Some interesting things to read the third weekend in May

Dear Friends,

What are the obligations of a child to fulfill their parent’s final wish? Quite high, I would say. But what if the wish were made in a faltering mental state? And what if you are the children of Gabriel García Márquez, and his final wish is to destroy his final novel? It’s perhaps easier, as seems to be the case in this instance, if the novel is imperfect by his standards. But perhaps it’s harder to comply with Márquez’s behest because the novel is a kind of story that he has never told before—one with a female protagonist—and, in fact, centered on a child’s obsession over a parent’s death. 

In any event, the book, titled Until August, has appeared and Ariel Dorfman, a friend of Márquez, has offered his children a form of absolution in a wonderful essay in The New York Review: “Let me say, then, to Gabo’s sons: very few old friends of your father are still alive, so I’ll take it upon myself to commend you for having betrayed his last wishes and bequeathed to readers one more memorable woman, this enchanting homage to freedom.”

On a similar topic, let me also recommend this essay, “The Mother Who Changed,” by Katie Engelhart, which just won the Pulitzer Prize. As people lose parts of their minds, when exactly do they lose the right to self-sovereignty? And based on what criteria? And speaking of Pulitzer winners, this is a superb series from David E. Hoffman at The Washington Post on one of the most depressing and relevant stories of the past twenty years: how the internet—which should have been a tool for enhancing democracy—became such a powerful tool for dictators.

Along those lines, I highly recommend Anne Applebaum’s new stemwinder in The Atlantic on the global propaganda war being waged by Russia and China, with some assistance from inside the U.S., aimed at discrediting liberalism and Western democracy. She writes: “Fear, cynicism, nihilism, and apathy, coupled with disgust and disdain for democracy: This is what modern autocrats sell to their citizens and to foreigners, all with the aim of destroying what they call ‘American hegemony.’”

One of my favorite recent literary essays is Zoë Bossiere’s “White Face, Black Eyes,” a memoir of life growing up in the Cactus Country RV park outside Tucson, Arizona. She describes a summer watching over an intense, animal-loving boy named Aiden: “In the three years I’d lived in the park, I’d known a lot of boys who made games of knocking baby birds out of their nests and kicking the pads off prickly pears in the cactus gardens. Boys whose rage was hot and pulsing, like the palms of our hands when we dared each other to hold them to the asphalt. Boys who spat insults like fire, who led with their fists, who always drew first blood. But Aiden wasn’t like that. He was always gentle with animals, and I’d never seen him get into a fight with anyone. Watching Aiden take one last swing at the door, I wondered what else Dave thought he saw in him that I couldn’t.”

In AI, I deeply enjoyed Fei-Fei Li’s book about her life story: from her emigration from China, to her struggle as a student at Princeton while helping her parents run a dry cleaning shop, to the creation of the data system that underlies much of current AI. I also listened to a terrific episode from the “Your Undivided Attention” podcast about the potential economic impact of AI. Will it be like the internet—creating both opportunity and persistent malaise? Will it be like other past inventions that have led to long-run growth and short-run misery? Meanwhile, you should read this essay from Anya Schiffrin about what the AI companies owe the content creators they all train their models on. And I thought this was a very interesting profile in The Information about a brash venture capitalist named Shaun Maguire who has some very strong, loudly voiced opinions on the Middle East. 

I enjoyed Drew Gilpin Faust’s Atlantic essay on how to pull off an elegant and memorable commencement speech, which inspired me to reread David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water.” In 2005, the novelist spoke to students at Kenyon College and imparted a few succinct and brilliant lessons on how to live: “Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism,” Wallace says. “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”  

You also should absolutely read Rachel Aviv’s new essay examining the case of the British nurse Lucy Letby. Is it possible that a woman was convicted unfairly of the most horrible crimes, in the most public of fashions? The world sometimes disappoints, but Rachel is one of those writers who never does.

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The economist Tyler Cowen writes a popular blog called Marginal Revolution that is filled with interesting ideas and provocations. Last fall, he dropped one of his boldest experiments yet: a 100,000 word manuscript titled, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter? The book was written like a conventional book—there are chapters on Adam Smith and Milton Friedman—and can be read that way, too. But Cowen also worked with data scientists so that the book can be queried by AI—he calls it a generative book.

The experience is captivating. I asked the book to summarize the ideas of Friedrich Hayek, which it did very well. But you can also ask the book for advice on how best to query it. When I prompted, “What are some good questions to ask you to understand modern capitalism?,” the GOAT responded with eight suggestions, including: “How did Milton Friedman’s advocacy of free markets, floating exchange rates, monetarism, etc. shape the more market-oriented capitalism that emerged in the late 20th century?” The queries can be anything you can dream up. Having trouble understanding a chapter? Ask the AI to present it to you as a graphic novel. Got an economics exam tomorrow? Tell the AI to offer some potential sample questions, and then ask it to grade your answers. Need to go for a walk? Tell the AI to turn the book into a thirty-minute podcast and then listen to it on your route.

The analytical abilities of AI and natural language processing open up horizons for scholarship. (They also create pitfalls: the scientist Gary Marcus likes to collect academic papers that have AI prompts and obvious AI passages left in the text for publication.) As many authors know, writing and publishing a book is just a start. The book goes into the world and you begin to hear from readers about pieces of the story you missed, or interesting facts that would have been nice to include, and even entire new directions to explore. What if you thought of the book as a generative book? As a body of knowledge that you were forever adding to and refining? That’s exciting. But also a little daunting. I’m writing a book about running right now; I’m deep into it. And I hope that when I’m done, I’m done — no matter what the AI says.  

Cheers * N

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