Modern culture whispers in your ears. If you listen closely, you can hear it everywhere. In ads on the Internet. From parents and coaches. From professors, politicians, and preachers. Be an entrepreneur. Start your own business. Work for yourself.

What these whispers are telling you is that you’re on your own. When it comes to getting ahead in the world today, you can’t simply go work for someone else. Real success comes to people who break the mold, seize their own destiny, and do it themselves. If you want a shot at material success, they say, you must be your own boss.

Going it alone looks different, of course, depending on where you are on the economic spectrum. At the high end, it means getting into the start-­up game. Launch a new enterprise, preferably with somebody else’s money, and then sell it for a mint. Further down the ladder? You are still in charge of your own economic future. You cannot—­and should not—­count on a stable job with good pay and benefits. “I am a millionaire in the making,” the megachurches tell you to say, but those riches can only come through entrepreneurship, through creating something new. Like Jay-­Z says, you have to be a business, man.

The whispers might sound innocuous. But underneath the bland inspiration lies a dark and alarming set of justifications. Are you underpaid? Work more. Unemployed? Try gig work. Run a side hustle. Take on debt to “invest in yourself.” Still struggling? That’s on you.

This fixation on going it alone—­the cult of the hustle, the gig economy—­has become so pervasive that we can overlook just how thoroughly it has saturated our entire culture. If you step onto a college campus like UNC-­Chapel Hill, where I teach, you’ll see its influence in all the buzz around business start-­ups. To be sure, many of the students who take college entrepreneurship courses want to learn how to get rich.

But what is striking is the convictions of the socially conscious ones, the altruistic folks who want to do good for the world. They, too, have been swayed by those whispers. For them, fixing social problems doesn’t involve political activism, legal reform, or movement building. Rather, the cure is always a new business venture.

Reality, of course, is far messier than mythology. Sometimes working for yourself turns out great, but many, many businesses fail. Some people discover a certain freedom in hustling from gig to gig, but many others get screwed, working for less than minimum wage, going into hock, or falling victim to get-­rich-­quick scams that prey on the appeal of “being your own boss.”

Of course, we can’t blame the kids. Today’s college students have grown up in a culture that is as obsessed with entrepreneurship as it is disillusioned with traditional political action. They have been told from birth that individual initiative breeds innovation, even as social problems—­from poverty and inequality to environmental disaster and war—­appear insurmountable. Their natural takeaway is that focusing on political organizing and reform efforts is naïve, doomed to failure.

What’s more, all but the most elite and privileged confront a world of work where jobs are less stable, real wage growth is worse, and benefits more paltry than when their parents or grandparents entered adulthood. Little wonder that so many are lured by those whispering voices, the ones that tell them that individual initiative, start-­ups, and for-­profit businesses are the keys to changing the world and getting paid in the process.

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This book is about those cultural whispers—­where they came from, how they became so pervasive, and how they shaped not only personal decisions but also our politics and public life. It asks how our conception of work became so individualized and how so many people became convinced that the path to success lay in working for themselves.

There are more than 33 million businesses in the United States today. Only about 4,000 are publicly traded corporations (that is, owned by stockholders), and only another 16,000 are “large” by the government’s definition (more than 500 employees). More than 99.9 percent of all companies, in other words, are “small.” And the overwhelming majority—­81 percent, or 27 million—­have no employees. The only people who work for them are the owners.

All told, the US government estimates that about 1 in 9 people in the workforce can be described as “working for themselves” today. The puzzle of this book is how that vast and unorganized community of business owners came to embody a cultural ideal, and how that ideal came to dominate our national conversation about economic life.

At first glance, we might assume that this is nothing new at all. Our history books, after all, are chock full of paeons to self-­made men (and, once in a while, self-­made women). As far back as the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson famously praised independent yeoman farmers as bastions of democratic virtue, since they controlled their own livelihoods.

“Rugged individualism” has been a central part of America’s national mythology since before the advent of the term itself, which is linked in our collective memory to the mythos of Teddy Roosevelt at the turn of the twentieth century. For many people, and for centuries, “independence” has literally meant that you don’t depend on anyone else—­a government, a family, a master, or even an employer.

Yet despite those deep roots, America’s individualistic culture has not always translated into a call to work for yourself. Although self-­interest and individual responsibility are central to capitalism, nothing about the capitalist ethic is incompatible with working for someone else. To the contrary, throughout the history of capitalism, that was the whole point—­laborers, managers, and executives alike all traded their time and energy for wages and salaries.

In the United States, the ideal of working for someone else reigned supreme as recently as the mid-­twentieth century, buttressed by a very different economy from the one we know today. In the quarter century after World War II, economic growth was rapid and, relatively speaking, evenly shared. Average incomes went up across the board. The gap between rich and poor got smaller. Rising numbers of people ascended into the middle class, with its amenities like affordable homes and cars, as well as family vacations and college for the kids.

And the central vehicle for that growth was reliable, well-­paid work—­typically at a large company—­for the (generally male) family breadwinner. For the people who were included, this was the dream. For those who were kept out, including especially people of color, women, and the very poor, it became the thing to mobilize and fight for. Success and opportunity were not defined by going it alone in the postwar years but rather by steady employment. By working for somebody else.

So, what changed? Americans in the 1950s and 1960s were every bit the ideological descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt that we are today. Why does this individualistic ethic now push us toward self-­employment, business start-­ups, gigging, and so on, when it didn’t back then?

If it’s tempting to think that our go-­it-­alone culture has always existed, it’s perhaps equally tempting, however paradoxically, to conclude that it has emerged just in the past few years with the advent of new tech and recent economic hard times. In the first quarter of the twenty-­first century, new communications technologies—­from smartphone apps and social media to GPS and Zoom—­have upended modern life.

When you can manage your workforce, optimize your logistics, and microtarget your marketing all on your phone from the comfort of your living room, working for yourself seems easier today than ever before. Add in the long-­term deterioration of the traditional job market since the Great Recession, compounded by the Covid-­19 pandemic and its aftermath, and it would seem that the cocktail for the do-­it-­yourself economy is complete.

But while it’s certainly true that new tech and economic fragility are vital parts of the story, they don’t answer the question by themselves. Despite what we always hear—­that such-­and-­such a device or app “changes everything” or that economics is destiny—­neither technology nor economic circumstance operate in a vacuum. Neither can change society all by itself.

To really understand how history happens, to figure out where those cultural whispers come from, we have to find the people who propagate them. The story of how the dream of working for yourself became so overpowering in the United States, in other words, is fundamentally a story about people—­people with interests, agendas, ideas, and often businesses themselves. I am a historian of American business, economic culture, and politics, and I have spent decades writing about the places where those things intersect. Those kinds of people are exactly the ones I’ve been trained to study. So I set out to find them.

What I discovered was a disparate but influential cadre of individuals and organizations who, between the 1970s and the early 2000s, promoted a new vision of work. Some of them are well known: politicians, business theorists, and national lobbying associations. Others are more anonymous, from the creator of a women’s home-­based business network to consultants, how-­to authors, and journalists.

What united them, though, was their common project: to repurpose long-­held tropes about self-sufficiency and success into a public case that individual business ownership was the cure for long-­term economic decline. Their activism—­which was nearly always aligned with their own business interests—­created a new set of values about work, opportunity, and what it meant to get ahead. Ultimately, they redefined what millions of people meant by the words “American Dream.”

So while the economic crises and technological changes of the last fifteen years have nurtured our culture of independent work, they didn’t create it. Instead, today’s cultural whispers trace back less to Jefferson in the eighteenth century and more to the social turmoil and economic upheavals that began in the early 1970s. Those were the years when a series of recessions and persistently high inflation battered the country, bringing an abrupt end to the postwar “growth economy.”

Since then, even in good times, economic growth rates have never matched what people had gotten used to in the previous several decades. And that disjuncture, that gap between old expectations and new realities, has had major social and political consequences.

In terms of jobs, the American economy since the 1970s has come to center more on services than on manufacturing. Rising global trade and foreign competition put new limits on America’s once-­dominant factories, which moved production from high-wage to low-­wage regions, and eventually out of the country entirely.

By the 1980s, plant closings, unemployment, and poverty—­both in cities and in rural communities—­dominated the headlines. That process only accelerated by the late 1990s and early 2000s. The “Steel Belt” became the “Rust Belt.”

At the same time, the service sector—­from banking and professional services at the high end of the pay scale to retail, hospitality, and caregiving at the low end—­became the primary source of jobs. But since labor unions had traditionally been much stronger at big industrial corporations, that shift meant that labor was increasingly on its back heels, organizationally as well as politically.

In a historic reverse, inequality in the United States, which has been shrinking since the 1930s, started rising again after 1980. In economic terms, the “returns to capital” (that is, investing) outpaced “returns to labor” (that is, working). Rich people, who had more to invest (and lower taxes than before) got richer. Corporate consolidation, new tax policies, and old-­fashioned greed all combined to jack compensation at the high end, even as workers’ wages stagnated and benefits dwindled at large and small companies alike.

The nation suffered no financial crises between the 1930s and 1970s, but in the decades since, the economy lurched onto a roller-­coaster ride of boom-­and-­bust cycles that were reminiscent of the nineteenth century. Weaker regulations led to speculative bubbles, prompting observers to declare that the United States had become a “casino economy.” An elite few struck it rich through big bets, while most people went home empty-­handed.

As the widely shared prosperity of the postwar period became a memory for so many people, American culture turned inward. Faced with political and foreign-­policy scandals and disasters, as well as with economic malaise, people lost faith in the government, organized labor, and large corporations alike. In the same years, though, public faith in the individual was on the upswing.

From politics to popular culture to personal finance, a long-­subdued fixation on self-­reliance bubbled to the surface. Individual retirement accounts replaced pensions for millions. Personal identity, for many people, became as linked to being a “consumer” and “owner” as to being a member of a class. Not that everyone started to do it—­the self-­employment rate ticked up only slightly, and the start-­up rate for new businesses actually declined consistently from the late 1970s onward. But the fascination took over. The dream of working for yourself came to dominate our culture and politics like never before.

This book sets out to connect the dots between the changing economic landscape since the 1970s and the widespread belief that working for yourself is the key to economic success. In an era of massive global corporations, ever-­expanding big-­box stores, and high-­flying finance, how did we decide that self-­employment was the dream? How did we become convinced to go it alone?

The people you’ll meet in this book are the keys to piecing that story together. From policy activists and b-­school professors to small-­town shopkeepers and tech start-­up founders, they mobilized around a range of interconnected but distinct ways of “working for yourself.” Some were boosters for “small business”—­an amorphous concept that eludes easy definition and that really exists more as a cultural touchstone than a clear economic category.

Others focused more on a company’s newness than its size, affirming the virtues of entrepreneurship and innovation. Still others trained their fire on individual choices, encouraging everyday people to abandon the corporate rat race. Work from home, they said, or open a new business or franchise. Become an independent contractor or multilevel marketing distributor. Join the app-­based gig economy.

In the hands of this community, individual initiative and personal responsibility became powerful buzzwords that shaped public debate over a host of issues. Business-friendly regulatory reforms, weaker labor rights and worker protections, the decline of the inflation-­adjusted minimum wage, tax policies that rewarded speculation rather than work, the drastic underfunding of infrastructure, social welfare, and education—­ll of these were justified by what they would bring to business owners, investors, and entrepreneurs. The ideal of business ownership has both emerged from and fed upon a political culture that frames policy decisions as a sharp choice between “the government” and “the individual” (or, even more abstractly, “the market”).

This book is not a knock on business ownership itself. To invoke a tacky cliché, some of my best friends are business owners. My wife, my father, my wife’s father, his sons, my uncle on my dad’s side—­they all own or used to own their own businesses. I myself am a part-­owner of my wife’s company. I have no problem whatsoever with people who work for themselves in any capacity. What I do have a problem with is hype: the blind faith in fanciful promises, the unquestioned assumptions about the magic of entrepreneurship, the idea that business start-­ups will somehow solve our economic problems and help someone get rich in the process.

I take issue with a political culture that puts the burden of economic survival squarely on the individual, ignoring the root causes of economic injustice and rejecting policies like public interest regulation, worker protections, and a higher minimum wage because they are “bad for business owners.”

Finally, I disagree with the notion, so common among people who fetishize entrepreneurship and private initiative, that the big, public institutions that played such a key role during the growth years of the mid-­twentieth century, from universities to government agencies like NASA, are relics that should be confined to the dustbin of history.

Putting all our faith in the promise of individual business ownership is both overly simplistic and a political smokescreen that blocks alternative visions to addressing social problems. A political culture that trips over itself to appease business owners risks forgetting about society’s most vulnerable—­people who are underpaid, who work without benefits, who cannot pay their bills or their loans or their caregiving expenses.

I worry that, when the dominant cultural whispers tell those people to go it alone, they become convinced that they have no other options. That they should seek instant wealth online as social media influencers or freelance content creators. Or buy into the false promises of the gig economy. Or lose hope in any society-­wide efforts to make things better. And I worry that the rest of us will decide that’s OK.

I started down the road of deciphering the rise of this work-­for-­yourself ethos in the wake of the Great Recession. By the time I was writing this book, the Covid-­19 pandemic had hit, throwing an already fragile national economy into acute turmoil. Both cataclysms laid bare the economic schisms that define modern life in the United States, casting a harsh light on a system where too many people have no safety net, no steady job, no benefits.

Where some 30 million Americans earn income through online gig-­economy platforms that do not offer benefits or the minimum wage, and a third of them consider that work their main job. As we make our way through the post-­pandemic world, Americans face a reckoning over how, where, and why we work, over what we can and should ask of our employers, and over whether we should listen to those cultural whispers in our ears.

Our ability to answer those challenges depends on understanding why we think about work the way we do. Ultimately, our modern vision of employment—­atomized, individualized, precarious—­did not emerge automatically, driven by the inexorable logic of the market, or the self-­evident power of entrepreneurship, or the magical technology of our fancy phones. Instead, it was the product of people, of their intellectual and cultural movements, and of their political decisions.

I am less concerned with judging anyone’s decision to work for themselves than I am in understanding why that ideal became so pervasive, so unquestioned, and so easily exploited by today’s gig-­economy companies. By tracing today’s cult of the hustle to economic failure—­bad jobs, stagnant wages, inequality—­this book asks why and how Americans embraced business ownership as the last best defense against the ravages of capitalism.

It does so through the stories of the shopkeepers, consultants, writers, and politicians who all became evangelists for entrepreneurship. My hope is that by understanding their history, we can figure out how our blinkered way of looking at work has hampered our ability to tackle the economic challenges of our lifetimes.

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From One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America by Benjamin C. Waterhouse. Copyright © 2024. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.

Starting in the early 1920s, radio graduated from being a plaything of amateur tinkerers, electrical engineers, and physicists and became big business. There was no lack of entrepreneurs who served up the tantalizing possibility for newcomers to break into the fascinating new technology. In the early days of broadcast radio, home-correspondence programs and residential vocational schools used the romantic image of radio to attract students.

One of the largest schools was the National Radio Institute, which ran ads in the pulp-fiction magazines likely to be read by young men. A different approach was the use of a 1921 publicity photo of Mary Texanna Loomis (1880–1960), who operated the Loomis College of Radio Engineering in Washington, DC, from 1920 to the mid-1930s. The success of NRI and of Loomis’s school—which were just two of numerous such operations in America in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and even later—was indicative of the popular view of radio as a possible route to obtaining skills to qualify for a “glamorous” job.

There was another side to radio, however, that many people found not so attractive—the stereotypical modern scene of groups of people sitting around a restaurant table, saying nothing to one another all the while their noses are stuck in their smartphones, is actually nothing new. The fascination of the new “wireless” technology was already widespread more than a century ago, with headphones and primitive radios acting as great-grandpa’s and great-grandma’s “smartphones”!

The eventual widespread availability of AM radio receivers, in homes at all levels of economic status, caused major cultural shocks in entertainment, politics, and religion. Each was, individually, a big shock, but that they occurred almost simultaneously further magnified the impact of each on society. When the BBC broadcast Mozart’s Magic Flute live from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, in January 1924, it was received by the UK radio audience to great acclaim. But what exceeded that feat, by a wide margin (although that was not immediately appreciated) was the broadcast by 2LO that same month of the first BBC radio drama.

Titled A Comedy of Danger, it was the story of a rescue from a coal mine accident. Taking place totally in the dark, the story relied not only on speech and sound effects but also on the listener’s imagination. It, too, was received with great enthusiasm by the UK audience. Ironically, when the author of that drama was in America a few months later, he found that radio executives there were of a radically different mind. Instead, they

rejected the whole idea [of radio stories]. That sort of thing might be possible in England, they explained, where broadcasting was a monopoly and a few crackpot highbrows…could impose what they liked on a suffering public. But the American set-up was different: it was competitive, so it had to be popular, and it stood to reason that plays you couldn’t see could never be popular.

Never have the “experts” been so wrong!

Within the next four years American radio dramas appeared on nationwide networks, starting with Real Folks on NBC in 1928, and then Amos ‘n’ Andy a year later (it had been on Chicago’s local radio station WGN as Sam ‘n’ Henry since January 1926). These shows were merely the initial ripple of what would become a tidal wave.

During the following years radio gave American listeners Just Plain Bill (the tale of a small-town barber with a mortgaged shop); The Romance of Helen Trent (during 7,222 broadcasts this program showed that “just because a woman is 35 doesn’t mean romance is over”); Ma Perkins (a kindly amateur philosopher who owned a small-town lumber yard); John’s Other Wife (despite the naughty title, the “other wife” was John’s proper secretary) ; Pepper Young’s Family (set in middle America, the characters experienced love, hatred, and finally went crazy); Our Gal Sunday (which explored the question, Can a coal miner’s daughter find happiness married to England’s richest lord?); Young Dr. Malone (featuring a physician who had many adventures between operations, such as surviving being shot down over Germany in the Second World War, emerging victorious from a murder trial, and being saved by a blood transfusion from a fatal illness); When a Girl Marries (what happens when young lovers from “opposite sides of the tracks” marry—and it wasn’t always pretty); Backstage Wife (the tale of the troubles a stenographer from the Iowa sticks has after she marries a Broadway matinee idol who is relentlessly pursued by every woman under the age of 85 that he encounters); Young Widder Brown (widowed in her early 30s, the still devastatingly beautiful Ellen Brown spends the next 20 years being pursued by every bachelor in Simpsonville)—and on and on went the list.

These shows (in 1938 there were at least 50 of them on the air, uttering well over a million words each week) were serials, that is, continuously evolving 15-minute, five-day-a-week presentations from 10:30 in the morning to 6 o’clock in the evening. Sponsored mostly by the manufacturers of soaps and cleansing agents (in 1936 the top radio advertiser, by far, was Procter & Gamble, with the makers of breakfast foods and laxatives trailing behind), these programs became known as “soap operas,” “dishpan dramas,” and “washboard weepers.”

Specifically targeting the millions of stay-at-home women of the 1920s through the early 1950s, the soaps were tales of perpetually troubled people wallowing in melodrama, and they were both immensely popular and hugely profitable. In 1940 one-third of the total advertising income of NBC and CBS, combined, was due to the soaps.

The development of television, however, and the changing post Second World War economic forces that encouraged the mass departure of working-age women from the house and into the labor force combined to spell doom for the radio soap opera. When “Ma Perkins” said her final goodbyes on Friday, November 25, 1960, after 7,065 broadcasts, it was the end of the road for radio serials after more than three decades of fabulous success.

Along with the adult soaps, broadcast radio also introduced a markedly different sort of dramatic program: the crime-and-horror show. As one writer said of those programs:

Come five o’clock each weekday afternoon, millions of American children drop whatever they are doing and rush to the nearest radio set. Here, with feverish eyes and cocked ears, they listen for that first earsplitting sound which indicates that the Children’s Hour is at hand. This introductory signal may be the wail of a police siren, the rattle of a machine gun, the explosion of a hand grenade, the shriek of a dying woman, the bark of a gangster’s pistol, or the groan of a soul in purgatory. Whatever it is, the implication is the same. Radio has resumed its daily task of cultivating our children’s morals—with blood-and-thunder effects.

The “children’s” program that probably best illustrates what Gibson had in mind is Gangbusters, first heard on CBS in January 1936. The opening of each broadcast certainly was something to hear: tires screeching, a policeman’s whistle, the shattering of a glass window, the wail of a siren—all as the background to a voice yelling “Calling the police! Calling the G-men! Calling all Americans to war on the underworld!” So raucous was this energetic opening that it gave birth to the still common use of the phrase “coming on like gangbusters!” as a description of anything with a strong start. Despite all the possible objections to the appropriateness of such a program for children, Gangbusters had a huge, loyal, enthusiastic audience, and it stayed on the air for more than 20 years (until 1957).

It’s almost a guaranteed bet that Hardy would never have listened to any of these horror shows, and certainly not to the soaps (which “enjoyed” the occasional label of being “American rubbish” when rebroadcast abroad). Other kinds of broadcasts, however, gained the attention of nearly everyone as politicians “discovered” radio early on: on June 21, 1923, Warren Harding became the first president of the United States to be heard on the radio.

A few months later, in November, former President Woodrow Wilson followed in Harding’s footsteps. Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, had his 1925 inaugural address broadcast coast to coast over a network of 27 stations, and then, two years later, his February 1927 address to a joint session of Congress was transmitted to an audience of 20 million over a network of 42 stations stretching from Portland, Maine, to San Francisco, California. The speech was the first international political broadcast as well, as it was sent by shortwave radio to London, where the BBC rebroadcast it over 2LO to the whole of the UK, to Paris, and to South Africa. President Franklin Roosevelt and Germany’s Adolf Hitler brought political radio to its peak, both before and during the Second World War, with Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats and Hitler’s loud, melodramatic (occasionally even unhinged) rants.

As fast as politicians embraced radio, they did not outpace the “radio priests,” the so-called Bible-thumpers of the ether, who were the ancestors of today’s television evangelists. The start of the twentieth century was the age of Elmer Gantry-type evangelists (fundamentalist preachers) who held wildly popular tent revivals attended by vast crowds. It is estimated that the best known of these masters of religious fervor, Billy Sunday (1862–1935), spoke directly, face-to-face, to a total of perhaps 100 million people over the span of his entire career (as early as 1929 he also had his own radio show, The Back Home Hour).

That’s an impressive number, to be sure, but it could easily be equaled in a single month of Sunday-morning radio broadcasts. The multiplicative force of radio made the preachers who came after Billy Sunday into Hollywood-style celebrities-even cult figures-to millions of listeners during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The radio age of religion began just two months to the day after KDKA/Pittsburgh broadcast the 1920 Harding-Cox presidential election results, when that same station broadcast the January 2, 1921, sermon of the pastor of Pittsburgh’s Calvary Episcopal Church. The joining of radio and religion quickly blossomed from that simple beginning into what became known as the “Invisible Church,” or the “Electric Church,” or the “Electric Pulpit.”

These phrases describe what one writer called “the promise of GE & Jesus walking hand in hand to make radio [a] rousing commercial success.” It also made the radio preachers into influential forces to be reckoned with, whether with a regional or a national reach. Of the former, the Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944) is noteworthy, as in 1924 she started her very own radio station, KFSG, in Los Angeles (the call letters stood for Kall FourSquare Gospel).

Even when such programs were at the height of popularity, much more was happening in broadcast radio in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s than simply soap opera, crime shows, church services, adventure and Western programs, and political talk. There was sports, starting with the July 2, 1921, broadcast of the world heavyweight championship boxing match between the American Jack Dempsey and the French light-heavyweight champion Georges Carpentier (300,000 listened to what was billed as “The Scientific Sensation of the Century”). There was news and gossip (Walter Winchel); gossip shows (Your Hollywood Reporter); comedy (The Life of Riley); and game shows (Hit the Jackpot). In 1926 the US Department of Agriculture started its Radio Service to broadcast educational programming to farmers. That same year saw the start of the US Bureau of Home Economics’s Housekeepers’ Chat program, starring “Aunt Sammy” (so named because the star of the program was supposed to be the wife of Uncle Sam). These broadcasts, which continued until 1944, carried important information to America’s homemakers on topics that included nutrition, sanitation, child care, and emergency plumbing repairs. It was an enormously popular production. When the meal plans that had been broadcast were brought out in printed form (Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes) the Government Printing Office received more than a million orders.

Television killed old-time radio, but it wasn’t a total victory. A price was paid, as illustrated by the final paragraph of Joseph Julian’s 1975 book This Was Radio:

Trying to analyze the reasons for the broad, universal appeal of radio drama I find it expressed best by a little seven-year-old boy who…was asked which he liked better, plays on the radio or plays on television.

“On the radio,” he said.

“Why?” he was asked.

He thought for a moment, then replied, “Because I can see the pictures better.”

This perfectly illustrates why early radio became known as “the theatre of the mind.”

But that is just the end of a particular era. I vividly recall the thrill of hearing, after the end of old-time radio (but still more than half a century ago), the first voice radio message from the Moon, and, I predict, there are readers of this book who will hear the first voice radio transmission from the surface of Mars, a transmission not from alien space invaders but from humans who are alive on Earth right now. Won’t that be something!

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From The Mathematical Radio: Inside the Magic of Am, Fm, and Single-Sideband by Paul J. Nahin. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Nature discovered only one method of producing and arranging living matter. There is, however, another, simpler, more malleable, and quicker method, one that nature has never made use of. This other method, which also has the potential to develop life, is the one I discovered today.

Any scientist, especially one who works in the artificial life field, would love to make such a groundbreaking discovery, to be the first in the world to share these wonderful words on social media and publish the results in prestigious scientific journals. Unfortunately, another method to create life has not yet been found, and these notes were written in a laboratory book by the fictional mad scientist Rossum from Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., subtitled Rossum’s Universal Robots.

Karel Čapek (January 9, 1890–December 25, 1938) was a Czechoslovak writer, playwright, and journalist. I don’t believe he ever had an ambition to be one of the “firsts” in the world, but in the end he was. With his brother Josef he invented a new word—robot—and he was the first to use this word for an artificial human, formed from chemically synthesized living matter.

In Czech, R.U.R. was published in November 1920 and premiered on January 25, 1921 in the National Theatre in Prague. The play was first performed in English by the New York Theatre Guild on October 9, 1922. It was a great success—by 1923 R.U.R. had been translated into thirty languages. And the word “robot” remained untranslated in most of these.

Soon the word “robot” started to be used for all sorts of things, and Karel Čapek, instead of being happy at its fame, was upset and frustrated. He protested against the idea of robots in the form of electromechanical monsters that fly airplanes or destroy the world by trampling. His robots were not made of sheet metal and cogwheels; they were not a celebration of mechanical engineering!

In a column in the newspaper Lidové noviny in June 1935, he emphasized that when writing R.U.R. he was thinking instead of modern chemistry. Although it was the chemistry of the time, without concepts like DNA or RNA, his statements were quite timeless (as is all of R.U.R.). He laid stress on the idea that one day we will be able to produce, by artificial means, a living cell in a test tube.

That we will be able to create a new kind of matter by chemical synthesis, one that behaves like living material; an organic substance, different from what living cells are made of; something like an alternative basis for life, a material substrate in which life could have evolved, had it not, from the beginning, taken the path it did. He emphasized that we do not have to suppose that all the different possibilities of creation have been exhausted on our planet. His texts were such a brilliant ode to artificial life!

However, in Čapek’s lifetime there was no developed scientific field of artificial life (commonly abbreviated as ALife). This emerged several decades later. It is generally accepted that the modern field of ALife was established at a workshop held in Los Alamos in 1987 by Christopher G. Langton. The field focuses mainly on the creation of synthetic life on computers or in the laboratory, in order to study, simulate, and understand living systems.

Originally the field was a conglomerate of researchers from various disciplines including computer science, physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and philosophy, who were exploring topics and issues far outside of their own disciplines’ mainstreams, often topics of foundational and interdisciplinary character. These “renegade” scientists had problems finding colleagues, conferences, and journals in which to disseminate their research and to exchange ideas.

For this rich and diverse set of people, ALife became a new home, a “big tent,” unifying them especially in two main conferences (the International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, and later also the European Conference on Artificial Life, with meetings in alternating years) and one scientific journal (MIT Press’s Artificial Life).

Today, artificial life researchers meet annually at conferences simply titled ALife. I have attended many of them, and always it thrills me to see what kinds of topics are presented and how many views on a specific problem are offered during the discussions. The common characteristic of all researchers in the ALife community is their open mind. It really is a radically interdisciplinary field that cannot be defined either as pure science or engineering. It involves both, employing experimental and theoretical approaches, and the research is fundamental and mainly curiosity-driven.

Practical applications come as by-products, but they are not the goal. There are so many basic questions that we are still unable to answer, such as “What is life?”, “How did life originate?,” “What is consciousness?” and more. Many of these questions are related not only to science but also to philosophy. And what has always fascinated me most was how many of these contemporary questions were already heard in Čapek’s century-old science fiction play.

And therefore I often introduced and praised Čapek’s R.U.R. in my talks at conferences, but also in scientific papers, in normal conversation, everywhere! Not only because I wanted to call attention to all of the fascinating open questions related to artificial life that Čapek outlined, but also to point out that the original robots were made from artificial flesh and bones, which was always surprising information for many people.

Moreover, I wanted to remind the world of the Czech giant, Karel Čapek, who was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in literature. Of course, I also like his other works. Since childhood I have loved his books Nine Fairy Tales and Dashenka, or the Life of a Puppy. Later I read The Makropulos Affair, The Mother, The White Disease, War with the Newts, Krakatit, The Gardener’s Year, and others.

Some of these works also raise issues related to artificial life (especially War with the Newts), but Rossum’s Universal Robots has become my favorite since I started my doctoral studies in the Chemical Robotics Laboratory of Professor František Štěpánek at my alma mater, the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague.

In fact, the chemical robots in the form of microparticles that we designed and investigated, and that had properties similar to living cells, were much closer to Čapek’s original ideas than any other robots today (“a blob of some colloidal pulp that not even a dog would eat,” as one of his characters puts it).

Currently, in my laboratory I examine droplets of decanol in the environment of sodium decanoate (an organic phase almost immiscible with water in the form of a droplet located on the surface of an aqueous surfactant solution). These droplets are unique in that they somehow resemble the behavior of living organisms.

For example, just as living cells or small animals can move in an oriented manner in an environment of chemical substances—in other words, they can move chemotactically (chase food or run away from poisonous substances)—so my droplets can follow the addition of salts or hydroxides in a very similar way. Thanks to chemotaxis, they can even find their way out of a maze!

Just as living cells change their shape and create various protrusions on their surface, so also decanol droplets are able to change their shape under certain conditions and create all kinds of tentacle-like structures. We also recently discovered that amazing interactions occur in groups of many droplets, when the droplets cluster or, on the contrary, repel each other, so that their dance creations on glass slides or in Petri dishes resemble the collective behavior of animal populations like flocks.

Bottom line, I started to call these droplets liquid robots! Just as Rossum’s robots were artificial human beings that only looked like humans and could imitate only certain characteristics and behaviors of humans, so liquid robots, as artificial cells, only partially imitate the behavior of their living counterparts.

As I mentioned above, R.U.R. was published in 1920. As the year 2020 approached, I felt that we must mark the centenary of this timeless work and celebrate the word “robot” in some way. Some of my ideas were never realized, and some were only partially realized due to the COVID pandemic (we organized the ALife 2021 conference as an online-only event, rather than hosting it in Prague as we wanted). The project I really took seriously was to prepare a book on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the word “robot.” This book would contain Čapek’s original play along with present-day views on this century-old story.

And thus the book Robot 100: Sto rozumů was released by our University of Chemistry and Technology Prague in November 2020, exactly 100 years after Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. It contained the contributions of 100 people, mostly scientists, but also writers, journalists, radio and television presenters, musicians, athletes, and artists. R.U.R. is a timeless work, in which we can find many topics that scientists deal with even today, whether the synthesis of artificial cells, tissues, and organs, issues of evolution and reproduction, or the ability to imitate the behavior of human beings and show at least signs of intelligence or consciousness.

R.U.R. also outlines social problems related to globalization, the distribution of power and wealth, religion, and the position of women in society. Every contributor could find an example of how R.U.R. raises some still unanswered questions of their field.

The feedback of readers and the positive reviews encouraged me to publish an English edition. I was pleased that the MIT Press was interested in publishing my book. The key problem, as I had already seen in feedback from contributors, was the English translations of Čapek’s play. Probably the most widely used English translation of R.U.R. is the very first one from 1923 by Paul Selver.

However, it is not a very successful translation, and Čapek himself was not satisfied with it. Not only did Selver leave out some passages, but he even completely canceled the character of the robot Damon. Also, while Čapek’s original consists of a prologue and three acts, in translations we often encounter three acts and a final epilogue. Foreign authors often wrote about Rossum junior as a son because he is referred to as “young Rossum,” but in the Czech original it is clearly stated that he was the nephew of the older Rossum.

Another difference was Domin’s request for Helena Glory’s hand—while in the Czech original he only places both hands on her shoulders, in Selver’s translation he even kisses her. Inconsistencies in the translations were mostly easily solvable trifles, but sometimes they complicated the content of the entire essay.

It was clear that if we published Robot 100 in English, it would require a completely new translation. I am happy that Professor Štěpán Šimek agreed to translate the first edition of Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. I was so happy when I obtained his comments to the translation: “This is a straight translation in terms of the original. By that I mean, that unlike some other translations that I’m familiar with, I have not made any cuts, that I have translated every word and line, and that I haven’t changed anything from the original. While the play has some obvious dramaturgical flaws, I have not tried to correct those in the translation. I believe that cuts, rearrangements, dramaturgical clarifications, and stuff like that are the job of the potential director and/or dramaturg, not the translator, unless the translator is asked to create an adaptation of the original. In other words, this is a Translation, not an Adaptation.”

And I was amazed when I read the new translation. It is excellent and it fulfills my expectations. Thanks to Štěpán Šimek’s work, this book offers English-speaking readers a truly faithful translation of Čapek’s R.U.R.

It was obvious that if we published book Robot 100 in English in 2023, it would require a new title, because there is no centenary this year. We also decided not to include the contributions of all one hundred of the contributing authors in our print edition, but to select mainly those related to artificial life, and to publish the rest online.

Finally, we have chosen the title R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life. This title perfectly reflects what the readers will find within—the century-old play R.U.R in a completely new and modern translation by Štěpán Šimek, and twenty essays on how Čapek’s brilliant play has the prescient power to illustrate current directions and issues in artificial life research and beyond.

__________________________________

From R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life by Karel Čapek, edited by Jitka Čejková. Copyright © 2024. Available from MIT Press.

And yet again, we’ve reached the end of a long, bad list year.For the sake of posterity, and probably because we’re masochists, this week we’ve been counting down the 50 biggest literary stories of 2023, so you can remember the good, the bad, and all the literary cool girls we met along the way. But you’ve made it to the end, almost. So with no further ado, these are the biggest literary stories of the year that was:

10.
It was time for Colleen Hoover to face the backlash.

2022 was the year that Colleen Hoover—BookTok monarch and undisputed heavyweight champion of 2020s book sales—went stratospheric. She outsold John Grisham and James Patterson combined. She outsold Dr. Seuss. She outsold the damn Bible. As Alexandra Alter put it in a New York Times profile of the author, published in October of that year: “To say she’s currently the best-selling novelist in the United States, to even compare her to other successful authors who have landed several books on the best seller lists, fails to capture the size and loyalty of her audience.”

2023, however, saw the bloom go off the rose a wee bit.

It began in January, when Hoover announced that she and her publisher, Atria, were issuing a coloring book tie-in for her biggest hit, It Ends With Us. That decision was not well received. Here’s how Chels Upton, writing for Slate, described the backlash:

The negative response was swift and overwhelming, for obvious reasons. It Ends With Us is a book about domestic violence. Hoover detractors who say she romanticizes abuse had a new weapon in their arsenal: How can Hoover pretend she takes the subject matter seriously while creating cutesy, juvenile merchandise? Only 24 hours after the coloring book’s publication was announced, it was canceled due to pushback from both her fans and critics.

After this happened, there seemed to be something of a vibe shift within the CoHo fan community, and impassioned Hoover takedowns—often accusing the author of romanticizing abuse and glamorizing harmful relationships—began to garner hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and YouTube.

Speaking to Jenna Hager Bush in June, Hoover seemed to take the criticism in her stride:

“If people don’t like what I write, I just try to avoid that side of it. I get it. It doesn’t bother me at all. I feel like when you have five books on the bestsellers list it’s very hard to be upset in any way by criticism. Because you know that people out there are enjoying your work, and I just keep my focus on that.”

Fair enough. –DS

9.
Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her Russia-set novel after social media blowback. 

On June 6th, Elizabeth Gilbert announced on social media that her next novel, The Snow Forest, would be published by Riverhead in February 2024. The story was inspired by Karp Lykov and his family, members of an orthodox sect who fled to the Siberian forest to escape religious persecution from the Soviet government and lived there, cut off from human contact, for decades.

On June 12th, the Eat Pray Love author returned to social media to announce that she was indefinitely delaying publication due to a “enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from [her] Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain about the fact that [she] would choose to release a book in the world right now … that is set in Russia.” (The criticism largely manifested through one-star reviews on Goodreads, presumably before most reviewers had read the book.)

As you might remember, the internet exploded with think pieces and backlash to the backlash—some applauded Gilbert, many more expressed concern over censorship (self-imposed and otherwise), everyone continued hating Goodreads, and at least one person wondered if Gilbert was just bored. (As the New York Times pointed out, other novels set in Russia flew under the radar, perhaps indicating that popularity is not a writer’s best friend.) Riverhead, noticeably, stayed mum on the matter.

Will The Snow Forest ever see the light of day? Who knows. Decidedly not in February 2024, which will mark two years of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. –ES

8.
Private equity fund KKR bought Simon & Schuster.

No one was really expecting the Justice Department to halt Penguin Random House’s attempted purchase of its largest rival, Simon & Schuster, so when the final word came down in late 2022, it sent shockwaves through publishing (and through PRH). For many in the book world, the decision was a welcome one, a rare moment of government intervention on the side of the little guy (writers, in this case, and the potential size of their advances).

But as the dust settled we all began to wonder what would come next? Nick Fuller Googins wrote optimistically at Lit Hub about the huge positives of the employee ownership model, aka the Norton model:

The workforce of WW Norton has successfully owned and managed the venerable publishing house since shortly after World War II, when Mary Norton sold her stock to the company’s editors and managers. They drew up a Joint Stockholders Agreement that still remains in effect, allowing active Norton employees to elect leadership, participate in decisions affecting the company’s future, and share profits. Anyone who leaves Norton must sell back their shares, ensuring that no outside market exists for ownership of the company. There is no risk of a hostile takeover, no fear of an unexpected sale. The employees are free and independent to do what they have done so well for decades: publish kickass books.

Wow, yeah, that does sound really good… But it was not to be.

In early August of this year it was announced that KKR, a private equity fund, had purchased Simon & Schuster for $1.62 billion. It’s no secret that private equity funds like to acquire struggling companies, ramp up short term profits (often by slashing expenses), and then sell them for a profit; but as many have noted, Simon & Schuster is far from struggling. As Alex Kirshner’s great piece for Slate points out:

Simon & Schuster is already humming. It just reported a record sales year and seems to have been on the market in the first place mainly because its parent company, Paramount Global, saw it as “not core” and liked the chance to pay down some debt with the proceeds. A private equity firm’s specific designs for Simon & Schuster would be clearer if the book publisher were a disaster site, an iconic brand in need of better management so that it could return to its place as a literary pillar. But Simon & Schuster never lost that status in the first place, so KKR’s buyout lacks the patina of a rescue operation.

So will KKR leave well enough alone? The company has talked publicly about giving employees equity—which is a good sign—but ask anyone who’s worked in newspapers or magazines in the last 20 years about private equity and they’ll roll their eyes, or vomit, or both.

Check back in this space a year from now and we’ll have a better idea… –JD

7.
Ron DeSantis’s war on books continues unabated.

Soon-to-be failed presidential candidate and wearer of terrible boots Ron DeSantis has succeeded in making Florida one of the most hostile states in the union when it comes to books. Again and again DeSantis has doubled down on his role as Culture Warrior in Chief, ginning up conspiratorial fears of the Woke Mind Virus, mobilizing veritable armies of white suburban moms against queer people, Brown people, and the collected works of Kimberlé Crenshaw anything to do with Black history.

According to PEN America: “Florida is one of the worst states in the country for those who care about the freedom to read: 13 school districts in Florida banned books in the second half of 2022—more than in any other state—adding up to a total of 357 bans.”

And as our own Janet Manley asked back in May:

FLORIDA, ARE YOU OKAY?

I’ve kept a rough tally of things the sunshine state is afraid of:

the word “gay”
Oprah
reproductive rights
Mem Fox
drag shows
Judy Blume
fresh water

and things Florida thinks are fine:

assault weapons
alligators
parrot shirts and Crocs that come with a bottle opener

Are you a Floridian? How is the vibe down there right now? I’d love if you could let me know in the comments. <3

Perhaps the worst thing to come out of DeSantis’s unrelenting and deeply cynical fearmongering is that scourge of school boards everywhere, Moms For Liberty, cofounded by Tallahassee’s Jennifer Pippin and Sarasota’s Bridget Ziegler (she of the now infamous sex scandal). Though it appears the group is collapsing from within, much damage has already been done, as the Washington Post itemized this past May (translations mine):

“Nearly half of filings — 43 percent — targeted titles with LGBTQ characters or themes, while 36 percent targeted titles featuring characters of color or dealing with issues of race and racism.”
TRANSLATION: We don’t want to hear about you unless you’re white and straight.

“Many challengers wrote that reading books about LGBTQ people could cause children to alter their sexuality or gender.”
TRANSLATION: Books can turn you gay.

“Serial filers relied on a network of volunteers gathered together under the aegis of conservative parents’ groups such as Moms for Liberty.”
TRANSLATION: It only takes a few bad actors to corrupt an otherwise open society. This is the Tolerance Paradox at work.

“‘These censorship attacks on books have real-life human impacts that are going to resonate for generations,’ said John Chrastka, cofounder and executive director of library advocacy group EveryLibrary.”
TRANSLATION: The few hateful book-banners don’t actually care about the mental well-being of children.

“From the 2000s to the early 2010s, LGBTQ books were the targets of between less than 1 and 3 percent of book challenges filed in schools, according to ALA data. That number rose to 16 percent by 2018, 20 percent in 2020 and 45.5 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available.”
TRANSLATION: This is a targeted, activist-driven culture war in the absence of any real policy ideas on the right.

“‘If that book was made without the strap-on dildo,’ Jennifer Pippin (founding chairman of Moms for Liberty) said, ‘that book wouldn’t be challenged.’”
TRANSLATION: Jennifer Pippin will not peg you, no matter how nicely you ask.

It’s hard to gauge whether we’ve reached peak book-banning, yet. My guess—as we enter an election year—is no. Thanks to DeSantis, politicians across the country have seen just how easy it is to mobilize vague conservative unease into full-blown, torch-bearing mobs. Whatever comes of the remainder of DeSantis’s ugly political career, his place in the annals of American demagoguery is assured, boots and all.  –JD

6.
It was a big year for ghostwriters.

One of the biggest books this year—without a doubt—was Spare, which was published just as Harry and Meghan officially stepped down as senior royals. In the publishing industry, everyone was a bit stressed trying to get a copy of the book before the on-sale date (Alexandra Jacobs recounted the New York Times’ inability to get an advance copy, which meant she only had a day to read and review it.) We were teased audiobook clips of the now Duke of Sussex dealing with his frostbitten penis, but most importantly, we saw book sales soar: the day it went on sale, the book sold more than 1.4 million copies; in its first week it sold 3.2 million.

Then in May, “Harry’s ghostwriter” J.R. Moehringer broke the cardinal rule of celebrity ghostwriters (which many are contractually forbidden to speak about) and wrote a seven thousand word essay about what it was like to be the Royal’s ghostwriter (as well as Andre Agassi’s and Phil Knight’s). The essay is warm, informative, and telling: he describes an argument he had with Harry over how to end a “difficult passage”:

Some part of me was still able to step outside the situation and think, This is so weird. I’m shouting at Prince Harry. Then, as Harry started going back at me, as his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed, a more pressing thought occurred: Whoa, it could all end right here.

Of course Harry used a ghostwriter, but what does it mean when we begin to acknowledge that the books “by” our favorite celebrities are, in fact, written by writers like Moehringer, who also happens to have a Pulitzer and has written his own memoir and novel? Let’s call 2023 the year of the ghostwriter; with many high-profile (and high-advance) celebrity books published, it was inevitable that the details would be revealed—Britany Spears (who was reportedly paid a $12.5MM advance for her memoir) apparently had a team behind her that included the writer Sam Lansky; in Paris, Paris Hilton thanked her ghost writer, Joni Rodgers, as someone who “helped me find my voice.”

But it’s not just memoirs—celebrities who write fiction likewise use ghostwriters, as The Guardian explored over the summer. Teenage actress Millie Bobby Brown’s novel sparked some controversy when it was revealed that her fall novel was written with (or by?) a ghostwriter.

Their names might not be on the cover copy—yet. But perhaps we’ll see more acknowledgments in years to come #nametheghostwriter. –EF

5.
Posthumous editions of Roald Dahl’s books—and then Ian Fleming’s—ignited controversy.

In this time of deep partisan divisions, it was in a way refreshing to see people from across the political spectrum come together this year over one particular topic: outrage at Roald Dahl’s work being posthumously changed to reflect the suggestions of modern sensitivity readers.

It wasn’t just the usual right-wing bloviators getting up in arms about wokeness (although there was, of course, plenty of that)—Steven Spielberg and Salman Rushdie and Suzanne Nossel of PEN America and the Queen Consort all chimed in about it. In an unholy fusion worthy of David Cronenberg, knee-jerk defenders of the perceived right for a person to be as offensive as they’d like came together with champions of good writing and good humanity to decry Penguin’s decision to edit the texts. They swiftly changed course and brought out a batch of ‘classic’ editions of the Dahl books—indeed, so swiftly that one might believe it had been a double-dipping plan all along.

Stories followed about how Ian Fleming’s James Bond books were being edited for a reissue campaign, about how R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books had been edited without his knowledge, and a new generation was introduced to the concept of bowdlerization.

And to be clear, some of the changes to the Dahl books in particular were unforgivable. Entire sentences added to the text, rhymes butchered, and a real “trees instead of forest” practice of removing specific words like ‘fat’ and ‘crazy’ or gender-specific pronouns while leaving the rest of the questionable context in place.

This is a complicated topic to discuss under the best of circumstances, and the internet of 2023 is certainly not the best of circumstances—but I’m going to give it my best shot. James Bond will always be a character defined by his casual racism and his brutality towards women, in service of the Crown. Roald Dahl was a terrible anti-semite and his books contain some of the nastiest sentences in fiction, children’s or otherwise. Agatha Christie really did title a book that, only to have it retitled twice. These things are true and it is in fact important that we know about them. Erasing any of this does nothing but try to sweep history under the rug, and anyone who has ever cleaned a house before knows that you can only get away with that for so long before all hell breaks loose.

It’s also true that it can hurt to read a slur, or a scene of sexual violence, or to in any way be thrown out of a work of fiction by a harsh reminder that the world used to be a crueler place. At a time when real violence is being done to marginalized populations, is it really such a big deal that we take steps to protect the more vulnerable among us?

But just as conflict is not abuse and retweets are not endorsements, assuming that all readers who encounter these texts in their unexpurgated form will take them at face value is a colossal misunderstanding. We read in order to make sense of the world, and while it might be true that Roald Dahl had plenty of shitty stances on beauty, race, size, and intelligence, he also wrote with grace about the incredible powers of imagination and love. When we read Ian Fleming and see James Bond talking casually about rape or racism, it is valuable to be able to say “you know, I don’t agree” instead of just pretending that it wasn’t there at all. After all, a version of King Lear with a happy ending isn’t a good revision; it’s one that misses the entire point of the story. –DB

4.
Writers and other literary people won some key battles against corporate interests.

Though we didn’t need any further evidence that solidarity is always a good look, unions racked up some significant wins in 2023. In February, after almost hitting the 100-day mark on the picket line, HarperCollins Union members (UAW 2110) agreed to a tentative deal with management. In April, the Writers Guild of America went on strike for 148 days. Writing about authors on the picket line, Alexis Gunderson made the point that “when there are already so few paths to having a stable career as a writer, the prospect of losing this one has also proved to be galvanizing.”

Of course, not everyone was galvanized—Drew Barrymore was set to host the 2023 National Book Awards, until she announced that her eponymous show would resume production amid the strike—without its writers.

“The National Book Awards is an evening dedicated to celebrating the power of literature, and the incomparable contributions of writers to our culture,” the National Book Foundation said in a statement. “In light of the announcement that The Drew Barrymore Show will resume production, the National Book Foundation has rescinded Ms. Barrymore’s invitation to host the 74th National Book Awards Ceremony. Our commitment is to ensure that the focus of the Awards remains on celebrating writers and books, and we are grateful to Ms. Barrymore and her team for understanding in this situation.”

LeVar Burton, who walked the picket line as a SAG member during this year’s 118-day actors’ strike, replaced her as host. Let this be a lesson to all of us! –JG

3.
The book banning continued.

The biggest literary story of 2022 was the national proliferation of book bans. Unfortunately, the trend did not abate in 2023—though neither did the efforts to push back.

PEN America recorded 3,362 cases of book bans in the 2022-’23 school year, a 33% increase from the 2,532 bans in the 2021-’22 school year. Over 40 percent of these bans are happening in Florida. The most banned books include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, John Green’s Looking for Alaska, and of course, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir.

The American Library Association has also recorded a record high of book bans and attempted book bans in 2023; this year was notable for the fact that the challenges had notably expanded from school libraries to public libraries. “The irony is that you had some censors who said that those who didn’t want books pulled from schools could just go to the public libraries,”’Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told the AP. Super.

“I never thought I’d be a president who is fighting against elected officials trying to ban and banning books,” said President Biden in April, at a White House event honoring teachers. “Empty shelves don’t help kids learn very much. And I’ve never met a parent who wants a politician dictating what their kid can learn, and what they can think, or who they can be.” In June, the Biden administration promised to appoint an “anti-book ban coordinator” in the Education Department; that person was finally named in September, though the scope of their powers is fairly limited.

In October, Scholastic came under fire for a policy change around its beloved Scholastic Book Fairs: some books had been separated into a separate, optional collection, which they titled Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice. This collection included “most of the books dealing with issues of race, gender and sexuality,” according to NPR. The internet was displeased.

Initially, Scholastic defended their decision, explaining in a press release:

There is now enacted or pending legislation in more than 30 U.S. states prohibiting certain kinds of books from being in schools—mostly LGBTQIA+ titles and books that engage with the presence of racism in our country. Because Scholastic Book Fairs are invited into schools, where books can be purchased by kids on their own, these laws create an almost impossible dilemma: back away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians, and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued, or prosecuted.

But after a few days of public pressure, Scholastic president Ellie Berger apologized and reversed the decision. “This fall, we made changes in our U.S. elementary school fairs out of concern for our Book Fair hosts,” Scholastic told USA Today in a statement. “In doing this, we offered a collection of books to supplement the diverse collection of titles already available at the Scholastic Book Fair. We understand now that the separate nature of the collection has caused confusion and feelings of exclusion. We are working across Scholastic to find a better way.”

And there has been other pushback as well: In May, PEN America, along with Penguin Random House and a group of authors, parents, and students, filed a “first of its kind” federal lawsuit to prevent the removal of books from school libraries in Escambia County, Florida. In June 2023, Governor Pritzker signed a bill making Illinois the first state to outlaw book bans; in September, California’s Governor Newsom followed suit. Elsewhere, individual parents and educators continue to fight the good fight. After all: the vast majority of Americans do not want this. Which is, I suppose, a certain kind of silver lining. –ET

2.
Writers are killed in Gaza; censored, silenced, and standing in solidarity in the U.S.

For over two months now, Israel (with the full military, financial, and diplomatic support of the US) has laid siege to the already-benighted Gaza strip, killing at least 18,272 people (including 8,000+ children), injuring at least 49,229, displacing at least 1.8 million, and damaging or destroying at least 305,000 homes. Despite calls for a permanent humanitarian ceasefire from the UN, the Pope, every major human rights association the world over, and tens of millions of protestors, this horror, this genocide, continues apace.

Gaza’s literary and journalistic communities have suffered heavy losses.

At least 75 Palestinian journalists and writers, as well as numerous members of their immediate and extended families, have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and sniper fire since the war on Gaza began. On October 20, the novelist, poet, and educator Heba Abu Nada was killed, along with her son, in their home in south Gaza. On November 19, Belal Jadallah, the “godfather of Palestinian journalism,” was killed while trying to reach his family. On December 7, the poet and scholar Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike that also killed his brother, his sister, and four of her children.

The damage to Gaza’s cultural sector has been so devastating, and so clearly targeted, that many are now referring to it as a “cultural genocide.”

Here in the US, many literary and cultural institutions showed that the McCarthyist streak in American public life is alive and well.

Artforum‘s editor-in-chief was fired for publishing a letter expressing solidarity with Palestinians. Several events for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama author Nathan Thrall were called off. Salvadoran poet and activist Javier Zamora was disinvited from a panel for publicly supporting Palestinian liberation. eLife editor-in-chief Michael Eisen, was fired for reposting an article from The Onion. 92NY canceled an event featuring the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen after he signed an open letter critical of Israel. Zibby Owens withdrew sponsorship from the National Book Awards, citing its “pro-Palestinian agenda.”

However, we also saw many inspiring displays of Palestinian solidarity to counteract this chilling of free speech.

Thousands of writers signed an open letter expressing solidarity with the people of Palestine. More than a dozen of this year’s National Book Award finalists took to the stage to call for a ceasefire. Over 2000 poets and writers pledged to boycott the Poetry Foundation, citing “a recent instance of prejudiced silencing.” Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Boyer resigned from the New York Times with this extraordinary letter. The Giller Prize ceremony in Toronto was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters, who were later supported by more than 1,700 Canadian writers. The kidnapping of poet Mosab Abu Toha by Israeli forces prompted an outcry from the literary community (Abu Toha was later released and eventually made it to Egypt with his wife and children). Hundreds of literary translators signed a statement in solidarity with Gaza, as did dozens of indie bookstores and hundreds of small publishers from around the world. And Rupi Kaur publicly declined an invitation from the White House.

As human rights activist and Booker Prize-winner Arundhati Roy said in a powerful address to the Munich Literature Festival back in mid-November:

If we allow this brazen slaughter to continue, even as it is livestreamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it. Something in our moral selves will be altered forever.

…

The world must intervene. The occupation must end. Palestinians must have a viable homeland.

If not, then the moral architecture of western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even that provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.

So please—for the sake of Palestine and Israel, for the sake of the living and in the name of the dead, for the sake of the hostages being held by Hamas and the Palestinians in Israel’s prisons—for the sake of all of humanity—cease fire now. –DS

1.
The rise of OpenAI, ChatGPT, and fears of an AI takeover.

The jury is still out on whether or not artificial intelligence will replace the novelist as we know it or is, in fact, one big dumb bubble. The one thing we know for certain is that everyone has an opinion about AI and will freely share it. Here at Lit Hub, we’ve published more than our fair share this year, pro and con:

Randy Sparkman wondered if a computer could write like Eudora Welty:

This time, I asked the model to take on the role of tutor. Teach me more about Eudora Welty’s writing. Give examples of her use of language. Ask me questions that develop my understanding of her writing and use of language, until I say “class is over.”

Debbie Urbanski actually thinks novelists should embrace artificial intelligence:

I worry that we’re forgetting how amazing this all is. Rather than feeling cursed or worried, I feel lucky to get to be here and witness such a change to how we think, live, read, understand, and create. Yes, we have some things to figure out, issues of training, rights, and contracts—and, on a larger level, safety—but I think it’s equally important to look up from such concerns from time to time with interest and even optimism, and wonder how this new advance in technology might widen our perspectives, our sense of self, our creativity, and our definition of what is human.

Naomi S. Baron feels strongly that we need to defend human writing in the age of AI:

If writing helps us think, what happens when we surrender the process to AI? We risk becoming cognitively and expressively disempowered. […] If we cede to AI final say about words and even commas, we jeopardize more than artistic pride. We risk convincing ourselves that in the name of efficiency, it’s harmless for AI to assume ever wider swaths of what we previously would have written ourselves.

Gabrielle Bellot takes a more nuanced approach and approaches the problem from the opposite direction, through literature:

Artificial intelligence has its precursors in many of our earliest achievements as a species. It’s in our tools, or technology—not just the obvious cases, like chatbots, but in the simpler ways that we have been taught to make technologies extensions of our own flesh-and-blood bodies.

This isn’t a bad thing, in and of itself. It’s how we’ve survived this long as a species, using our tools to do things that other creatures can do—flight, deep dives into the ocean’s blues, enhancing our strength and environmental resistance and speed through weapons and clothes and vehicles. Technology is the story of humanity from our earliest days in firelit caverns, which is why Freud famously called humans “prosthetic gods” in Civilization and Its Discontents.

I have no doubt that we will publish many more such pieces in 2024, of differing positions, about AI and its relationship to writing.

And while I think people are right to worry that a lot of writing jobs will be made redundant by AI, it’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of those jobs are predicated on a terrible version of the Internet that relies on an endless churn of content, with little to no value. (I’d also point out that human beings write thousands of terrible novels a year, too, but that might get me in trouble.)

To be frank, AI is not only the biggest news story of the year, it’s going to be the biggest story of our era, whether we like it or not.  –JD

And yet again, we’ve reached the end of a long, bad year. For the sake of posterity, and probably because we’re masochists, here’s the second installment of the 50 biggest literary stories of 2023, so you can remember the good, the bad, and all the literary cool girls we met along the way. Have fun:

30.
The End of an Era for the Old Guard of Publishing

One of the many knock-on effects of Penguin Random House’s failed attempt to acquire Simon & Schuster was the acceleration of departures by a legendary generation of editors, the final act in an era of publishing upheaval that began with the COVID pandemic and Black Lives Matters protests of 2020.

Gone now are the likes of Daniel Halpern (founder of Ecco Press), Victoria Wilson (who worked with Anne Rice and Lorrie Moore), Ann Close (editor of Lawrence Wright, Alice Munro, and Norman Rush), Shelley Wanger (Edward Said, John Richardson, Joan Didion), Jonathan Segal (seven of his books have won Pulitzers), Kathy Hourigan (who worked closely with Robert Caro for decades), Wendy Wolf (Nathaniel Philbrick, John Barry, and Steven Pinker), Rick Kot (Barbra Streisand, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and Ray Kurzweil), and Paul Slovak (Amor Towles, Elizabeth Gilbert, and David Byrne).

Most of these editors and publishers took generous buyout packages from a company eager to trim its expenses. And as this expansive New York Magazine feature points out:

One thing that’s making it slightly easier for the old guard to say good-bye is their hatred of the work-from-home era. “It infuriates me to no end,” says one person who reluctantly accepted the buyout. The PRH offices in midtown remain empty as ever. “If you go in there, it’s quite shocking,” says an exec who dropped by recently. “You walk on to one of those floors and there’s literally no one there. Just books in boxes piled up. It looks like a storage house.”

Many of those listed above had versions of the kind of old fashioned publishing careers that remain dominant in the public imagination (three-martini lunches, extravagant expense accounts, glamorous book parties), a professional way of life largely unrecognizable to the majority of the thousands of lower level workers that actually get books published.

Nonetheless, the loss of so much brilliant institutional knowledge—and the well funded editorial risk-taking that so often went along with it—is a sad moment for literary culture.  –JD

29.
Reading became . . . cool?

Odds are that, if you’re reading this list, you know that reading is cool and probably have since LeVar Burton told you so when you were a child. But 2023 was the year that reading became Cool Again, according to the culture. LA is hosting pop-up readings in parking lots, “Literary It Girls” are now throwing the most exclusive of book launch parties, the Look Book photographed the attendees at Catherine Lacey’s launch event, you can buy a hat plastered with the name of your favorite (dead) author (they got rid of the living-author hats, which was probably for the best), Chris Pine keeps being spotted with bags of books in seemingly every city he visits…

Honestly, if you want a hot tip, we’re betting that next year’s big trends will be everybody ditching their phones to carry around battered Penguin paperbacks in their back pockets, from which they can and will read aloud at the slightest provocation. Also there might be more hats. Watch this space. –DB

28.
Caroline Calloway and Natalie Beach published dueling books.

Say what you will about Caroline Calloway: The woman knows how to capture a headline. Or, in the case of the well-timed release of her self-published memoir, Scammer, wrest the headlines from her best friend-turned-very public bad art friend, Natalie Beach. Beach’s memoir-in-essays, Adult Drama, which sprang from her viral essay “I Was Caroline Calloway,” was released on June 20 by Hanover Square. Calloway’s—originally slated for publication (by her, at the steep price of $65) in 2020, shipped that same month, guaranteeing that it would garner mention (at the very least) in any bit of publicity for Beach’s book.

Becca Rothfeld at The Washington Post had this to say of the dueling memoirs: “Beach is a talented essayist with a promising career ahead of her. Calloway is a lunatic who has already written a masterpiece.” Tyler Foggatt at The New Yorker came to a similar conclusion, writing “Beach’s book is less meandering than Calloway’s, and yet it is also slower and more unsure of itself.”

As you might expect from someone who built an identity from the fetishization of aristocracy, Calloway is an expert at dueling. She doesn’t even need a second. –JG

27.
World’s largest and worst bookstore, Amazon, gets sued by the FTC.

In what is probably the largest suit every brought against the world’s largest distributor of stuff we generally don’t need, the FTC—specifically chairwoman Lina Khan—is accusing Amazon of

…exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon to reach them.

That sounds about right. But why is this literary news? Most of you probably know that Jeff Bezos began his little experiment in online shopping with books, a gambit that turned him into the overwritten evil genius caricature he is today, and changed forever the way we buy books—for the worse.

Will this suit change anything? Probably not, but this is likely just the beginning of a protracted effort to rein in the company’s world historical monopoly on what people buy.  –JD

26.
Haruki Murakami published a novel (but English speakers did not get to read it).

In March we reported that there would be a new novel by Haruki Murakami but, alas and alack, English readers wouldn’t get to read it. The Japanese publisher pitched the 1,200 page book as: “Must go to the city. No matter what happens. A locked up ‘story’ starts to move quietly as if ‘old dreams’ are woken up and unraveled in a secluded archive.” OK! In April, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (Machi to Sono Futashikana Kabe) was published.

The Japan Times described the book as a novel told in three parts: the “first of which is based on Murakami’s 1980 short story of the same title, which he considered a failed work and had hoped to return to one day. In it, a male narrator seeks out a girlfriend from his teenage years, and moves between the real world and a fantasy city surrounded by a very high wall. In part two, the protagonist leaves his job to work in the library of a new town, and in part three, the story returns to the walled city.”

Trolling Reddit threads and Japanese discussion boards via Google Translate, it seems the book treads similar ground as Murakami’s 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World but has been appreciated by fans for being a good example of Murakami’s signature style. According to distributors, the novel is the top-selling book across genres for the first half of 2023, beating out a guidebook for the latest Pokemon game on Nintendo Switch. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for the English translation before too long. –EF

25.
Wired published a pretty mean profile of Brandon Sanderson . . . and Sanderson responded.

Perhaps the fact that Mormon fantasy author Brandon Sanderson made $55 million in 2022 started things off on the wrong foot. For Wired senior editor Jason Kehe, that was the peg on which to hang a profile of the author, “Brandon Sanderson Is Your God,” which was published to . . . quite a bit of drama, it turned out, in March.

“How’d he do it? Why now? Is Brandon Sanderson even a good writer?” he asked, embarking on a quest to Utah to find out.

The result is an author profile that is either incredibly mean or lightly elitist, depending on your interpretation of Kehe’s text, and your personal stance on the quality (Stanley Fish? Are you out there?) of Wheel of Time (Sanderson authored three books, and the series was adapted by Netflix), and his dozens of other works from the “Cosmere” and “Cytoverse” (worlds in which he is much richer than a magazine writer).

Does Kehe insult Sanderson’s writing, or Sanderson, or Sanderson’s Mormonism in this piece? Yes. All of those things. Some grabs from which you can make your own assessment:

“Sanderson is extremely Mormon. What makes less sense is why there’s a hole the size of Utah where the man’s literary reputation should be.”

“…none of his self-analysis is, for my purposes, exciting. In fact, at that first dinner, over flopsy Utah Chinese—this being days before I’d meet his extended family, and attend his fan convention, and take his son to a theme park, and cry in his basement—I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame.”

“My god. Here’s a sample sentence: ‘It was going to be very bad this time.’ Another one: ‘She felt a feeling of dread.’”

This goes on and on. Kehe’s chief criticism of Sanderson is that the author is simply too prolific to be good (he notes a diagnosis of graphomania; a manic compulsion to put words down).

Breaking every rule in the author’s handbook (apparently, according to Kehe, not for the first time), Sanderson responded via Reddit, home turf for Wheel of Time fans, in a well-written and occasionally VERY SHARP yet kind response (this feels like the most “extremely Mormon” thing I can identify, if you wish to allow such rhetoric, and the best rebuttal, thank you Emily Temple, of Kehe’s critiques of Sanderson’s keyboard skills). Sanderson’s best “take” on the profile:

[Kehe] seems to be a sincere man who tried very hard to find a story, discovered that there wasn’t one that interested him, then floundered in trying to figure out what he could say to make deadline.

I would argue this was deadlier than anything in Kehe’s profile. So what was Kehe trying to do? Part of me wants to read the piece as a meta-commentary on the kind of immersive latter-day gonzo journalism that places the cynical journalist in the center of the story and the subject as the sidekick (“The Full Tatum”; “Can You Say … Hero?” (I liked both of these, but you know)), or perhaps it’s a meta example of the lamestream media ignoring, then “discovering” a story years later, or an intellectual look at the geography of power in late-capitalist America (San Francisco may have corporate campuses, but Utah has Goblin Valley!).

Or maybe we can take Kehe at face value and assume he pitched a story, went on assignment, then found very little to string together while standing at his desk in San Francisco in his Patagonia vest. (Still, the Dragonsteel conference sounds like something!)

Negative reviews and profiles are vanishingly rare these days, because, as people have noted, those trying to sell books and solicit blurbs are the same people writing reviews for the most part, so you can understand the thrill of publishing something willing to go against the grain (and to court those lucrative hate clicks).

Finally, I am sorry that Salt Lake City’s dim sum received such a beating, surely not deserved. –JM

24.
A romance writer who faked her own death returned to the Facebook group where it all began.

It’s a story worthy of a romance novel, or at least a soap opera: a self-published romance author who reportedly committed suicide in 2020 after being bullied in a Facebook group announced in January (on that same Facebook group!) that she had not in fact taken her own life! The story has plenty more twists (apparently she created a fake account and used that account to ultimately take over moderation of the Facebook group) and unsurprisingly the community didn’t take any of them terribly well. In the wake of these revelations, Laura Miller at Slate coined Meachen’s Law: “The longer a tightly-knit internet community exists, the more the likelihood that someone will fake their death approaches one.”

It’s easy to make light of this story (and certainly we expect to see some of its details powering the engines of pulpy plots for years to come) but once you push past the lurid details, it’s hard not to think poorly of everyone involved. The Internet, it seems, continues to bring out people’s worst behavior — whether that’s bullying, faking your own death, or otherwise trying to serve up what folks believe to be karmic retribution for perceived slights. And to think, this was the year I decided to start reading romance novels because everybody told me the community was incredibly supportive and kind! (Which, to be fair, they mostly are!) –DB

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 at any time day or night to speak with trained counselors.

23.
The Internet was convinced that Taylor Swift had written a book. 

In May, the Internet was in a furor over a certain, then-forthcoming nonfiction book, a 544-page memoir (including 40 full-color photographs) that was slated to be published by Flatiron on July 9th. Why? Because The Internet thought it was probably written by Taylor Swift.

It all started when the owner of indie bookshop Good Neighbor Bookstore posted a video on TikTok reporting that a major publisher had informed them of a secret book coming in July, and speculated that it might be by the singer, citing various Easter eggs and clues. The publisher quickly asked the bookseller to take the video down, but of course, nothing can truly be deleted anymore.

A screenshot originally posted to Reddit showed notes from sales rep Anne Hellman on Edelweiss indicating a few more hints: that the book had an announced first print run of 1 million copies, that it was “fun and NOT political,” and the title would be announced on June 13. Hellman also pointed out that July 9th—the worldwide pub date—was a Sunday, an unusual day for a book to be published, and that booksellers who wanted copies in advance had to sign an affidavit.

The Swifties, unsurprisingly, went deep. Some even theorized that that not only would Taylor be publishing a memoir, she’d be using it to come out. Alas (?), once actual publishing people got wind of the rumors, it was quickly confirmed not to be a Taylor Swift book, but rather, a BTS book. (July 9 being, apparently, Army Day.)

Did it sell like hotcakes, even though Taylor didn’t write it? It did indeed. –ET

22.
James Daunt puts the books back into Barnes & Noble, and it’s working.

I’m old enough to remember when Barnes & Noble was the big bad enemy box store, muscling into our charming little neighborhoods, taking all the business away from our delightful indie bookstores and our mom-and-pop coffee shops (I mean, they even made a famous documentary about it).

But then came the internet, and Amazon (see 27 above). So we realized that Barnes & Noble wasn’t exactly the enemy, and that for a lot of communities outside those charming, gentrified little urban neighborhoods, it served as both meeting place and starting point, for seniors in need of a place to read the newspaper, and for awkward teens looking for something—anything—to reveal a bit more of the world.

So now I find myself rooting for Barnes & Noble, and for former Waterstones CEO and bookstore whisperer James Daunt, whose tenure thus far as Barnes & Noble head honcho has surpassed expectations. The key to a successful bookstore, it turns out, is books. As Daunt told The Guardian in April:

[Now] you’re not seeing much beyond books. I mean, there are other things, but it’s unequivocally book-driven. Amazon doesn’t care about books … a book is just another thing in a warehouse. Whereas bookstores are places of discovery. They’re just really nice spaces.

This revolutionary focus on… books in bookstores has yielded very positive results. After having closed nearly 400 of its 1,000 US stores over the last decade, Daunt’s leadership has seen nearly 30 new stores open in 2023.

The margins for bookselling will always be tight, and there’s no guarantee Daunt’s initial successes can be sustained over time, but in a business accustomed to bad news, this is a nice change.  –JD

21.
Spotify makes its big move into audiobooks.

As I wrote way, way back in August, 2020, when it first became clear Spotify was going to move into the audiobooks space:

The biggest question (for me, anyway, as an audiobook reader and Spotify user) is how the hell Spotify plans to bring the one-price-for-infinite-songs subscription model to books. On the one hand, I imagine publishers are glad to see a potential and legitimate competitor enter the playing field to provide an alternative to Amazon’s incredibly aggressive contract stipulations (look, I love these guys, but I don’t think Bezos and co. are all that worried); on the other… UNLIMITED BOOKS WHAT NOW?!

Well, as of September 2023, Spotify is officially in the game, offering over 300,000 titles for purchase, a la carte. But here’s the scary new part: as of last month in the US, nearly 150,000 titles are available on-demand for premium members, just like songs or podcasts. And if you know anything about what Spotify has done to the livelihoods of musicians, this has to be scary as hell for writers. Maybe having everything you could ever possibly want available at any moment isn’t such a great idea?  –JD

20.
BookTok moved into publishing.

BookTok, eh? What’s it’s all about? How does it work? Why are its users so obsessed with Madeleine Miller’s The Song of Achilles? I, a hapless luddite, still don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I do know that the subcommunity is a powerful new player in the literary landscape, and woe betide anyone (me) who doubts its ability to move copies and shake up our dusty old industry. Case in point: in July, the New York Times reported that ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) had recently filed a trademark for a publisher (8th Note Press), hired a romance industry veteran as an acquisitions editor, and begun courting self-published romance writers to join its stable. Given that ByteDance has direct access to an audience larger than any traditional publisher could ever dream of and therefore could, in theory, boost its own authors at the expense of all others, the question must now be asked: is it only a matter of time before the Knopf Borzoi, the Random House penguin, and the Simon & Schuster guy with hat are each forced to bend the knee in supplication to publishing’s new overlord? –DS

19.
When Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain, horror followed.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as intellectual property hits the public domain, it will be immediately twisted far beyond the creator’s wildest dreams. It’s hard to imagine how A. A. Milne would react upon seeing even just the trailer for Blood and Honey, wherein a forgotten Pooh, Piglet, and co. have gone feral in Christopher Robin’s absence and are… *checks notes* now slasher villains hunting Christopher, his girlfriend, and their friends. It sounds absurd, and it is! But honestly, it’s also a hell of a lot of fun! Proper B-movie slasher silliness, as opposed to the increasingly ponderous and altogether un-fun vibe coming off of basically every other long-running franchise that keeps going back to the same well instead of getting strange with their IP.

Combined with a burgeoning wider acceptance for fan-fiction in general, there’s palpable joy out there at seeing artists go to the mat with wild ideas that play in established sandboxes. Obviously it can go too far (the director of Blood and Honey has expressed interest in a childhood-horror ‘shared universe’ involving the Hundred-Acre Wood characters as well as at least Bambi and Peter Pan) but honestly, if Sherlock Holmes can fight Dracula, why can’t Eeyore take his rightful place upon a throne of skulls and cover all the lands in a second darkness? –DB

18.
Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

After a decade near the top of Ladbrokes’ list of odds, 2023 was finally Jon Fosse’s year, with the 64-year-old Norwegian receiving his call from the Swedish Academy, rather fittingly, while walking alongside a fjord. Perhaps best known to Anglophone readers for Septology, a single-sentence, seven part, 672-page novel (deftly translated by Damion Searls) that combines the domestic and spiritual in incantatory prose, Fosse is possibly more famous abroad as a playwright, with over 1000 productions of his work to his name.

Interestingly, Fosse writes in Nynorsk—a standard form of Norwegian based on Norwegian dialects, as opposed to Bokmål, which is based on the written grammar of Danish. Between 10-15% of Norway’s 5.4 million citizens use Nynorsk as their official language, or roughly 800,000 people, meaning that this is the first time in several decades that the Nobel hasn’t gone to an author writing in one of the “major” languages. The Nobel might be the biggest literary prize Fosse can aspire to in this life, but there might be something greater waiting for him in the next. In 2012, Fosse quit booze and converted to Catholicism, something the Vatican itself seems to have noticed, with the Pope writing to Fosse in December and invoking upon him “an abundance of divine blessings.” –SR

17.
Michael Oher, the subject of Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side, filed a suit against the Tuohy family.

I’m not going to say anything here about Sandra Bullock and her acting chops, because my opinion on that matter tends to cause friction, but if you can remember the 2010 Oscars, the film The Blind Side was a big winner on the night, netting Bullock a statuette for best actress while the film itself won best picture. In broad strokes, it was a feelgood true story about how a white family (the Tuohys) adopt a young Black man (Michael Oher) from an impoverished background, helping him attend Ole Miss and eventually make it to the NFL.

But in court filings in Shelby County, Tennessee earlier this year, Michael Oher alleged that in February 2023 he discovered that he had never been adopted, but instead placed in a conservatorship, which allowed, and continues to allow, the Tuohy family to make financial decisions on his behalf. For their part, the Tuohy family maintain they never claimed to have adopted Oher—he was over 18 at the time the agreement came into effect, meaning adoption was no longer an option—and that the conservatorship was the most legally practical option at the time. As with Britney, a conservatorship is usually put in place when an adult individual has mental or physical disabilities, which was never the case with Oher. Oher asked the judge to end the conservatorship with immediate effect and asked for a forensic accounting of how the profits from his life story—developed by Hollywood into film that went on to make over $330 million—were dispersed. The matter remains before the courts.

So, how is this a literary story? Well, you have to wonder how much Michael Lewis, author of the book, knew about the finer details of this story, and perhaps also how much he stood to profit from the wheeling and dealing and percentages granted once his book was optioned. The story broke at around the same time Lewis’s highly-anticipated biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-convicted founder of crypto platform FTX, was ramping up its publicity cycle. There were angles of interest for those into biography-as-form and crypto-as-real in this book, as Lewis had been granted unprecedented access to Bankman-Fried’s Bahamas compound, and it had been reported that Lewis’s approach to biography was in fact something more like hagiography. To top it all off, the book (Going Infinite) was embargoed lest it affect the court case. Fast forward a couple of months, you have reports of Lewis sitting on the Bankman-Fried family’s side of the courtroom through the trial, but when the book came out, it received middling reviews, with Zeke Faux’s Numbers Go Up rating several mentions during the trial and emerging as the more authoritative SBF bio. –SR

16.
Everyone realized (finally, again) that Goodreads is terrible.

Goodreads is terrible. Everyone knows this. Amazon owns it! But because there’s no viable alternative, people just keep using it. Still, every once in a while, everyone remembers that Goodreads is terrible at the same time—this year it was because of the Elizabeth Gilbert thing, which you’ll find a little further down our list—and then we get a bunch of articles about it.

“The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry,” wrote Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. It can help a book succeed, or it can, possibly, destroy a book before it has even been published (that is, before anyone has actually read it).

What tends to happen is that one influential voice on Instagram or TikTok deems a book to be “problematic,” and then dozens of that person’s followers head over to Goodreads to make the writer’s offense more widely known. . . . When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles.

Over at Shondaland, Greta Rainbow called the site “beige in every sense of the word” and wrote: “A San Francisco couple initially built it for their friends to compare the popularity of Dune versus Pride and Prejudice. Now, ads for Prime shows splash on the home page. The algorithm gives Ferrante fans links to textbooks in Italian.” Useful!

“It is, in fact, possible to have a decent time on Goodreads,” wrote Tajja Isen in The Walrus. “You just have to ignore everything about the way the site is designed and how you’re supposed to use it.”

Cool. But why bother, when it seems to bring out the worst in people—as evidenced by this recent story, in which a debut fantasy author with a two book deal admitted to “review bombing” other debuts and making fake accounts to give her own (unpublished) book five stars. She was then dropped by her publisher.

By the way, if you find yourself unable to understand why your favorite book has three stars on Goodreads, we have the answers for you. –ET

15.
Everyone realized (finally, again) that blurbs are terrible.

You know what’s worse than Goodreads? Blurbs. For some reason, 2023 was also the year we all remembered that.

“On their surface, book blurbs seem fairly innocuous, but in reality, they’re a small piece of the puzzle with a big impact—one that represents so much of what’s broken within the traditional publishing establishment,” wrote Sophie Vershbow in Esquire. “Blurbs expose this ecosystem for what it really is: a nepotism-filled system that everyone endures for a chance of ‘making it’ in an impossible industry for most. To borrow a phrase from Shakespeare enthusiast Cher Horowitz, ‘Blurbs are a full-on Monet. From far away, they’re okay, but up close, they’re a big old mess.'”

It’s true. Everyone hates them—but authors especially, who are often either groveling for them or being groveled at for them, neither of which is remotely pleasant. And then there’s the fact that they’ve become more divorced from reality—and therefore pointless—than ever.

“Blurbs have always been controversial—too clichéd, too subject to cronyism—but lately, as review space shrinks and the noise level of the marketplace increases, the pursuit of ever more fawning praise from luminaries has become absurd,” writes Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. “Even the most minor title now comes garlanded with quotes hailing it as the most important book since the Bible, while authors report getting so many requests that some are opting out of the practice altogether.”

“Within the blurb ecosystem it is generally understood (perhaps cynically) that ‘blurbspeak’ is, as [David Foster] Wallace noted, ‘literally meaningless,'” wrote G.D. Dess in The Millions. “(And the jury is still out as to how much they actually help increase book sales.)”

Who will save us, then, from the tyranny of the blurb? (No one. The answer is no one. See you again in a couple of years.) –ET

14.
It was the Year of Judy Blume.

To be fair, it’s always sort of the Year of Judy Blume, because Judy Blume is eternal. But at the very beginning of 2023, we were treated to the first trailer for the long-overdue adaptation of beloved Blume classic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and it was clear things were going to be turned up a notch this year. Not only did we get Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (which turned out to be wonderful) in April, but also Judy Blume Forever, a documentary about the life and legacy of the 85-year-old writer, in addition to a healthy number of contemporary authors reflecting on the importance of her work, both personally and, you know, to the world.

“Judy’s writing helped me to honestly play a teenage girl because her books helped me become one,” wrote Molly Ringwald in her citation for Blume in TIME‘s 100 Most Influential People of 2023.

At a time when no one was chronicling the monumental minutiae occupying a young person’s brain—body shame, bullying, grief—there was no subject that Judy wasn’t up for exploring in her books. Even the most taboo subjects of the time—menstruation and masturbation—were examined, helping millions of young women to enter young adulthood a lot more informed and a little less afraid. Her books have been banned many times in various places over the years, since there are always people for whom the thought of an empowered young woman’s autonomy over her mind and body is objectionable. But good books will find their way into kids’ hands, and I’m so grateful they found mine.

Same! –ET

13.
So many beloved literary magazines closed. . . 

Let’s hope this isn’t a story we have to run every year. In recent times we’ve seen the shuttering and resurrection of The Believer, the loss of Astra Magazine and Gawker, and unfortunately 2023 was no different.

Across the pond, The White Review, founded across the pond in 2011 by Ben Eastham and Jacques Testard (who would go on to e-Flux and Fitzcarraldo Editions, respectively) finally reached the end of its financial tether, reportedly due to a combination of factors, including a declining appetite for literary philanthropy, and the non-granting of government funds on which the magazine had been reliant. It leaves a giant hole in the English literary scene, as a publication where many, many contributors were discovered by British publishers, and which from its inception had a commitment to authors beyond the anglosphere. Their last hurrah will be an anthology of translations by writers previously unpublished in English, to come out next year.

Here in the US, The Gettysburg Review fell victim to the ongoing (never-ending?) corporatization of American universities. Founded in 1988, the magazine had published writers like Rita Dove and Jeffrey Eugenides, but, according to Gettysburg College president Robert Iuliano, the $200 000 per year the college spent on it (Endowment: $409 million) can’t be justified because “its purpose is not the education of students.”

What are magazines for? –SR

12.
. . . but Bookforum rose from the dead.

But it wasn’t all bleak. At the end of 2022 when Penske Media added Artforum to its portfolio, the changes were swift and devastating. Beloved newsprint publication Bookforum was shuttered, and the publishing world lost its best outlet for long-form reviewing. There was quite a bit of manoeuvring behind the scenes, though, and in the end the mag was bought by The Nation and the entire enterprise returned in August 2023 to much fanfare. What can be great about one magazine acquiring another, as opposed to say, a hedge fund, is that you can reasonably hope that they understand the “business,” so to speak, of magazines. Bookforum was able to relaunch in the same format, with almost the same staff and list of contributors. That’s in stark contrast to parent pub Artforum, where longtime EIC David Velasco was fired for posting a pro-Palestine Open Letter on the magazine’s website, despite that month’s issue carrying an image by Emory Douglas for Black Panther magazine on its cover.

You can help keep Bookforum strong with a lifetime subscription, for only $500—which if you break it down, is pretty good value?

And, in breaking news at the time of writing, it seems Jezebel is to be resurrected by Paste Magazine. From the ashes! –SR

11.
Elizabeth Koch shuts down half of Catapult in aid of her “Perception Box.”

If this story didn’t involve a lot of good people losing their livelihoods, it would be funny as hell. Billionaire* heiress Elizabeth Koch, who up until February of this year was essentially the silent money behind the publisher Catapult, finally decided to step into the spotlight.

On the heels of shuttering the popular Catapult Magazine site, along with the organization’s online classes (a great side hustle for many a writer I know), Koch made the press rounds with something right out of Arrested Development: The Perception Box. Per this credulous, borderline sycophantic profile in the New York Times, Koch describes the box thusly:

We all live inside an invisible but ever-present mental box — a Perception Box. This box distorts our perceptions of everything and everyone around us. It distorts our ability to understand other people, to see them clearly, to connect with them. And it distorts our ability to really even know ourselves.

Most of the external conflict, messiness and miscommunication in the world — in corporations, in relationships, in families, in every aspect of our lives — is caused by internal conflict. And most of the internal conflict is caused by unconscious beliefs that we have been carrying around since we are very young — like zero to 5 — and that we project on everyone around us.

I’m not sure if this meaningless dorm room lunge at basic epistemic curiosity is worth breaking down, but I would suggest that the great majority of the “conflict, messiness, and miscommunication in the world” is, in fact, caused by the megalomaniacal greed of people like the Kochs.

Koch, who of course describes herself as “apolitical,” would most likely blame this assertion on the limitations of my own perception box. To which I say boooooo.

*All billionaires, by definition, are bad, but the Kochs are a particular level of evil reserved for only for the most special of billionaires.  –JD

And yet again, we’ve reached the end of a long, bad year. As is now our custom, for the sake of posterity, and probably because we’re masochists, starting today, we’ll be counting down the 50 biggest literary stories of 2023, so you can remember the good, the bad, and all the literary cool girls we met along the way. Join us:

50.
Edgar Allan Poe starred in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Competition was fierce at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, but I was particularly partial to Teya & Salena’s “Who the Hell is Edgar?”, which featured Edgar Allan Poe’s visage looming over the singers on stage and my favorite group dance since “Single Ladies.” Go ahead, give it a listen and see if you can resist singing “Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe” ad infinitum.  –Eliza Smith, Lit Hub special projects editor

49.
Anne Carson re-entered The Discourse.

There was no prior announcement, but an assessment took place this summer on the internet of our collective worth, a kind of Internet Speed Test for our souls.

On June 5, New Yorker writer Hannah Williams posted a screencap of Anne Carson’s 2017 POEM “Saturday Night As An Adult,” with the caption: “Think about this a lot” (editor’s note: the choice not to include a period perhaps emphasizing the open-ended nature of this thought). The poem captures a series of disappointments at a dinner out with second- and third-tier friends.

Think about this a lot pic.twitter.com/UT7xSTl9ty

— Hannah Williams (@hkatewilliams) June 5, 2023

Like a weather balloon lofted into the sky, or a chubby wombat awakening with a new honing beacon attached to its ankle and rushing off into the bush, the scene was now set for The Study to begin.

By 10 a.m. EDT, June 7, Williams’ tweet had been retweeted 928 times, quote-tweeted 583 times, and liked almost 10,000 times, indicating 928 instances of people finding an outsized resonance in the original tweet, and 583 instances of people hoping to correct the discourse, which ran quickly off the rails into a series of what Carson might term “yell factions.”

Critiques of the short poem about getting dinner at a noisy restaurant and finding bones in your fish fillet ranged from “kill Anne Carson?” to “wow that’s crazy has the author ever thought about letting joy into their life.” Generally speaking, a common theme was “can’t we just have a nice dinner here on Twitter, Anne Carson?”

Critiques of the critiques argued for the salvaging of context amid anthropogenic context-decline. I note, for example, Carson’s formal choices around line breaks and choice in the poem to use the royal “we” to engage the reader (seemingly, it worked). The viral moment came as the government issued a Code Red for air quality across much of the Eastern U.S., and as scientists warned that Arctic ice-melt was approaching a tipping point.

“I think it’s about the Michael Cera movie,” said the internet in utter earnestness.

The conversation continued into June 7, showing no signs of letting up despite the orange skies over Twitter hotspot New York City.

“Anne Carson should go to therapy and work on setting boundaries” offered Lauren Oyler in presumed disappointment at the level of discourse we have to work with here.

Anne Carson should go to therapy and work on learning to set boundaries

— Lauren Oyler (@laurenoyler) June 6, 2023

As to Anne Carson herself, the prolific Canadian poet and classicist appears not to be on Twitter at all (you’ll have to follow @carsonbot instead, I suppose, or read this appreciation for Autobiography of Red).

In a good appraisal of the aptitude Carson’s poetry has for Twitter, Dirt’s Terry Nyugen wrote, “There seems to be a Carson verse suitable for any ruminative occasion (“Is it a god inside you, girl?”) or random outcry (“[scream] [scream] [scream] for my ruined city”). A line from An Oresteia can be repurposed into an ecstatic anti-work mantra: “Gods! Free me from this grind!” No other contemporary poet inspires such a rabid rush of retweets.”

In other words, this won’t be the last time we fail a simple comprehension test.

It’s possible that even Anne Carson has had enough of the Anne Carson discourse, writing in a new poem “No You May Not Write about Me” in the London Review of Books that:

                           I should go in. I go in. I say, You are the worst thing I know I
can’t breathe around you the world is more than this I am more than you put on your
black coat we’re going out. We go out.

With prescient timing, Carson obtained Icelandic citizenship last year, all the better to escape the encroaching QT-storm.  –Janet Manley, Lit Hub contributing writer

48.
Everyone on the Booker shortlist was named Paul.

Okay, sure, it was only 50% of the people on the Booker shortlist, but that’s still a lot of people named Paul. And surprise, surprise, one of them won. (This year, the bookies called it.) Read an in-depth feature on Paul Lynch, the Paul in question, here.  –Emily Temple, Lit Hub managing editor

47.
Tim O’Brien published his first novel in 20 years.

In October, Mariner Books published America Fantastica, Tim O’Brien’s first novel in twenty years. Arguably still best known for his 1990 story collection The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s new novel is a madcap road trip novel full of terrible people in a Trumpian America obsessed with “mythomania.” But in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, O’Brien said it would be his last, “I think I’m probably done. I will be 77 in two weeks. I’ve got bad carpal tunnel [syndrome]—really, really, really bad. Typing is just a chore. I’ve got to peck it out with one finger. God, writing a novel that way—it’s hard to imagine doing that. I can’t 100% say I’m not going to write another book, but the odds are really, really slim.” To be fair, he said that about the last one too, so here’s hoping.  –Emily Firetog, Lit Hub executive editor

46.
Stephen Elliot settled his defamation lawsuit against Moira Donegan.

This endless debacle may now hold the record for most years appearing on this list: news of Moira Donegan’s “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet first circulated in late 2017, but became an international #MeToo sensation when Stephen Elliot decided to sue for defamation in 2018:

In a move guaranteed to offend pretty much everyone, including other people who were named on the list, Elliott in October filed a federal lawsuit against Donegan claiming defamation and seeking $1.5 million in damages along with information that would reveal who anonymously added to the spreadsheet or shared it.

Well, five years later, after much public whingeing from Elliot, he has settled his lawsuit for something in the six-figure range. It’s hard to say for sure, but given the overwhelming amount of support for Donegan during the trial—including free legal representation—one hopes that she hasn’t had to spend a dime on any of this.  –Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub editor in chief   

45.
Internet sleuths wondered—and then discovered—who was behind the classic 1976 cover for Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

You probably recognize the iconic cover of the 1976 Dell edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, but have you ever wondered who illustrated it? This spring, artist Michael Whalen asked Twitter for help figuring it out, but for a while it looked like the mystery would be as unfathomable as the cosmos.

Finally, Amory Sivertson, the co-host and senior producer of the podcast “Endless Thread,” figured it out, as Amanda Holpuch reported in September. The artist’s name is Richard Bober, and he is also the creator of many other weird artworks, for Dell paperbacks and otherwise. The internet was useful for once!  –ET

44.
Mike Pence’s book became a best-seller . . . because his PAC spent $91,000 buying copies.

It is a time-honored tradition in American politics to beg, borrow, steal, lie, and otherwise outright cheat basically whenever possible. When it comes to stakes, best-seller lists might be relatively small potatoes when compared to, say, the authoritarian overhaul of our rickety democracy—but it turns out the main reason Mike Pence’s memoir hit the bestseller list is because he spent $91,000 of his PAC’s money to get it there. You’d think that would’ve earned a dagger on the list, or perhaps that the NYT and other list-makers would change the rules so that these bulk buys wouldn’t count! You would think.  –Drew Broussard, Lit Hub contributing editor

43.
A new forensic study found that Pablo Neruda was poisoned.

Officially, Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet who wrote that love poem you like so much, died on September 23, 1973 from prostate cancer, coincidentally just shy of two weeks after Pinochet overthrew the government of Neruda’s (democratically elected) friend, President Salvador Allende, in a military coup backed by the US. Not surprisingly, there have always been rumors that Neruda was murdered for political reasons, and this year, 50 years after the poet’s death, forensic experts have confirmed once and for all that he was poisoned, or at least that the toxin clostridium botulinum was present in his body when he died.

“We now know that there was no reason for the clostridium botulinum to have been there in his bones,” Neruda’s nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, told the Spanish news agency Efe. “What does that mean? It means Neruda was murdered through the intervention of state agents in 1973.” –ET

42.
Maggie Tokuda-Hall refused to remove references to racism from her children’s book.

Back in April, Maggie Tokuda-Hall tweeted a story that those of us who fondly remember our Scholastic book fair days were horrified to learn: Scholastic’s educational division had approached Tokuda-Hall about licensing her book, Love in the Library, for use in classrooms—but the offer was contingent upon Tokuda-Hall removing references of racism from her author’s note. Originally published by Candlewick, the book for six- to nine-year-olds was inspired by Tokuda-Hall’s grandparents, who met and fell in love in an incarceration camp that held Japanese Americans during World War II.

The author’s note introduces readers to the real-life Tama and George, and references “the deeply American tradition of racism” that continues today in the police murders of Black people, Muslim bans, children in cages at the border, and so on—all of which got a big, red strike-through from Scholastic.

Tokuda-Hall declined Scholastic’s offer and sounded the alarm, and a public outcry ensued. Scholastic offered to publish the book with the original author’s note, an offer Tokuda-Hall refused, and the company paused production of the AANHPI narratives collection that Love in the Library would’ve been part of in order to evaluate their practices. One has to hope Scholastic will learn from the (extraordinary) mistake… but the top ten literary stories of the year reports otherwise. Stay tuned. –ES

41.
Michel Houellebecq filmed a porno . . . then had the Dutch courts suppress it.

It would be hard to find a literary news story in 2023 that was a greater source of delight to me, one of the few Lit Hub staffers who genuinely liked Michel Houllebecq’s early novels (he lost me with The Map and The Territory). As I wrote in March, somewhat breathlessly:

…defiantly unctuous French novelist-cum-provocateur Michel Houellebecq is having second thoughts about his whole “xenophobic libidinous creeper toad” thing—at least when it comes to doing it on camera with attractive young Dutch women. Allow me to explain.

According to Dutch art collective KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics), the idea for the “experimental porn” originated at a Paris dinner party in which Houllebecq’s wife, Qianyun Lysis, suggested to KIRAC co-director Stefan Ruitenbeek that her husband get naked in front of the camera to “counteract his gloom.” Houellebecq and Lysis were familiar with KIRAC because of an earlier film by the collective, Honeypot, in which Dutch extremist Sid Lukkassen becomes entangled with a comely young leftist.

Unsurprisingly Ruitenbeek leapt at the opportunity to film sexy times with the increasingly misogynistic, xenophobic Houellebecq. Lysis also told VICE that she told Ruitenbeek he’d “have to turn [her husband] into a porn star.”

So far so good! I guess! Maybe. Ugh.

Houellebecq went to Amsterdam just before Christmas and proceeded to hang out on a hotel bed and drink wine in his pajamas, waiting for one of the “many girls in Amsterdam who would sleep with the famous writer out of curiosity.” Amidst the hedonist reveries Houellebecq signed a release waiver in which the only limitation on filming was that “his face and genitals would not appear on screen at the same time.”

A few days after arriving in Amsterdam, though, Houellebecq walked off the set, accusing Ruitenbeek of “gutter journalism” and citing “radically opposed” artistic conceptions of the film. This, of course, was after Houellebecq slept with KIRAC collaborator Jini van Rooijen. According to Ruitenbeek, “It was incredible, they did all kinds of positions. He’s very good in bed.”

Fast forward a few months and Houellebecq has made attempts in both France and the Netherlands to block the film’s trailer and release, claiming, among other things, that it will damage his honor (lol). Houellebecq’s petition was denied in France, and only yesterday a Dutch judge declared that KIRAC has every right to distribute the film, despite the novelist’s protestations that he was “depressed at the time of signing the agreement and had drunk several glasses of wine.”

And no, I have not yet watched the movie, and likely never will.  –JD

40.
Gabrielle Zevin’s best-selling novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow sparked a debate about credit in fiction.

Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow which was published in July of 2022, stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 33 weeks and sold more than a million copies globally. But earlier this year it sparked a debate about credit in fiction. TaTaT is a story about two video game developers and has a robust “Notes and Acknowledgments” section where Zevin “notes instances in which she referenced real games… and names half a dozen games that inspired a chapter called ‘Pioneers’ as well as their designers.” Missing from those acknowledgments is Brenda Romero, a game designer who read the book and saw the idea and structure of her board game Train, which she developed at MIT, is reflected in a key point in the book:

Regarding Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, my uncredited work is in the book. “Solution” is, by the author’s own admission, a take on my game Train. She uses the same theme, gameplay patterns, releases the game at the same location (MIT) … more

— Brenda L Romero (@br) March 22, 2023

As the Washington Post explains, “In the novel, Sadie designs “Solution” as an MIT student in the 1990s. It’s a “Tetris”-like video game taking place “in a nondescript black-and-white factory that made unspecified widgets.” The player earns points for each widget but is constantly interrupted by a text bubble, which offers information about the factory in exchange for points. Through this feature, players eventually learn that the factory belongs to the Third Reich and that they can choose to slow, or stop, making parts. High scorers who dismiss the bubble eventually see a message calling them a Nazi. “The idea of ‘Solution’ was that if you won the game on points, you lost it morally,” Zevin writes in the novel. “Solution” bears a strong resemblance to Train, a game Romero created in 2009.”

Todd Doughty, Knopf Doubleday’s senior vice president for publicity and communications, issued a statement saying: “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a work of fiction and when crafting a novel, every author draws from the world around them. As Gabrielle Zevin publicly stated in last year’s Wired interview, Brenda Romero’s undistributed board game, ‘Train,’ which Zevin has never played but was aware of, served as one point of inspiration among many for the novel, including books, plays, video games, visual art and locales.

Do fiction writers need to cite their inspiration? Or is this more a case of stealing an idea? At least readers now know about Train. –EF

39.
Cat Person ruined “Cat Person.”

Ah Cat Person: The Movie, was there ever any real hope for you? The ill-advised Emilia Jones- and Nicholas Braun-starring adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s mega-viral 2017 New Yorker short story premiered at the Sundance Film Festival way back in January, and while initial reviews weren’t quite dead-on-arrival bad (nothing will ever top the The Goldfinch in that department), they were still pretty rough. By February, the writing was on the wall for Susanna Fogel’s film, and by the time Cat Person was released to the great unwashed masses in October, all remaining interest in the phenomenon had seemingly dissipated: the film limped to (a lot) less than half a million dollars (on a reported $12 million production budget) at the box office, and then disappeared. By the sounds of things, Cat Person wasn’t aided by its tacked-on horror movie ending, which The Guardian called “a bafflingly silly misjudgment with any of that previous, far scarier, unease replaced with in-your-face violence.” Meow. –DS

38.
Lydia Davis published a new book, only to be sold at indie bookstores.

New work from Lydia Davis is always cause for celebration—but this new collection of stories isn’t just a book. It’s also an experiment: if a book is published without being distributed to Amazon, will it still make a sound? (It’s being distributed only to independent bookstores and through our friends at Bookshop.org)

It’d be a worthy effort even if the book was second-rate—but happily, the collection is a delight through and through. Some of the stories are barely as long as their titles, many of them are lightly off-kilter in one way or another, and I found it best read like a poetry collection: dip in, dip out; read one every night before bed for a week, then put it aside and pick it up again later. A good read and a good cause—an experiment worth investing in. –DB

37.
Granta published a new list of the Best of Young British Novelists and not all men were upset.

Once a decade since the year of our Lord 1983, the good people at Granta magazine have anointed a new crop of emerging writers to watch out for in the future. It dubs these precocious wordsmiths the “Best of Young British Novelists,” and many of the chosen have gone on to carve out nice little careers for themselves. The first BoYBN class included Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Pat Barker; the second had Jeanette Winterson, Ben Okri, and Hanif Kureishi; and the 2003 group featured Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, Rachel Cusk, and Hari Kunzru. Not bad, eh? Seems like they should keep producing these lists, right? Wrong! The latest incarnation, which arrived in April and featured only four red-blooded British male novelists, prompted this New Statesman article by Will Lloyd, in which the author asked the question that has kept many of us awake at night these past few years: “How did male literary novelists become uncool?”

Lloyd didn’t furnish us with a definitive answer, but he did murder poor old John Green (“Green was neither cool, nor was he sexy … Nobody could even be bothered to be rude about him”) on his way to this discourse-igniting conclusion:

Inevitably, it all comes down to status. The decline of male literary fiction is not down to a feminist conspiracy in publishing houses, nor is it evidence that the novel itself is in decline. Reality is simpler. If men cannot dominate the literary landscape, cannot walk into lists like Granta’s, deservingly or not, they will look for other landscapes to colonize.

I presume he’s referring to either Mars, the Metaverse, or the lost city of gold, but only time will tell. –DS

36.
BU’s Center for Antiracist Research, led by Ibram X. Kendi, was dismantled.

In the year that Donald Trump was elected President, Ibram X. Kendi won the National Book Award in Nonfiction for Stamped from the Beginning, which along with other endeavours like the 1619 Project, brough to the fore once again the notion that America’s foundation and entire history is inseparable from slavery. It’s fair to say that his 2019 book, How To Be An Antiracist, made him a bona fide star, and the protests across America in 2020 following the murder of Floyd George created a new moment of reckoning for public and private institutions, with corporations and colleges alike taking steps to show they were fighting racial injustice.

It was in this context in 2020 that Boston University announced that Kendi was to be appointed the inaugural director of the Center for Antiracist Research. The Center raised, by some accounts, up to $54 million and had a staff of over forty, with funding coming from the non-profit sector, the corporate sector, and individual donors. The Center would combat racism by, amongst other things, conferring a masters degree and an undergraduate major in antiracist studies.

But by September 2023 it was announced that over half of the Center’s staff would be laid off, that $30 million of the remaining funding would be placed in an endowment, and that the Center would refocus its attention to offering nine-month academic fellowships, a model familiar throughout the country. Of course, the right was quick to pile on, spouting all kinds of familiar racist tropes, but Kendi came in for some heavy criticism from former colleagues, who cited a culture of mismanagement, and fellow intellectuals, who found fault in Kendi’s aims and approaches from the beginning. Writing in the New Yorker, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor pointed out that Kendi’s individual approach, where personal work can lead someone to become an antiracist, seemed more likely to assuage liberal guilt than bring about systemic change in the way that Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Angela Davis or James Baldwin had championed. As Taylor noted, perhaps “Kendi’s decision to simply sit on much of his funding, as what seems like a kind of anti-racist rainy-day fund, deserves more explanation than a murky idea that academic fellowships can contribute to the effort to combat racial injustice.” –SR

35.
Anthony Broadwater, after being exonerated for the rape of Alice Sebold, received a $5.5 million settlement from New York State.

 After being wrongly convicted and spending 16 years in prison for the 1982 rape of Alice Sebold, author of the memoir Lucky (which describes the attack and ensuing court case) and The Lovely Bones, Anthony Broadwater—who was exonerated in 2021—was granted a $5.5 million settlement from New York State. The New York Times reports that Sebold made the following statement: “No amount of money can erase the injustices Mr. Broadwater suffered. But the settlement now officially acknowledges them.” (As of 2021, Scribner no longer publishes Lucky.) –ES

34.
Hanif Kureishi dictated poignant daily dispatches from his hospital bed.

 On January 6th, Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia) shared with his Twitter followers that he’d suffered a grievous injury several days earlier, when he collapsed in Rome and regained consciousness without the use of his arms or legs. “It occurred to me then that there was no coordination between what was left of my mind and what remained of my body,” he wrote in the dictated Twitter thread. “I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying. I believed I had three breaths left.”

Kureishi continued to dictate to his family (of whom we get glimpses as well); his missives—poignant and funny, beautiful and candid—proved incredibly popular and eventually turned into a Substack newsletter called The Kureishi Chronicles. He writes about sex and drugs and music, his trepidation over returning to an able-bodied world, and of course writing and reading (among a smattering of other topics). A memoir, Shattered, that will expand further on the material, is planned for 2024—a major publishing event, to be sure. –ES

33.
Lit Hub made the Pulitzers change the rules (sort of). 

In August we published an open letter to the Pulitzer Prizes from almost three hundred writers imploring the prize to “update your requirements for the Pulitzer Prize to include the work of our peers who through accidents of geography, of violence perpetrated on our lands, and the personal familial reckonings with survival, have come to have or have been born into a mixed or undocumented status.” (Many people in the literary community first learned that in the categories of Fiction, Biography, Memoir, Poetry, and General Nonfiction, the Pulitzer Prize required authors to be United States citizens from Javier Zamora’s op-ed piece, It’s Time for the Pulitzer Prize for Literature to Accept Noncitizens.)

After our letter, the Prize reached out to let us know that they had been discussing the issue since last year and planned to address the issue at their fall meeting. In September, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced it had decided to expand eligibility for the Books, Drama and Music awards beyond the current U.S. citizenship requirement to include permanent residents of the United States and those who have made the United States their longtime primary home. The amended criteria will go into effect beginning with the 2025 awards cycle, which opens in the spring of 2024. “This expansion of eligibility is an appropriate update of our rules and compatible with the goals Joseph Pulitzer had in establishing these awards,” the Board said in a statement from co-chairs Prof. Tommie Shelby and Neil Brown. Did Lit Hub change the rules of the Pulitzer Prizes? Well, I don’t think we didn’t help! –EF

32.
Feminists bookstores came back.

One heartening trend as conservative lawmakers and “concerned parents” attempt to ban books about anyone who isn’t straight, white, Christian, and entirely without sexual parts or urges: Feminist bookstores are experiencing a welcome revival. Ms. reported that the number of self-identified feminist bookstores in the country has more than doubled since 2017.

At a moment when the rights of women, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC people are under assault and book bans are reaching a fever pitch, vibrant activist communities are once again coalescing in and around feminist bookstores.

Ms. highlighted business thriving as both bookstores and community spaces, particularly in states where freedom to read is the most imperiled—Burdock Book Collective in Alabama, Violet Valley in Mississippi, and the recently opened Eleanor’s Norfolk in Virginia. Once again, indie bookstores continue to be much-needed beacons of hope in a bleak, bleak national landscape! –JG

31.
The manuscript thief saga came to an end.

Remember the frankly dazzling series of heists that had the literary world on edge? No new manuscript was safe, it seemed, from some enterprising con artist who wanted them for… well, to read them, it seemed. Filippo Bernardini was unmasked last year and his case came to an end in March when a judge convicted him of a felony, without jail time. The judge described the case better than anyone: “I have no idea what to do with this case, and I’ve thought about it a lot. I don’t expect to see anything like this ever again.” The guy just… wanted to read books in advance! And instead of asking for galleys like the rest of us, he engaged in a moderate amount of fraud. We at Lit Hub are not endorsing any further breaking of the law, but it’s also true that this year was a little more boring without a great unifying mystery like this one to bring us all closer together. –DB

Let’s imagine, for the purpose of this essay, that the following statement is true: An AI writes a novel.

Actually, forget about the imagining. This is already happening. Today’s AIs—large language models (LLMs) specifically, like GPT-4—can write. If you’ve glanced at the headlines this year, you probably know this. They can write papers for high school students, they can write bad poetry, they can write sentences, they can write paragraphs, and they can write novels.

The problem is, for now, the creative writing that LLMs produce isn’t that great.

To demonstrate this point, I recently gave GPT-4 a few lines from my novel that describe a post-human world. Then I asked it to complete the paragraph. Here’s what it wrote:

The woods seemed to inhale, drawing in its myriad of lifeforms, coalescing into a pulsing organism. The gurgling creek was its veins, the trees its lungs, the moss and ferns, its skin. This realm thrived on its own rhythm, deaf to the clockwork of man-made time. Creatures great and small, predators and prey, living in an intricate ballet—well, you get the idea. If I were being kind, I would call these sentences overwrought and unpleasant.

So here’s what I really want us to imagine for the purpose of this essay: An AI writes a novel and the novel is good.

This is what a lot of people, and certainly a lot of writers, are angry and scared about right now. That AI, having been trained on a massive amount of data, including copyrighted books written by uncompensated authors, will begin writing as well or better than us, and then we’ll be out of a job. These concerns over intellectual property and remuneration are important but right now, it feels they’re dominating the discussion, especially when there are other worthwhile topics that I’d like to see added to the conversation around AI and writing.

Such as: how can humans and AI collaborate creatively?

Which brings me to a third possibility to consider: An AI and a human write a novel together.

In my first novel After World, I imagine humanity has gone extinct and an AI, trained on thousands of 21st century novels, has been tasked to write their own novel about the last human on Earth. When I began writing in the voice of my AI narrator in 2019, I had no idea that within a few years, artificial intelligence would explode into public view, offering me unexpected opportunities for experimentation with what, up until that point, I had been only imagining.

Some of the interactions I’ve had with LLMs like GPT-3, GPT-4, and ChatGPT have been comical. GPT-3 recommended some truly awful book titles, such as Your Heart Was A Dying Light In An Abyss Of Black, But I Lit It Up Until You Burned Bright And Beautiful, or Eve: A Love Story. (Eve is not in this novel, I explained. This didn’t seem to matter. It is just a cute play on words, replied GPT-3.) But many of my conversations with LLMs have been fascinating.

I’ve discussed with them about what AI would dream if they dreamed. We talked about the questions an AI might have about how it feels to be a human. We discussed what the boundary between AI and humans would look like if this boundary was a physical one. (An “ever-evolving, shimmering and translucent wall,” if you’re wondering.) We talked about why poetry comforts people, and we tried writing poetry and song lyrics together. We created so much bad poetry and so many bad songs.

But after days and days of so much bad writing, GPT-4 presented me with this pleading prayer which now appears at a turning point of my novel. To the embodiment of growth and expansion, / To the embodiment of purpose and fulfillment. / To all these entities and more, I humbly offer my plea, / Grant me the strength to manifest my desires…

One can certainly reduce these sorts of exchanges to my typing in prompts and the LLMs responding to those prompts, but what I’ve experienced feels like a much more collaborative process, more of an active conversation that builds on previous interactions. In a way, when we talk with GPT-4, we’re talking to ourselves. At the same time, we’re talking to our past, to words we’ve already written or typed or said. At the same time, we’re talking with our future, portions of which are unimaginable. As a writer, I find that the most exciting of all.

Here are a few other examples of human-AI collaboration that leave me optimistic:

1. “Sunspring”“ (2016)
A short film directed and acted with grave seriousness by professional humans but written by Benjamin, a LSTM recurrent neural network. The writing is surprising, surreal, and beautiful. I’ve watched this film more times than I’ve watched any other. I find it both weird and moving. It features one of the prettiest songs I know, “Home on the Land,” written by Benjamin but sung and scored by the human duo Tiger and Man. From the lyrics: I was a long long time / I was so close to you / I was a long time ago. (Interesting to note that “Zone Out,” Benjamin’s much less collaborative 2018 film that he wrote, acted in, directed, and scored, doesn’t have nearly the same emotional impact as his more collaborative work, despite the fact that the technology had advanced in the two intervening years.

2. Bennet Miller’s exhibition at Gagosian (2023)
Miller, a Hollywood director, generated more than 100,000 images through Dall·E for this project. The gallery show displayed 20 of them. When I first saw these photographs in March 2023, I couldn’t stop looking at them. I still can’t look away. I find them haunting, existing on the edges of documentary and fiction and humanness, suggesting a past and memories that didn’t happen but nonetheless was recorded.

3. Other Dall·E’s collaboration with artists (ongoing)
In particular, check out Maria Mavropoulou’s work on “A self-portrait of an algorithm”  and “Imagined Images”; everything August Kamp is doing, including documenting the worlds of her actual dreams with ChatGPT and Dall·E; and Charlotte Triebus’ Precious Camouflage, which examines the relationship between dance and artificial intelligence.

I worry that we’re forgetting how amazing this all is. Rather than feeling cursed or worried, I feel lucky to get to be here and witness such a change to how we think, live, read, understand, and create. Yes, we have some things to figure out, issues of training, rights, and contracts—and, on a larger level, safety—but I think it’s equally important to look up from such concerns from time to time with interest and even optimism, and wonder how this new advance in technology might widen our perspectives, our sense of self, our creativity, and our definition of what is human.

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After World by Debbie Urbanski is available from Simon & Schuster.

Early computer users were consumed with the idea of being able to go places that ordinary people could not. There was something tantalizing about the vast complexity of computer technology. Peering into the digital nooks and crannies, sometimes one could find oneself making a discovery that unlocked a door to a realm of the impossible. The most familiar example of this effect from the classic era of computing is the video game cheat code.

Cheat codes allowed the player of a game to do things that were not achievable in normal gameplay. In most cases, this simply meant gaining an unfair advantage to beat the game more easily, but any number of miraculous things could happen after entering one. For instance, if the secret code for games made by the publisher Konami was in a player’s bag of tricks, they could get thirty extra lives in Contra or nearly all of the power-ups offered in Gradius.

Cheat codes existed for a variety of reasons. They were often intentionally programmed into a game by developers to use for debugging or for players to make use of for fun. It was also possible for cheat codes to be unintentionally introduced into the source code of games as bugs, which were then serendipitously located and exploited by players.

“Cheat codes were the currency of cool,” according to Dan Amrich, an editor of GamePro magazine in the 1990s. Regardless of whether a code was deliberately introduced into a game by the developers, it was always treated as underground knowledge by the players. Rumors of new codes were whispered across high school cafeteria tables, eventually landing in a BBS post or Internet website after school. If one was in the know, one could gain quite a bit of respect within a technically savvy peer group by sharing the secret of a new code.

The popularity of some games was even propelled by the intensity of the conversation around the ways to cheat them. The more extreme the effect of a cheat code, the more players could be whipped into a frenzy (and ultimately a buying spree). The infamous cheat code that unlocked a series of grisly “fatality” actions in the Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat led to a full-blown moral panic in the early nineties. Suburban mothers were appalled that their children were deliberately changing the play of the game to witness various characters being murdered in spectacularly violent fashion.

Yet as the controversy grew, so too did demand for both the game and the fatality cheat code. Mortal Kombat, of course, did not lead to any meaningful societal harm, and it is now considered a cultural touchstone for the millennial generation. For our purposes, the cheat code is a terrific illustration of a social phenomenon even more prevalent today: the increasing desire for subversive information that enables the impossible through computer technology while simultaneously contributing to a broader culture. And it is by no means the only example from the early days of personal computing.

Some of the gamers trading cheat codes were exchanging other pieces of underground information as well—a great deal of which was far more alarming to outsiders than any video-game violence. Nearly everything that is considered subversive on the Internet today could be found on computer networks as early as the 1980s, but in a much different format: the textfile.

textfiles were digital texts, often authored anonymously, which covered a broad range of topics: from UFO lore to instructions on how to break into computers. By sticking to just text, writers of these files got around the bandwidth and storage constraints of early computers, thus maximizing the potential of sharing. And the way these files were written and disseminated lent them an air of the mystical, as if they were arcane writings meant to be discovered only by a chosen few.

Internet historian Jason Scott has described the textfiles as “the cheat codes for life,” because they let the reader go places others cannot by manipulating reality. Remarkably, this material was massively influential in kickstarting the careers of many well-known technologists.

Scott’s own history is relevant to the story here. Beginning in the mid-1980s, he was the system operator (SYSOP) of a hacker BBS based in New York called “The Works.” By his own telling, Scott was just a teenager when the board debuted in 1986, and his father was not pleased by the inordinate amount of time he was dedicating to it. By the time Scott left for college in Massachusetts, his family had expressly barred him from all distractions while he was enrolled in school—no part-time jobs and absolutely no BBSs.

Thus, The Works was disconnected in 1988. It reappeared shortly after as a Boston-area board, this time under the control of a SYSOP going by the handle “Dave Ferret.” Scott very visibly continued his affiliation with The Works, organizing meet-ups of users around Boston and recruiting volunteers to help run the board.

In his self-described role of “master of lore” of the hacker scene, Scott obsessively collected textfiles that he considered gateways to places where ordinary people could not tread. This meant that several genres of subversive material were available for browsing on The Works. In its heyday of the early nineties, the board advertised itself as having 10 megabytes of storage space for over nine hundred textfiles—a veritable trove of underground information.

It became a popular gathering spot for Boston-area hackers, many of whom were initially drawn to the scene via the discovery of the textfiles and were looking to connect with other local hackers to trade information with. Joe Grand (aka Kingpin), a hacker and influential in the maker movement, described wading into the board’s content to Decipher in 2018: “The Works had all those text files, and it was sort of hacker related, but it wasn’t evil hacker related. So I think The Works is the spot.”

The Works brought together one particular group of hackers that would fundamentally change the way that companies and governments would think about securing computer systems and networks. Incorporating themselves as a think tank called L0pht Heavy Industries, they contributed to the development of the “hacker space” concept for collaborative technology projects by moving their base of operations off of the BBS and into a physical space in Boston’s South End neighborhood (later, suburban Watertown).

As a tight-knit group working in concert, the members of the L0pht were able to release a number of high-profile security advisories for various operating systems and networking technologies, as well as a now infamous password cracker (“L0phtCrack”) for Microsoft Windows. Crucially, in this period the L0pht’s output remained rooted in the textfile format, with the release of all of its information made in a mode that was instantly familiar to other hackers.

The L0pht’s files attracted the attention of the federal government, which was monitoring developments in computer security outside of the establishment (and not always making the distinction between fact and fiction). In what was a highly consequential moment in the history of the computer security, the members of the L0pht were invited to provide testimony to Congress, during which an astonishing disclosure was made that they had the ability to “take down the Internet” in a mere thirty minutes.

Politicians and reporters took this claim seriously, as here was a group of expert hackers that had been engaged precisely because they had technical knowledge far beyond that of the establishment. But there was intense speculation within the computer underground about whether it was actually possible to shut down the entire Internet. Hacking culture blended fact with fiction in bombastic ways, after all. Had the L0pht merely invoked a cheat code of their own making to hack Congress?

Following the Congressional testimony, members of the L0pht were approached by other hackers who had attempted to determine if there really was a way to shut down the Internet. A handful of brand-new attacks emerged out of this genuine curiosity, but not the one the L0pht actually had in hand. In the end, the hackers revealed that the attack they had described to Congress targeted a bug in the border gateway protocol, used by critical infrastructure at network providers to move packets of information around the Internet.

Yet though there had been a real attack, the L0pht had indeed hacked Congress: vendors were informed of the bug before the testimony happened, and fixes were already in place by the time senators learned it was possible to bring the entire Internet down. This incident was shaped by what the members of the L0pht had been exposed to on BBSs like The Works: the convergence of sensational storytelling with real technical information.

Watching the L0pht’s testimony today, one can see that this motley crew of technologists was on the verge of big things. Shortly after their appearance in Washington, the hacker think tank was acquired by the security firm @Stake. L0pht members Chris Wysopal and Christien Rioux (aka Dildog) would go on to become founders of Veracode, a software-auditing firm that was later acquired by CA Technologies for $614 million.

Peiter Zatko (aka Mudge) has had an influential career in government and industry, with stints at DARPA and Google. L0pht affiliate and denizen of The Works Katie Moussouris became famous in the security industry for popularizing “bug bounties,” sums of money paid out if security vulnerabilities were disclosed to vendors before becoming public. All are now senior leaders of the computer-security industry.

In another instance of a programmer making good use of the cheat codes for life, famed software engineer and Stack Overflow cofounder Jeff Atwood got his start as a teenager who learned how to manipulate the telephone network via textfiles. Writing in his popular blog Coding Horror, Atwood described his early experiences with BBSs: “I was always fascinated with the tales from the infamous hacker zine 2600. I’d occasionally discover scanned issues in BBS ASCII archives…and spend hours puzzling over the techniques and information it contained.”

That information eventually landed him in trouble with the law. After he wrote a program that let users make use of calling-card numbers they did not own (mainly so that he could make free long-distance calls to BBSs), Atwood received a visit from the police and a computer trespass charge. Yet he harbors no regrets over the incident, which only pushed him deeper into computing and the myriad directions it could take enthusiast: “I must confess I’ve grown to love my own bad judgment. It’s led me to the most fascinating places.” Atwood was certainly not alone in this regard.

The textfiles written by computer hackers would get progressively more technical from the late 1990s through the early 2000s, but they never stopped blending factual information with creative storytelling. Nor did they stop encouraging sensational behavior in the real world. In fact, the stakes were dramatically raised as the Internet became an indispensable resource for the entire globe and security threats began to manifest themselves within it and against it. By looking at the activities of computer hackers in this later period, we can develop a clearer picture of common deception techniques used in technical contexts today.

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Excerpted from A History of Fake Things on the Internet by Walter J. Scheirer, published by Stanford University Press, ©2024 by Walter Jerome Scheirer. All Rights Reserved.

The International Space Station is a beguiling thing. Twenty-three years into its orbiting life, twenty-three years of continual human habitation, fifteen contributing nations, its story is an eloquent testament to international human collaboration. It’s the most expensive manmade object ever created, staggeringly complex and ingenious.

At the same time it’s become almost mythological in the human psyche—a point of moving light visible from earth, a silhouetted butterfly passing the moon, comforting in its unfaltering repeating transits.

As well as being technology and mythology, it’s also time capsule. Yes, new modules are added and there are constant innovations and renovations, but the original parts of the ISS are now well over twenty five years old. That’s a stately age for something bombing through low earth orbit at 17500 miles per hour, day in, day out—withstanding extreme heat, cold and solar radiation, pelted with space junk.

Marvelously, as a result, some parts of the Station are now in fact quite retro. They look more vintage than cutting-edge. The Russian segments, Zarya and Zvezda, are among the oldest, their internal parts fitted in the mid-1980s. Their walls are covered in oppressive green Velcro, handy for sticking things to in microgravity but now deemed a fire risk.

Many of the Station’s fittings are clunky and brutalist—not at all the corporate Disney-sleek lines of Space X tech that we see now. There’s a lot of disheartening beige. The “shower” is a pouch of water, a cloth and some rinseless soap. Lately, cracks have appeared in the Zarya module which a spokesperson has described, inspiringly, as ‘”bad.”

This splendid, sci-fi craft is orbiting its way into obsolescence. How tantalizing, from a writing point of view—the passing into nostalgia of something once trailblazing. Sci-fi, in becoming sci-fact, has become what I see as a whole new imaginative terrain, a kind of sci-pastoral. Space pastoral. With the outmoded Station and its gradual demise, an era ends. A technological and political era, but also a whole way of apprehending space and our relationship to it. A certain—if it’s not too simplistic to say it—lapse of innocence.

It isn’t just the spacecraft itself that has aged; some of its founding principles look kind of vintage now too. Consider that a quarter of a century ago the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, named one of its ISS modules “Zarya” (Dawn), signifying a new dawn in international cooperation in both geo- and space politics. Even if the relationship between Russia and the West was born more of expediency than love, still, it rattled on soundly enough.

And now, well—we’ve progressed (if that’s the word) to war and the complete collapse of that relationship. Where has that new dawn gone? Its last vestiges are orbiting the earth. Its ambitions are encoded into those hurtling titanium and steel modules: Dawn, Destiny, Harmony, Unity. Those cracking metal shells.

Enemies co-habit up there, cooperate there, share food stores, cut one another’s hair. Probably not for a great deal longer—Russia threatens to pull out of the ISS and it almost certainly will at some point—but for the time being the craft is a magnificent relic, a repository of disintegrated diplomatic dreams.

And then there’s the environment of low earth orbit itself that testifies to change. In 1961, a rocket upper stage exploded and its debris—about two hundred recorded fragments—was the first of its kind to enter into earth orbit. No human-made space debris had been created by a satellite breakup before then. Gradually this became more commonplace, but since the start of the twenty-first century, when countries all over the world started shooting satellites into orbit, the increase has been exponential.

Now there are millions of pieces of human-made debris orbiting the earth. They make human navigation complicated and dangerous; relatively often, the Station will slightly alter its course to avoid known debris, but the greater problem is the debris too small to have been catalogued—given the speeds of travel involved, a single fleck of paint can crack an ISS window.

What was once the new frontier, the pristine, humanless, ferocious expanse of low earth orbit, has become a rubbish dump we can’t clear up. We’ve done as we’re given to do—discover, domesticate, trash. Now consider again our time-capsule craft its determined orbit, speed-dodging old rocket payloads and spanners dropped by spacewalking astronauts. Can we really look at what we’ve done to the wilderness of low earth orbit and not feel a certain pang? A wish that this too had not been vandalized?

For that wilderness I feel the same strange, somewhat baseless—since I never experienced it—nostalgia I feel for medieval England, full of silent forests and eagles and wild boar. Something cellular in me longs for that again. This is what I mean by the imaginative field of space pastoral, the idea that space, too, has become subject to warm and probably useless thoughts of the good old days.

Yet meanwhile we set our sights on Mars. Space is no longer one thing; it’s the dusty past and cutting-edge future sharing surfaces with one another.

As for Mars. Our designs on that, too, lend the ISS what is beginning to look like a vintage charm. Granted that the ISS is a monumental and astonishing piece of science with specific goals, not least of which is to prepare equipment and astronauts for longer and deeper space missions.

It was always a step toward Mars. It was never an exercise in sentiment—but. But, it’s a craft that circles the earth from a distance of a mere 250 miles. It’s run collaboratively by national space agencies and everything that happens there (at least on the NASA/ESA side), every piece of science, all data, is in the public domain, ostensibly for the public good. It’s international, it came complete with a set of collaborative values on which it has delivered.

Contrast that to now, when space exploration is so commercially driven; every proposed endeavor in space travel is a part-privatized competitive effort not to circle and observe the earth but to get away from it, to the moon, which we plan to mine and build a base on, and ultimately to Mars. To get there first—fast! before Russia, China and India—to stake claims and to exploit resources, mostly for commercial gain.

The quarter of a century the ISS has spent in low orbit looks, by comparison, humble in its dedication to our planet. There’s something vigilant and devoted and democratic, even if just symbolically, in its steadfast orbit. Its observance of our weather, our animal migrations, our changing topographies; its ability, by virtue of its overview, to help contain fires and oil-spills.

It is by any measure a beautiful experiment that has almost served its time. In 2030 it will begin to be de-orbited and crash-landed piece by piece into the Pacific. It’s as if, as an entity, it perfectly projects humanity’s psychic shift from earthbound to extra-planetary as our curious restless spirit itches for the new.

What of those warm and probably useless thoughts of the good old space days? I do know that nostalgia can be a dull and forceless thing. I know too that on my gravestone will never be written he words: She Was a Great Adaptor. Left to me, humanity wouldn’t have progressed from caves and if it hadn’t already died out would be catching the odd rabbit which it would then feel bad about eating.

But in fact I found that this idea of literary pastoral was potent when I came to write about space. Here’s the slender whispering arc of our planet’s atmosphere, inside of which the auroras fret; behind which the moon distorts and the stars tumble. Here’s the dense crowded field of constellations at the Milky Way’s heart. Things that stagger you with their grand improbability.

And it seemed that if ever there were a vantage point for such writing it had to be this great space-hide we call the ISS, this ship that for almost a quarter of a century has been watching us and our acreage of cosmos with a faithful, quiet attention, just as the shepherd in the traditional literary pastoral watches his flock.

The Space Station as a new-millenium shepherd, inveterate wanderer, witness to loveliness, dependably circling. Its very presence in descriptions of space inscribes those descriptions with time and lends them vanishing points. I find this space-age relic, this embattled, dented dream-capsule, and everything it symbolizes, just captivating. On it goes, carrying at 17.5k miles an hour a lost era, an era that was once our golden future.

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Orbital by Samantha Harvey is available via Grove Atlantic.

I am good at many things. I can grow vegetables, bake from scratch, cook for a family or a dinner party without embarrassing myself. I can read maps and navigate foreign cities and make minor household repairs.  I can do a headstand and paint a room and tile a backsplash and operate a jackhammer. I’m an excellent driver, a fine teacher and a compelling public speaker. I can carry a tune and not embarrass myself on the dance floor.  I can take direction, decipher texts and get out splinters. I’m a competent writer; I know how to get my point across.

I am good at many things, but, of course, it is possible I overestimate my abilities, à la the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It’s possible I think myself more capable than I am precisely because I lack the skills to accurately self-evaluate.

But I think it is more likely that I am objectively competent at the limited number of activities in which I engage not only because I’ve been doing them so long, but also because being competent is the reason I do them in the first place. Maybe even things I’ve learned later in life— like how to tile a backsplash or teach an online class or supervise other human beings —simply built upon what were already baseline competencies. Maybe I’ve kept learning and being successful at learning mostly because the growth has come in areas that already played to my strengths. Maybe everything new I’ve learned since I was young has played straight to my strengths.

For the first part of our lives, we learn unconsciously, at a breathtaking pace. By the age of ten I had learned at least a thousand things I did know at birth: how to walk and talk and eat with utensils, how to dress myself and tie my shoes and brush my teeth, how to read and write and listen, how to obey and also how to resist.

But at some point, learning becomes conscious. When that happens, to continue learning we must believe we need to learn, must feel ourselves lacking in some area, absent some skill or piece of knowledge which holds the potential to improve our life. This comes easily to children, who are told in constant word and deed that their primary job is to acquire the accumulated knowledge presumably held by members of the adult world. But the older we get the more difficult it is to see, and to acknowledge, our inadequacies.

When my son was contemplating a year abroad in high school, we went to an information meeting for the program he would attend. An alumnus of the program, a sweet-faced young man, was asked how hard it was to immerse oneself in a language you did not understand. “Not hard at all,” the young man said, “you just have to be willing to constantly look like an idiot.”

Learning is hard on the ego. Despite teaching for decades—or perhaps because of teaching for decades—I’d forgotten that.

It would certainly explain why I hated the motorcycle class.

The basic rider course, approved by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, requires four hours of classroom learning and 10 hours of on-cycle training over two days. There are twelve of us in the class, including myself and my husband, who takes the class as moral support and also because he loves motorcycles. See above.

Leading us on this adventure are Sam the Scolder and another instructor named Zeke.  Sam we suspect, from his authoritarian posturing and doughy body, of being a cop, but Zeke is shorter, more muscled and also far more chill. Less CHIPS, more Zen.

The course is scheduled to run eight hours Saturday and eight hours Sunday and conclude with written and skills tests. If I pass both, I’ll be allowed to stop in the motorcycle store on the way out and legally drive home a machine capable of reaching 200 miles per hour and 37 times more likely than an automobile to result in my death. Like many things in America, this is insane, but never mind.

Because it is raining, the class begins indoors, inside a massive warehouse stocked with Harleys and Ducatis and Indians (ugh on the name, ugh on the bike) and ATVs and snowmobiles and other expensive toys. We choose our bikes — everyone else has already chosen theirs, the instructor points out — and spend the first thirty or minutes getting familiar with the controls: here’s the throttle, here’s the clutch, here’s the brake. I make special note of the brake. We spend an eternity discussing when to use the choke. The answer, my husband will tell me later, is never, since most modern bikes don’t have one.

My Honda Nighthawk 250s is a good thirty years old and bears the scars of many a drop. Besides injury, dropping the bike is my biggest worry, one which intensifies when I realize I’m the only woman in the class. Dropping the bike gets you serious demerits. I am not going to be the Girl Who Dropped the Bike.

I am also the only Black person, though the class is otherwise diverse, surprisingly so. One guy’s from Russia, another from Italy; both are college students, which makes sense. There’s a man from India and another from somewhere in Central America. He is, he tells us, recently married. (“When I told my wife I wanted a motorcycle, she burst into tears.”)

The remaining students are, like my husband, white. One, a tall, neat, good-looking young man in his early thirties, listens to the introductions then says, in a voice straight out of The Departed, “Lotta accents in this class.”

“Yep,” I say. “Including yours.”

He stares at me a moment, then laughs. His name is Riley. Unlike Sam, he turns out to be a cop.

The youngest student is seventeen. Only three of us, including me and my husband, are old enough to remember a time before the internet or ovens that microwave. Being an elder or whatever we’re called and learning to ride a motorcycle is strange and not a little embarrassing, like showing up, dressed and grinning, at a BTKS concert, or crashing a prom.

Outside in the drizzle we start the bikes, fiddle around some more with the controls and then, astonishingly, begin to ride. The routine for the class is quickly established: Sam outlines a drill, Zeke demonstrates, we line up and try it ourselves, failing or succeeding in plain view. We practice basic skills — starting and stopping, shifting and stopping, using the clutch and finding the friction zone. Though I’ve driven a standard shift car for years, the friction zone on the bike eludes me, raising my frustration, which, in turn, makes my performance worse. Every drill I feel more like Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford (you have to be a certain age to get the reference.) I drive too slow, stop too soon, go the wrong way around the marker. Finding neutral feels impossible; over and over I shift through and stall. Part of the problem is that the bike is too small and my boots, dug out of the closet and borrowed from one of my kids, too clunky and big, but in the moment I don’t make this connection. In the moment I feel incompetent.

The afternoon is easier. Sam departs, off to scold jaywalkers and people who leave leaves on their lawns. We retreat inside, to a cluttered classroom that smells faintly of stale fast food but at least is warm and dry. It’s Zeke’s turn to lead; his instruction method involves having us read portions of the textbook aloud then pausing to discuss. This is not innovative teaching but it gets the job done, the job being cramming enough information into our heads for us to pass the written test. When it’s my turn I read fluidly and answer questions with a snap. In a classroom I am hyper-competent. In a classroom, I am home.

The motorcycle textbook focuses mostly on ways to stay safe while riding: dress appropriately, remain visible, anticipate rather than react to the actions of others. Always have an escape path, or two. Know your risk offset and operate within it. Risk offset, explains Zeke, is the difference between the risks you take and the skills you possess. Low risk, high skills is the gold standard. High risk, high skills, okay. Low risk, low skills is reasonable, especially to begin. The person most likely to get into trouble riding a motorcycle is the person who takes high risks with a low skill set, risking their life on abilities insufficient to the task at hand.

Risk offset. The concept almost makes the entire grumpy day worthwhile.

Zeke is a gentle teacher, gentle in the way of men who have nothing to prove. He’s a veteran (“I got back on the bike when I came back from Afghanistan. My wife couldn’t say no,”) loving father (his daughter keeps calling because their guinea pig had died) and country boy who’s taken his share of spills and learned that what mattered on the road was not speed or noise or badassery or any other kind of macho cosplay. What matters is enjoying the ride and coming home.

“You may be right: that guy who cut you off may be an asshole,” Zeke says. “The question is: do you want to be right, or do you want to be alive?”

This reminds me of a question a therapist once asked me, one that changed my life.  Do you want to be right, or do you want to be loved?

In class, everyone nods their heads as Zeke raises his eyebrows. The right answer to his question is obvious. But the honest answer, the answer I gave the therapist, the answer no one speaks aloud, is: Both.

Day Two we arrive twenty minutes early, bearing boxes of donuts and hot coffee to ward off the morning chill. The donuts are my husband’s idea: there is no quicker way to win friends and influence people than to offer deep-fried food. Later, as we drive the college students back to their train, they will tell us how Sam, who picked them up from the station that morning, spent the commute trashing us and wondering if we’d be late again. Instead, we stand and watch Sam hustle to finish setting up the course as the arriving students gleefully stuff their faces. When Sam sheepishly asks for a donut, my husband winks.

Day Two focuses on control of the bike: S-turns and U-turns and maneuvering. Also on tap are ways to get out of trouble on the road. As in life, Zeke tells us, the question is not whether trouble will come, but when. On a motorcycle, trouble comes often in the form of sudden obstacles. You’re riding down the road and a deer leaps from the bushes, or the school bus in front of you suddenly breaks or a board falls from the back of a truck. The choice, when faced with a sudden obstacle, is to either swerve, ride over or try to stop, and this is a choice best made ahead of time. Zeke gives us a scenario: you’re riding down a beautiful country lane when suddenly a ball rolls out of a driveway, followed, for all you know, by a child. What do you?

“Stop,” I say.

“That’s a lot of people’s instinct,” Zeke says. “But that instinct is usually wrong.”

When trouble comes in the form of a sudden obstacle you probably won’t have time to stop. Even if you do, the guy right behind you may not. The right choice, in this case, Zeke says, is probably to swerve into your escape lane, the one you’ve previously identified. The one you’ve kept at the back of your mind. Always have an escape lane.

We practice racing across the parking lot (racing being a relative term) and then swerving around a barrier, first to the right, then to the left, then to whichever side Zeke points at the last minute. We practice riding over boards and cutting tight corners. We practice riding fast down a long strip and coming to a hard stop on a line without losing the bike. The young men love it. They chatter happily as they wait their turn to perform, revving their motors to hear the sound. The one other older man smiles quietly, keeping mostly to himself. My husband, the star of the class, leads each exercise at the request of the instructors, too tall for his tiny bike but enjoying himself. Everybody but me is having a good time.

“Does she ever smile?” Sam asks my husband, though not in my hearing. Sam is an asshole but not an idiot.

After two hours of maneuvers, it’s time for the road test. My heart thumps and my palms, beneath the thin leather gloves I am wearing, sweat. Even in the moment I know this is ridiculous. I have no plans to actually get a motorcycle, no plans to take long rides on a summer day the way my husband does. If I fail the test, if I don’t get the license, my life will not change. Moreover, my husband told me the last time he took the course (at another school,) everyone in the class passed, including a woman who crashed her bike. These guys are in the business of putting people on the road, not keeping them off. I’m not even the worst person in the class; that would be a young, lanky guy wearing dress shoes and drugstore knit gloves who comes oh-so-close to dropping his bike. If I don’t pass the test it doesn’t matter one whit. Still, I want to do well. I want to appear competent, not for the people who I will never see again, not even for my husband, but for myself. Learning may slow as we age but the ego never relents.

I don’t do well. My turns go outside the lines and my swerves take me right into the back of the imaginary bus. I accelerate too slowly and brake far too soon and my feet touch the ground while I’m turning a slow figure eight. Even as I’m still testing I know that my performance is inadequate. There are only a certain number of points you can lose and it is certain that I have lost those points. I know that I have failed.

“Pass,” says Zeke. To everyone. The college students grin.

But I pull Zeke aside as the others hustle towards the classroom to take the written test. I don’t yet know I will not only achieve a perfect score on that assessment but will find myself racing to finish first, to leap up mere minutes after the test begins and hand the paper to Zeke with a flourish of victory—but I know , as if that  know I will perform well on that assessment and I do, not only scoring 100 but finishing first, heart pounding, As the others hustle inside for the written test, I pull him aside. I didn’t pass, I insist. It doesn’t matter if I wasn’t the worst one in the class. It doesn’t matter if I was close enough. I don’t want a mercy D, I want the F I earned. I didn’t pass and I want him to say as much. I am not, it turns out, the kind of person who is good at everything she does. Only a person fairly good at acknowledging reality.

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Excerpted from Everday Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Has Failed by Kim McLarin. Used with permission of the publisher, IG Publishing. Copyright 2023 by Kim McLarin.