On my first birthday after my husband and I got married, my mother-in-law gave me a subscription to The New Yorker. It was a thoughtful present to give a bookish new daughter-in-law, someone determined to be a writer, even though I’d only published two or three short stories in literary magazines. Maybe Mary thought that giving […]
Writer Taffy Brodsesser-Akner has a question. A friend asks if she’ll interview her father, a Holocaust survivor who’s been given a terminal cancer diagnosis. The friend has asked before, and Brodesser-Akner has repeatedly refused. After being battered by stories of genocide at her Jewish high school, she’s decided she’s going to push her preoccupation with […]
Two writers whose work I admire. Two pieces about genocide: a book written by a man with a complicated Middle Eastern-immigrant background, and an article by a Jewish woman born in the U.S. Both centre on the author’s own people and the great evils perpetrated against them. Both are written in great upset and outrage, […]
One of the first words I learned when I moved to Mexico was gente. The English translation is “people,” and you often hear Mexicans talking about mi gente. For those who don’t speak Spanish, it’s pronounced “me hen-tay” and it means “my people.” I usually heard it as a fond word, an embrace, although it could sometimes be […]
“It’s okay,” a guy tells his dog. “It’s all right, buddy.” “Is everyone feeling weird today?” another man asks him. “It’s the atmosphere,” the dog guy says. “What does that mean?” “We’re victims of the chem trails in the sky.” That’s something I wrote in one of the notebooks I always carry. Sometimes I use […]
The documentary opens with a pan up a totem pole in a Swedish museum, far away from where it was carved in the 19th century on the northwest coast of Canada. The historic pole is shackled by a collar and suspended—imprisoned—in wires. The symbolism reverberates through the film, which I stumbled on while I was searching […]
I had a friend in high school, a guy I never saw afterward, although I always thought fondly and vaguely that we might eventually meet again. Then one day I got a high school update saying that Derek had suffered a stroke. He had lived with the after-effects for several years but had died not […]
What is the future of publishing in a world of artificial intelligence? (What’s the future of anything these days?) Will Anderson of Penguin Random House in New York says he sees two things: better written non-fiction books and novels more centred on feelings. In other words, non-fiction books written with the assistance of AI models […]
It was a boring business day. So I pivoted, and had tons of fun pitting Sam Altman’s Chat GPT against Mark Zuckerberg’s new AI model, Llama 3. The issue: stealing writers’ copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence models. An Atlantic magazine scoop by Alex Reisner shows that Zuckerberg’s Meta operation is using pirate sites to train its […]
I was about to leave the courthouse when one of the journalists intercepted me. “We’ve got the cameras set up outside,” she said. “Can you give us a comment?” I didn’t want to. I profoundly didn’t want to. I was emotionally exhausted after attending a series of hearings spread out over several months. All I wanted to […]
I don’t know when I decided to be a writer. As far as I remember, I always wanted to write, and I have no idea why. I must have talked about it early on, since I have a photograph of myself sitting at a toy typewriter our parents gave me when I was seven years […]
Two or three years ago, a friend visiting from London left me a copy of British author Samantha’s Harvey’s novel The Western Wind, which she’d bought to read on the plane. I’d never heard of Samantha Harvey, although she’d written three previous novels and been on the long- and shortlists for a slew of impressive prizes. […]