1. The Death of Literary Heroes
Gregory Conti offers a new critique of AI. Instead of handwringing about how robots are taking over, he worries that AI “means the death of authorship.” Writing in Compact, Conti sees a future where we “increasingly become mere ‘prompters’”:
The awe that we feel in reflecting on an Einstein or a Dostoevsky, we will feel toward no one again; Claude cannot be someone’s hero. The whole concept of a “life’s work” that belongs to a great progenitor of ideas is under threat; soon we may have less reason to care who “wrote” a paper with an AI’s help or who inaugurated a theory by prompting Claude than we do about who was riding Secretariat when he won his triple crown.
Also recommended: The FT’s exploration of how publishing houses are scrambling to find and verify books written by “real humans.”
2. The No Book Club
Incredibly, Rose Horowitch’s 9,000-word essay in The Atlantic became a viral summer sensation. Ironically, the essay makes the case that reading is dying. Full of depressing statistics about how entertainment and social media have shortened attention spans, the piece serves as an obituary for literary culture:
People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
Does this mean that Western civilization is near its end? Not according to Horowitch’s critics: here, here, and here.
3. Emily’s List
Emily Wilson thought her 2017 translation of The Odyssey might sell around a thousand copies. Sales have exceeded one million this year alone. It’s unfamiliar territory for a scholar in a classics department. In response, she did an interview on her substack – with herself:
You’re the first woman to have her translation of the Odyssey published in English. What does that mean to you, and why does it matter?
Mostly, I don’t think it matters at all. It’s a silly little factoid, not something particularly relevant for my actual work. Gender wasn’t a topic in my scholarly or critical work before I began work on the Odyssey. I’d published various books and articles, mostly about male authors and male characters, with very little attention to gender. I’d published earlier translations – of Seneca’s tragedies – and none of the reviewers or readers of those translations seem to have thought my gender mattered for that work, and nor did I. But all of a sudden, “Woman Translates Odyssey“ became the universal headline, and then journalists began to ask me endlessly and unstoppably about my supposedly female or feminine or feminist perspective.
4. E-Z Rider
Long before Tesla, a different electric revolution was underway: the e-bike. According to this long report on the fading importance of gas-powered vehicles, there are over 200 million e-bikes in China and 51,600 e-bike manufacturers. India and Vietnam became massive early adopters, followed by the rest of Asia and much of Africa. Now it’s America’s turn:
Here comes the Harley-Davidson “LiveWire” ONE electric motorcycle. There’s no violent kickstart; you just turn it on. The engine roar is gone, and so is the intricate dance of throttle-and-gearshift to accelerate. In complete silence, a simple twist of the wrist takes the 500-pound bike and you from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.1 seconds. Reviewers use words like “addictive sheer exhilaration” to describe the ride. The range on a charge is about 140 miles in town. The price is $20,000.
5. Who Knew About “The Decision”?
The Athletic deconstructs Lebron James’s slow, masterful reveal of what team he would choose as his next home. The article argues that there were clues along the way, but with one big surprise:
During one of his appearances at Fanatics Fest, James referred to “trust the process,” the old 76ers’ slogan from star center Joel Embiid’s younger days.
He knew, James knew, all along, right? It was always going to be Philadelphia? He dragged out one of the longest free agencies for a star in NBA history just because he could, stringing along the four franchises – and fan bases – who weren’t going to get his talents, poking commissioner Adam Silver along the way for demanding an answer so the league could finish the 2026-27 NBA schedule on time. This has to be what happened, no?
Well, if it was all a conspiracy, there was one key partner left out of the loop.
The 76ers. They didn’t know.
6. The King of Comedy
Nearly everyone seems to agree that Jimmy Burrows, the legendary television director who died last week, invented the modern sitcom. Rob Long, who was the showrunner and chief writer for Cheers while Burrows sat in the director’s chair, explains how Burrows orchestrated a set “like it wasn’t television at all, but an off-Broadway comedy.” Long elaborates:
Burrows would rehearse for a few days, get the show up on its feet, guide the writers through revisions and adjustments, and only then would he think about cameras and shots and how he was going to film the episode. The result is that all of his shows have the same loose, spontaneous liveliness. Characters are always entering and exiting and sitting and crossing, with the cameras often barely keeping up. If you think about the Cheers bar, or the Big Bang Theory living room, or the coffee shop in Friends—you feel like you’re there too, just a little bit offscreen.
Websites Worth Reading
Summer School Homer: A UCL Intro Course
How to Go to the US Open: Top 10 Tips
NYC’s Buckling Buildings: A Visual Essay
Feeds We Follow
@BookNoteApp: Reading Lists
@AmericanGywn: American Novels
@The_culturist_: Books that Influenced
