"Amid hints that AI is a spectral bubble floating a hallucinatory economy, these books suggest just how weird things will get." Jordan Williamson reviews Derek Lee’s “Parascientific Revolutions” and Joshua Comaroff’s “Spectropolis”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/disenchanted-enchantment/

"Though she was never a member of the Nazi Party, she was certainly committed to the glorification of its project, to making horror and hate beautiful." Annalisa Zox-Weaver reviews Andres Veiel’s 2024 documentary, "Riefenstahl." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fantastic-lies/

"This reevaluation of Pynchon’s novel couldn’t have come at a better time, since 'Vineland' anticipated with uncanny prescience many of the most central political debates currently being litigated." Travis Alexander revisits "Vineland": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pynchons-abundance/

"'Luddite' isn’t an insult—it’s a warning and a word of caution. One we must return to, repeatedly, if we’re to resist the constant drumbeat of consumerism dressed up as science and progress." Erik J. Larson reviews "The AI Con": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-return-of-the-luddites/

New from me in the @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social: a review of tech critic Cory Doctorow's latest book, "Enshittification," an essential roadmap to why the internet continues to get worse. (Free to read, no paywall.) lareviewofbooks.org/article/gian...

"How is this not only possible, but common? No one is being forced to do business with, or use the platforms run by, these companies. Can’t we simply vote with our feet?" Dave Mandl explores Cory Doctorow’s "Enshittification." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/giant-platforms-of-shit/

"I’m very aware that everyone is reading this with a phone less than one foot away from them. The whole book is this performance of: 'Do you like me? Will you keep reading?'" Madeline Howard interviews Anika Jade Levy about her book, “Flat Earth.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/do-you-like-me/

Lana Lin has a new essay (about archives and appendices) at @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social!

🧵This week @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social published my review of OpenAI’s “metafictional literary story about AI and grief,” which Sam Altman claimed “got the vibe of metafiction just right.” My piece challenges this claim. 1/ lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...

"OpenAI’s story, the literary devices it uses to tell it, and the story the company told about it offer important insights into the shape of the crisis at hand." Rachele Dini on OpenAI’s literary capability: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/literature-is-not-a-vibe-on-chatgpt-and-the-humanities/

"It’s hard to imagine anything like this succeeding in today’s environment, wherein tech overlords like Mark Zuckerberg have toadied up to Trump." Aniko Bodroghkozy revisits the 2017 Charlottesville attack: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/very-fine-people-charlottesville-eight-years-later/

“Alien: Earth thus banks on a fear not only of invasive Xenomorphs, but of a future that robs children of their innocence, forcing them into adult decisions and bodies.” Tia Glista reviews "Alien: Earth": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-baby-was-screaming/

"I didn’t know if we’d be getting that Shaolin soul style anymore, but when 'Nutmeg' hit, I thought, 'oh shit, is the Wu back?'" Oliver Wang and David Ma talk Ghostface Killah's "Supreme Clientele." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/after-further-review-ghostface-killahs-supreme-clientele/

“By insisting on the term “automation,” Bender and Hanna reveal that what’s sold as innovation is often just labor displacement with better branding.”

After a somewhat disappointing SC2, myself and Oliver Wang went in on the indisputable greatness of the first one for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social lareviewofbooks.org/article/afte...

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Very grateful for this rich response to my book!

My review of Damon Krukowski's excellent book Why Sound Matters is up at @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.

"Krukowski zooms in on everyday life to such a minute degree that we can almost separate the various shapes and sounds that make it up." @ubupamplemousse.bsky.social on Damon Krukowski’s “Why Sound Matters.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/sound-epistemology/

"Writing my memoir was a process of changing my relationship to my own experience very directly, much more directly than when I write fiction." Tess Pollok interviews Melissa Febos on her memoir, “The Dry Season.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-sex-in-the-city/

"By insisting on the term 'automation,' Bender and Hanna reveal that what’s sold as innovation is often just labor displacement with better branding." Erik J. Larson discusses "The AI Con" by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-return-of-the-luddites/

"My body’s interior is a surprising mystery to me. I was always taught to look outward for myself, and rarely thought about my own body." Lana Lin dissects the literary and bodily significance of the appendix: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/archive-appendix-hoodie-home/

"Forgetting is necessary to live; remembering everything is one road to insanity. Meanwhile, the present lingers." @formalfeeling.bsky.social reviews Rainer Diana Hamilton’s “Lilacs.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-could-smell-without-smelling/

A nice review of an excellent book "In the end, The AI Con reminds us that the fight over AI is not only about technology. It’s also about language, labor, and the stories we choose to tell about the future, which we can humanize rather than surrender to the myriad ways mass automation dehumanizes."

In this week's special episode of LARB Radio Hour, hosts Kate Wolf, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman discuss how Big Tech dreams – from iPhones to social media to AI – have become nightmares. https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/the-shit-show/

I'm excited to share my piece in Los Angeles Review of Books @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social, which examines OpenAI's claims about ChatGPT's creative writing skills, Big Tech's weaponisation of grief and nostalgia, and the collapse of the academic humanities. lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...

Really appreciate this review of our book (w/ @alexhanna.bsky.social) "By insisting on the term “automation,” Bender and Hanna reveal that what’s sold as innovation is often just labor displacement with better branding." "…a demystifying, often hilarious lexicon that cuts through the fog of hype."

"The new Luddites aren’t afraid of AI. They’re afraid of the people who profit from pretending it’s intelligent." Erik J. Larson reviews "The AI Con" by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-return-of-the-luddites/

"This is not literature as 'entertainment,' no. It’s literature as propaganda." Rachele Dini discusses OpenAI’s “A Machine-Shaped Hand” and an academic sector in crisis. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/literature-is-not-a-vibe-on-chatgpt-and-the-humanities/

Enter the cosmos of new essays, short fiction, and poetry in LARB Quarterly no. 46: Alien. Subscribe today to recieve your copy and all future issues. https://lareviewofbooks.org/edition/alien

My tribute to genius cartoonist Edward Steed-- out in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social. "The 'homunculus' comics can be read as embodiments of the *actual truth* of the male self, one that is usually concealed or otherwise disguised" @dandq.bsky.social

"'Vineland' anticipated with uncanny prescience many of the most central political debates currently being litigated in whatever is meant by the American 'left.'" Travis Alexander revisits Thomas Pynchon’s "Vineland." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pynchons-abundance/

"Many of Steed’s jokes rely on jolts or surprises of scale or perspective that undermine human/non-human distinctions," writes Ivan Kreilkamp on Edward Steed’s “Forces of Nature.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/edward-steeds-posthuman-comedy/

"'Service' is built on the obsessive repetition of questions that ring in the ears of every writer." Gracie Hadland on John Tottenham’s "Service:" https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/finishing-last/

Eric Vanderwall reviews the new translation of Pierre Guyotat's memoir "Idiocy." "This book, for which the author won the Prix Médicis, covers only the period 1958 to 1962, from the ages of 18 to 22, in dreamy, digressive fragments." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/destroy-humanism/

"His scrupulous detailing of hour-to-hour action and the exactitude of his sentences do not open outward but close inward to form a monstrous version of the realistic novel." Tom LeClair reviews Mark Z. Danielewski’s new novel “Tom’s Crossing.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/enuf-is-enuf/

"In some ways, it’s hard to imagine a more poorly timed book." Emmet Fraizer on Adam Szetela's "That Book is Dangerous!: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-cancel-culture-canard/

John Rieder reviews "First Contact" by Zac Zimmer: "The project Zimmer delineates involves negotiating between the truth and falsity of recorded history, and historicizing the processes that produced them." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/challenging-the-myth-of-firstness/

"It remains what it is: a quirky but ultimately untransfigured story, which 'works' in all the ways you might expect it to without ever moving into the unexpected." Josh Billings reviews Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s novel “Your Name Here.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/beautiful-losing/

"Bennett’s sentences offer a master class in how language gives rise to thought and memory, and how repetition revises both." @claire-foster.bsky.social reviews Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/precious-vestiges-of-something-that-took-place/

"'Frontier' breaks the code of suffering in silence over and over again." Corinne Cordasco-Pak reviews Erica Stern's "Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story:" https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ghosts-of-the-delivery-room/

“That we made intelligence out of Sydney sandstone is no problem for Agüera y Arcas, who rightly points out that our brains are also made of inanimate, elemental building blocks such as calcium and carbon…So what’s the difference, really?” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-isnt-intelligence/

In this week's episode of #LARBRadioHour, Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt about her new movie, "The Mastermind," out in theaters now. https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/kelly-reichardts-mastermind/

Ryan Lackey considers Damion Searls’s "Analog Days": "Much to its credit, it feels cramped and sprawling at once: unfinished and overwrought, a claustrophobic snapshot and a vertiginous panorama." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-novella-in-the-age-of-being-performatively-offline/

"I think that people who experience loss are always trying to fill up that hole, becoming the person for themselves that they are trying to find." Tess Pollok interviews Natasha Stagg about her new novel “Grand Rapids.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/are-you-there-god-its-me-natasha-stagg/

"We need King Lear to understand Chinese history, and we need Chinese history to understand King Lear." Amy R. Wong on The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear by Nan Z. Da: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/can-tragedies-transcend-borders/

"'Web Beneath the Waves' suggests that privately owned physical cables are an integrally important source of geostrategic power today." Ian Kumekawa on Samanth Subramanian’s "The Web Beneath the Waves." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/virtual-space-and-physical-infrastructure/

Looking for your next adventure? Flip through the pages of LARB Quarterly no. 46: Alien and find yourself galaxies away. Join today for all new essays, short fiction, and poetry. https://lareviewofbooks.org/edition/alien

"Schweblin is a modern master of uncanny fiction, and she subtly, dreadfully parades around among the literary in these six stories." Zachary Gillan on Samanta Schweblin’s “Good and Evil and Other Stories." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/parading-around-among-the-living-like-nothing-happened/

"Postmodernism is a weird workaround where we can still feel real things but we can only express them with references—often mocking references—to other things." Raphael Helfand talks to David Leo Rice about his new novel: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/im-gonna-act-as-though-what-seems-real-is/