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Oct 27, 2024 | 
biblioracle.substack.com | John Warner |Dave Karpf |Parker Molloy |Perry Bacon
So…the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have decided not to publish a candidate endorsement for this year’s presidential election. The choice was made by the papers’ respective billionaire owners, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made his fortune in biomedical devices, and some guy named Jeff Bezos.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
biblioracle.substack.com | John Warner
I was reading New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka’s mini-profile of journalist when I came across this passage. Reader, I gasped.
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Oct 6, 2024 | 
biblioracle.substack.com | Anne Michaels |Renata Adler |John Warner
Note: This post may be too long to fully appear on some email clients. To see the full post, please click through to the online version.
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Jun 2, 2024 | 
biblioracle.substack.com | Salman Rushdie |J.M. Coetzee |Michel Houellebecq |John Warner
(This post may be too long for some email clients. Click through to see the full post.)The title of Sal Khan’s new book, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing), makes two implicit claims:AI will revolutionize education. The AI revolution is “a good thing.”It is strange, then, that the book makes no real attempt to grapple with the implications of its own argument.
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May 26, 2024 | 
biblioracle.substack.com | John Warner |Maris Kreizman
One of the fun parts about getting older and persisting in the same general area of activity is connecting to others in the same field do the same, and seeing their careers progress. For me, one of those people is Teddy Wayne whose new novel The Winner will be available wherever books are sold starting this coming Tuesday. My first connection to Teddy came way back when I was editing the McSweeney’s website and he was one of the most frequent contributors.
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May 5, 2024 | 
biblioracle.substack.com | Annie Proulx |Eskor Johnson |John Warner |David Epstein
The Pulitzer Prize awards, including the fiction prize, will be announced tomorrow. I have a long history of incorrectly predicting the winner, a track record I am eager to extend by incorrectly predicting this year’s prize. Before I do that, however, I’m going to predict next year’s fiction’s prize: James by Percival Everett.
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Apr 21, 2024 | 
biblioracle.substack.com | John Warner |Maris Kreizman |Christian Lorentzen
When it comes to recommending books I do not kid myself that I have even a fraction of the influence of an Oprah, Reese, or Jenna, the book recommending colossi of today. I’m sure I even lack the juice of other celebrity book recommenders (Dakota Johnson, Emma Roberts, and Sarah Michelle Gellar among them), but I like to think my endorsements carry at least a little weight.
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Mar 10, 2024 | 
biblioracle.substack.com | Raymond Carver |Toni Morrison |John Warner |Paris Marx
I managed to get my hands on an advance copy of the forthcoming book on AI and education by Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy and the ChatGPT-powered AI-tutor, Khanmigo. I am perplexed by the title.
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Feb 25, 2024 | 
biblioracle.substack.com | John Warner |Brian Merchant
Apparently there’s some consternation floating about regarding kids coming across “new adult” or adult (primarily romance) fiction via TikTok and being lured in by the cartoon-ish pastel covers, only to be exposed to stories with R-rated sexual content. It’s hard to know how real this is, but if you’re curious, there’s a recent article in The Guardian about the phenomenon.
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Feb 11, 2024 | 
biblioracle.substack.com | John Warner |Austin Kleon
I intended to get back to writing more directly about books and reading this week, but then I got stuck on this video by the band The Smile for their new song “Friend of a Friend.”My brain is stuck on the questions of how and what we learn, probably because of this book I’m working on, but also because it’s a question that’s never far from the front of my mind.