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Hand-wringing about AI, Part III: “We’re Stuck in the Middle”

Back for Part III? Curious if I can land this plane? (ME TOO.) If you missed the earlier pieces, here's Part I, and here's Part II. To recap: we've seen how AI can thrust us into a world of infinite choice by theoretically translating (or eventually writing) any book out there, which is interesting from the point of view ...

Hand-wringing about AI, Part II: “Write Me an Ad Campaign”

You might want to read "Part I" before going any further, but if you just want a recap, that post is essentially about how AI could translate the world (and/or create millions of new novels), which, on one hand, could be useful in bringing unique, diverse voices to an English audience, but, on one of the many other hands, ...

Hand-wringing about AI, Part I: “I Want to Read it All”

Many many moons ago, in a dark bar on a wintry Rochester night, I sketched out a series of eight posts/topics that would roughly correspond with my plan of reading all of In Search of Lost Time (in the semi-recent Penguin set with each of the seven volumes translated by a different translator), and would investigate ...

A Venn Diagram of Not Reading

“If I actually finish a book, I feel like I deserve a Nobel Prize.” “I can't even guess when I last read a book. But I'd watch movies all day if I could. Especially Marvel ones.” Overheard on a University of Rochester Shuttle “In the last decade, she says, history has toppled from the king of disciplines to a ...

Stock Market and Art

Not the most common of connections, but that’s the angle that Bloomberg‘s Robert Hilferty takes in his review of Proust’s The Lemoine Affair: A hundred years ago French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) lost money in the stock market, too. And as he would in the epic In Search of Lost Time, he ...

Interesting Translation Issue

In reading the new translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Levi Stahl came across a really interesting translation issue. In “The Prisoner,” when Madame Verdurin suggests inviting Comtesse de Mole to a party, the Baron de Charlus insults her: “Well, well, there’s no accounting for ...