Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story
Long-read time: in The New Yorker, Manvir Singh shows how scholars are reconstructing lost myths through bits and pieces of language across continents and cultures. The collective effort and depth of knowledge required to do this sort of linguistic anthropology is truly amazing. I was left thinking about how this work is done for its own sake–the aim is not the production of something for a Series A funding round or that can get sold to become a Netflix show. It’s a fundamental wish to understand, a wish that is in seemingly short supply of late.
On Opening a New Bookstore in Texas
I can never read enough stories about someone, in this case a young couple, moving somewhere and opening a bookstore. I have read interviews with many booksellers, and while nothing is particularly revelatory in this interview with one of the co-founders of Recluse Books in Fort Worth, the details and people and titles and stories in it nourish, if even just a little. A welcome Friday respite.
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Human Versus AI Script Readers
As language machines, AI agents are at their best when dealing with language. And a screenplay is a thing of pure language. LLMs’ ability to ingest huge piles of language and do stuff with it at blazing speed is at the heart of what makes them both alluring and terrifying. But how do they do at analyzing language that might make a great movie? Script readers, as a profession, are understandably worried the nature of their work, reading a bunch of scripts, summarizing them, and then giving notes, might just the kind of thing a digital AI-powered program might be good at. So someone set up a test. The results are both encouraging and unsettling: they are indeed good at ingest and spitting out brief descriptions, though the more complicated the action, the more likely they were to make mistakes. And on the most valuable part of the process –hey is this script any good?–they are pretty bad. For now.
The response to our new podcast series, Zero to Well-Read, has been heartening. In each episode, we talk about one book that you maybe have always wanted to read. Or at least wanted to have already read. Or just wanted to know what the deal was. Or a book you read and have sort of forgotten what it was about. Or that you loved and would like to have occasion to think about again. Those books. We have episodes up about The Great Gatsby, The Bluest Eye, Twilight (because sometimes you want to know what the fuss was about), Never Let Me Go, Vineland (which One Battle After Another is an adaptation of), and more drops in the coming weeks. Hope you will give it a shot.