid obvious picks like Bradbury or Carver or Lahiri? Should I get weird and include a song or a poem or something? Does a recipe count? (kidding)
At any rate, it’ll be fun.
Also, this happened:
It’s always weird when the author hits ‘like’ on your review of their book. It’s weirder when the review wasn’t a glowing one.
Journalism!
Scam America continues apace
In the NYT, a story by John Carreyrou (the Bad Blood guy) about a magic cancer treatment that seems to be killing cancer patients. It’s infuriating stuff. (if you got the newsletter, this would be a gift link)
Slow Dance ‘24
This is an annual thing and it’s always a great source for new music: last year’s Slow Dance sampler led me to at least 5 artists that I now follow closely. They’re releasing a track a day here, and so far it’s killer.
Ted Chiang strikes again
A long and excellent interview in LARB. (more from Chiang here and here) One of many choice quotes:
LLMs are not going to develop subjective experience no matter how big they get. It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words “Baby don’t hurt me” on them.
More AI realism
That Chiang interview is part of a series. Here’s another interview with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell about the same topic. It’s denser, with ideas just as compelling as the Chiang one, and just as quotable:
LLMs provide a test case for asking, What can you learn just from transmission, just from extracting information from the people around you? And what requires independent exploration and being in the world?
Mike Monteiro’s advice column
I talk about Monteiro’s book Ruined By Design all. the. time. Last week I discovered Monteiro has a blog. The latest post is an excellent entry point.
