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Books

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Michael Lewis would like Sam Bankman-Fried’s jury to read his book.

“If I were a juror, I would rather hear my story than either defense or prosecution,” Lewis tells Andrew Chow at Time. Also:

I want to ask about some details that appeared in various charging documents and complaints against Sam but are featured less prominently or not at all in your book. One is that Bankman-Fried allegedly bribed Chinese officials to release money from a frozen Alameda account.

I know too much about that, and it seemed like a distraction.

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
Amazon released a new Kindle app for the sickos who read books on a Mac.

Amazon has released a new Kindle app for macOS, reports Good e-Reader. The new app has been redesigned to look more like iOS and now supports new features like a reading ruler, more fonts, a full-screen view, and page-turn animations.

You had me at page-turn animations, Amazon.

Apple’s The Changeling is a haunted fairy tale about the joys and nightmares of new parenting

Apple’s adaptation of Victor LaValle’s The Changeling transforms the novel into an even more chilling tale about the things that keep parents up at night.

Charles Pulliam-Moore
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“Yes, it is a Ponzi structure. But it is not a Ponzi.”

In this entertaining excerpt from Zeke Faux’s forthcoming book, we get a glimpse of the crypto Bahamas conference before Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall. Pretty fun stuff! Seems like Michael Lewis was all-in on SBF, among other nuggets here.

Netflix’s One Piece is the rare anime adaptation that gets all of the important things right

Netflix’s One Piece succeeds where other live-action anime adaptations have failed by understanding its limits and knowing how to work within them.

Charles Pulliam-Moore
Wes Davis
Wes Davis
Stephen King illustrates, in his way, the difference between human writers and AI.

The famed horror author, whose body of work is weaved (in a multi-verse-before-multiverses-were-popular way) around a fantasy series about a gunslinger in a post-technological society that incorporates a sentient AI train (who is a pain), wrote for The Atlantic that he isn’t worried about AI supplanting him.

At least, not yet. This abridged passage illustrates why:

A character creeps up on another character and shoots him in the back of the head with a small revolver. When the shooter rolls the dead man over, he sees a small bulge in the man’s forehead. The bullet did not quite come out, you see. When I sat down that day, I knew the murder was going to happen, and I knew it was going to be murder by gun. I did not know about that bulge, which becomes an image that haunts the shooter going forward. That was a genuine creative moment, one that came from being in the story and seeing what the murderer was seeing. It was a complete surprise.

Could a machine create that bulge? I would argue not, but I must—reluctantly—add this qualifier: Not yet.

Low interest rates and loneliness: the origins of the pandemic crypto boom

This Is Not Financial Advice and Easy Money attempt to explain the extremely online financial mania. Their very divergent takes show how difficult it is to fully understand.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Good Omens season 2 is a lovey-dovey shipper’s delight

The second season of Amazon and the BBC’s Good Omens adaptation joyously marches into familiar yet unexplored territory with a love story that feels like it was crafted with Neil Gaiman fans in mind.

Charles Pulliam-Moore
Readers pick the best tech books of all time

We asked you for your favorites, and you delivered.

Verge Staff
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Samuel R. Delany, sci-fi legend, may have had a mini-stroke, but he doesn’t want to discuss his own significance.

Delany, who is seriously one of the greats, is “willing to discuss nearly anything but his own literary significance. Openly sharing the most intimate minutiae of his life—finances, hookup apps, Depends—he recoiled with Victorian modesty whenever I asked why he’d written his books or what they meant to his readers.”

The profile is a delight all the same.

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
TikTok’s owner is apparently getting into the book publishing business.

#BookTok is evidently a big thing, and seeing how influential its platform is, TikTok owner ByteDance has begun to court writers to publish their books under its new 8th Note Press, according to The New York Times.

Not everyone sees this as good news. Though it is offering rates “competitive with industry standards,” some worry ByteDance will push its own books at the expense of others.

How AI art killed an indie book cover contest

Science fiction and fantasy authors are struggling with AI-generated media — and formulating strategies to deal with it.

Mia Sato
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
People under 30 do not read this.

Hello, fellow olds. Let’s help solve a mystery. Remember that cover of A Wrinkle in Time with the centaur that’s got wings for arms? The nightmare-fuel one? Okay. Does anyone know who designed it?

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
Just in time for Towel Day on May 25th, this new Hitchhiker’s Guide Folio Society edition is here.

Check out the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy collectible edition being released tomorrow by The Folio Society. Gizmodo has some of the artwork in a slideshow.

The hardcover five-part trilogy set features new art from series artist Jonathan Burton, colorful metallic folio paper tops, and a handmade presentation box. Just 750 sets are being made, and you can pre-order one now but it will cost you $875.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Hey, kid, wanna hear a dead body?

The actor Edward Herrmann, who died in 2014, is still the narrator for newly-published audiobooks. His family has used DeepZen Ltd, to reanimate his voice, and presumably make more profits from his synthetic narration.

DeepZen says it has signed deals with 35 publishers in the US, but I didn’t have much trouble distinguishing the AI from the live read in the audio quiz.

‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots

CEO James Daunt explains how Barnes & Noble is different than Amazon.

Nilay Patel
Mitchell Clark
Mitchell Clark
Sorry, Erik Larson fans.

Hulu’s apparently no longer working on an adaptation of The Devil in the White City, a book about a serial killer and a world’s fair that helped usher in alternating current electricity as the dominant form of power.

It’s possible we’ll still get a TV adaptation of the book, but it probably won’t be a Hulu original.

Shift Happens celebrates 150 years of typewriters, keyboards, and the people who use them

A wide-ranging interview with Marcin Wichary, author of Shift Happens, which launches today on Kickstarter.

Jon Porter
FX’s Kindred series feels like a pale shadow of Octavia Butler’s seminal story

FX’s Kindred series doesn’t know how to navigate the nuances of Octavia Butler’s genius.

Charles Pulliam-Moore
Why automating trucking is harder than you think

An interview with Karen Levy, an associate professor of information science at Cornell, about her new book, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance

David Zipper
In its finale, House of the Dragon became a worthy Game of Thrones successor

House of the Dragon’s season 1 finale pulled the series together by becoming what Game of Thrones was at its best

Charles Pulliam-Moore
David Pierce
David Pierce
This is a pretty good list of tech books.

Ken Kocienda, the longtime Apple designer and current exec at Humane, dropped 12 books he recommends in a tweet thread. They’re not all tech, but they’re mostly tech, and I nodded vigorously at all the ones I’ve read before. Definitely reading Longitude this weekend, too.