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☆ Opinion: Ambitious, tech-savvy and jobless. Why India’s young people could reshape the internet
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-02 | by ( Opinion Snigdha Poonam | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +10 min

Her book, “Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing Their World,” was longlisted in 2019 for the PEN America Literary Awards. Unlike China, which leveraged its demographic dividend through large-scale factory employment, India’s economic growth does not rely on young workers manufacturing goods. Catering to a market of 750 million smartphone users, India’s fast-growing gig economy is attracting young workers in great numbers. As incidents of abuse and exploitation pile up, many of India’s gig workers are questioning their career choice. Feeding the social media monsterThere are other ways in which India’s young people are shaping the future of technology.

Persons: ”, Raju Rai, Rai, “, ” Rai, Dhiraj Singh, Mithun Kumar, Kumar, hyperlocal, Jewel Samad, Mohit Yadav, Monu Manesar Organizations: PEN, CNN, Delhi CNN, Facebook, Catering, Bloomberg, Getty, YouTube, Big Tech, Twitter, New York Times Locations: Delhi, India, Thailand, Indian, Varanasi, Bangkok, Myanmar, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Southeast Asia, Europe, China, Mumbai, Bihar, Covid, AFP

☆ WME signs author and speaker Ed Mylett, whose top business podcast adds to the agency's growing audio roster alongside clients like Malcolm Gladwell and Jay Shetty
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-31 | by ( Reed Alexander | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Hollywood talent agency WME has signed Ed Mylett, an author, public speaker, and entrepreneur. His podcast, "The Ed Mylett Show," has landed guests including Tony Robbins, Barbara Corcoran, and more. "I need the best people to help manage the growth of 'The Ed Mylett Show' podcast," Mylett told Insider via email. Among business podcasts, "The Ed Mylett Show" currently sits at No. His podcast, "The Ed Mylett Show," has seen a bevy of other guests including Barbara Corcoran, Martin Luther King III, David Goggins, and Tony Robbins.

Persons: WME, Ed Mylett, Tony Robbins, Barbara Corcoran, Vervante, He's, Mylett, Michael B, Jordan, Dwayne Johnson, Miley Cyrus, Dan Fogelman, Jay Shetty's, Stephen Dubner's, Malcolm Gladwell's, he's, Maria Shriver, Matthew McConaughey, Martin Luther King III, David Goggins Organizations: Hollywood, Wiley, Apple, Spotify, CAA, UTA, WME, Pushkin Industries, YouTube, Forbes

☆ ChatGPT Secret Training Data: the Top 50 Books AI Bots Are Reading
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-30 | by ( Adam Rogers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

To figure out what GPT-4 has read, they quizzed it on its knowledge of various books, as if it were a high-school English student. One way to answer the question is to look for information that could have come from only one place. Genre — sci-fi, mystery, romance, horror — is, broadly speaking, more interesting, partially because these books have plots where things actually happen. Bamman's GPT-4 list is a Borgesian library of episodic connections, cliffhangers, third-act complications, and characters taking arms against seas of troubles (and whales). See what a bot makes of Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun," maybe, or Sheri Tepper's "Grass."

☆ A Provocative Satirist Left a Pervasive Legacy, Influencing African Writing
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-29 | by ( Anderson Tepper | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina was many things in his short, frenetic life: memoirist and roving essayist, trailblazing editor and publisher, agitator and activist. After winning the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002, he used his prize money to finance a new literary journal, Kwani? (“So what?” in Nairobi slang), helping to promote a generation of Kenyan and African writers. His 2005 essay in the British literary journal Granta, “How to Write About Africa,” eviscerated timeworn Western tropes about Africa and African writing. Wainaina, who died in 2019 at age 48, became an outsize figure on the literary landscape, his omnivorous brilliance matched by ambition and vision on a continental scale.

Persons: Binyavanga Wainaina, ” Organizations: Granta Locations: Nairobi, Africa

☆ George Maharis, TV Heartthrob of ‘Route 66,’ Is Dead at 94
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-28 | by ( Anita Gates | Alex Traub | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

George Maharis, the ruggedly handsome New York-born stage actor who went on to become a 1960s television heartthrob as a star of the series “Route 66,” died on Wednesday at at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. His friend Marc Bahan announced his death on Facebook. Mr. Maharis’s greatest fame arose from the role of Buz Murdock, one of two young men who traveled the country in a Corvette convertible, finding a new adventure and drama (and usually a new young woman) each week on CBS’s “Route 66.”In a 2012 reappraisal of the show, the New York Times critic and reporter Neil Genzlinger praised the literary quality of the scripts and commented, “This half-century-old black-and-white television series tackled issues that seem very 21st century.”

☆ Even After Debunking, ‘Sybil’ Hasn’t Gone Away
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-28 | by ( Alexandra Jacobs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Schreiber, who aspired to a literary career and at one time was romantically involved with the playwright Eugene O’Neill’s oldest son, wrote celebrity profiles and pop psychology pieces for outlets such as Cosmopolitan. And Wilbur, who had treated the actor Roddy McDowall — Case 129 in a book she co-authored about the causes and “treatment” of male homosexuality — craved the kind of broad audience that magazines then attracted. Rather than telekinetic powers, she develops a preternatural ability to assume different personas. Wilbur by any modern metric crossed the line from transference to enmeshment. She crept into her patient’s bed to administer electroshock treatment with an outdated device, doled out Pentothal (a barbiturate then wrongly thought to act as a truth serum) to the point of addiction, and took her on creepy road trips.

Persons: Schreiber, Eugene O’Neill’s, Wilbur, Roddy McDowall —, —, ’, Sybil ”, Dora, Truman Capote’s “, ”, “ Sybil Dorsett ”, Stephen King’s, Carrie, ” Sybil, dissociating, “, Peggy, Mike ”, Sid ”

☆ Opinion | What’s the Point of Prizes?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-27 | by ( Roger Rosenblatt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Ah, the magical season of prizes is once again upon us. The award ceremonies for literary prizes are usually demure, decorous little things, but award shows on TV are like a country music hoedown. And the Oscars rank so high in the culture that actors measure their worth by rehearsing their acceptance speeches. It is, in essence, the world’s way of telling you that you’ve done something noteworthy and valuable. Would the minds and achievements of Copernicus, Galileo, Vermeer or van Gogh have suffered chilling effects from winning prizes?

☆ The 18 best ways to make money by reading, from submitting book reviews for cash to narrating audiobooks
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-27 | by ( Zulie Rane | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +16 min

She always wanted to earn money from reading books, but said the best way to do that doesn't exist. Here are a few of the best ways to make money by reading books using social media. The good news is that BookTok is one of the best ways to make money by reading books. Post your book reviews on a publication like Books Are Our Superpower and make money by reading books that way. Until then, I hope this article helps you find the best ways to make money by reading books.

☆ Remembering Martin Amis
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-26 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The writer Martin Amis, who died last week at the age of 73, was a towering figure of English literature. Amis was “arguably the most slashing, articulate, devastatingly clear, pungent writer of the last 25 years of the past century and the first almost 25 of this century,” Garner says. Just his way with words, his descriptions, the fact that he scorned cliché, scorned outdated language. In my own life as a writer, there are very few writers — of course I’m not a fiction writer, but I study writing — there are only a handful of writers that I think of in the category that Martin Amis is in, which is, if I’m stuck on a piece or I’ve just written a bad sentence, I think: Would Martin Amis ever let this sentence go to print? Not that I can hope to match his sentences, but I hope not to sink to this level where, don’t do that because Martin Amis wouldn’t do it.”We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general.

☆ Opinion | My Fantasy Bookshelf
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-26 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

After filing last week’s newsletter comparing “Succession” to a work of “Game of Thrones”-style fantasy, I recorded a podcast episode with Razib Khan in which we talked about our shared affection for actual fantasy novels, our experience as early George R.R. It was a wide-ranging conversation, but one that stayed mostly with the big names of the genre — Martin, J.R.R. To be clear, this isn’t a list of my all-time favorites or even a list of “fantasy novels that should be adapted for TV instead of making more seasons of ‘The Rings of Power.’” It’s just me turning a glance at my bookshelf into a newsletter. You can think of this list of novels, maybe, as various inspirations for that imagined perfection. Hobb’s hero, Fitz, is one of the most successful examples of character-building and compelling interiority in recent fantasy.

☆ Columns That Scrutinized, and Skewered, the Literary World
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-22 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

NB BY J.C.: A Walk Through the Times Literary Supplement, by James CampbellIf you are a subscriber to the Times Literary Supplement, or TLS, that august literary review out of London, you know that its good, gray issues roll in every week, more quickly than it is possible to keep up. Davis didn’t mention it, but one part of the TLS no one skips, in my experience, is the NB column, which runs inside the back cover. This correspondent has officially been outed as James Campbell, a biographer of James Baldwin and a longtime editor at the magazine. He was a good steward of the column, and his best material has been collected now in “NB by J.C.: A Walk Through the Times Literary Supplement.”His NB was not a gossip column, Campbell explains. He hoped never to see the words “Martin” and “Amis” in proximity, and he mostly lived up to that vow.

☆ NAACP issues travel advisory for Florida over DeSantis’ ‘aggressive attempts to erase Black history’
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-21 | by ( Summer Concepcion | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

The NAACP on Saturday issued a travel advisory for Florida over Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' "aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity and inclusion programs" in the state's schools, the organization said in a statement. Under DeSantis, "the state of Florida has become hostile to Black Americans and in direct conflict with the democratic ideals that our union was founded upon," Johnson added. The NAACP's travel advisory for Florida was initially proposed to the board of directors by the organization's Florida State Conference, which voted unanimously in favor of it in March. DeSantis' office and the NAACP did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the travel advisory.

☆ Opinion: A cerebral rock star is dead
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-21 | by ( Opinion John Avlon | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

He is the author of “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace.” The views expressed in this essay are his own. These celebrated writers were the subject of long-form profiles and occasional tabloid scandals, treated as cerebral rock stars and voices of their generation. They were a post-punk crew that migrated from the UK to the US, including Hitchens, Tina Brown and Salman Rushdie. In his final book, “Inside Story,” part memoir and part novel, Amis returned to his friendship with Hitchens in the 1970s, prior to their becoming famous. It chronicles a doomed affair, flashing forward at times to the decline of their friend Saul Bellows from dementia, as well as Hitchens’ death.

☆ Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-20 | by ( Dwight Garner | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

As he aged, he stopped playing tennis, a sport he once played daily and wrote about often. He mostly stopped writing criticism, too. “Insulting people in print is a vice of youth,” he said in an interview with The Independent. Mr. Amis was shortlisted for the award in 1991 for “Time’s Arrow,” and longlisted in 2003 for “Yellow Dog.”His final novel, “Inside Story,” published in 2020, was a “novelized autobiography” that considered his friendship with Mr. Hitchens and his relationship with his father. In “The Information,” he wrote: “Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves.

CNN —British author Martin Amis, best known for the 1984 novel, “Money,” and 1989’s “London Fields,” has died, his publisher Penguin Books UK announced Saturday. “(Amis) leaves a towering legacy and an indelible mark on the British cultural landscape, and will be missed enormously,” the British publishing house said on Twitter. LONDON - APRIL 5: Writer Martin Amis at home in London on April 5, 1995. His 1991 novel, “Time’s Arrow,” and 2014’s “The Zone of Interest,” explored the Holocaust. “It’s hard to imagine a world without Martin Amis in it,” his UK editor, Michal Shavit, said in Penguin’s statement.

☆ Martin Amis, British writer of dark comedic novels, dies at 73
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-20 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

[1/2] Novelist Martin Amis (L) talks to Tina Brown at the launch of Brown's book "The Diana Chronicles" at a party hosted by Reuters in the Serpentine Gallery in central London, June 18, 2007.... Read moreWASHINGTON, May 20 (Reuters) - Martin Amis, a British writer of dark comedic novels, has died at the age of 73, his publisher said Saturday on Twitter. Penguin Books said Amis "leaves a towering legacy and an indelible mark on the British cultural landscape, and will be missed enormously." Amis died Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Florida, the New York Times reported earlier, quoting his wife, Isabel Fonseca, as saying the cause was esophageal cancer. He worked as an editor at The Times Literary Supplement and later the literary editor of The New Statesman. In a 2020 interview with the New York Times, Amis said "we read literature to have a good time.

☆ Unanswered Questions About Trump and Russia
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Peggy Noonan | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Peggy Noonan is an opinion columnist at the Wall Street Journal where her column, "Declarations," has run since 2000. She has been a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, and has taught in the history department at Yale University. Before entering the Reagan White House, Noonan was a producer and writer at CBS News in New York, and an adjunct professor of Journalism at New York University. She was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up there, in Massapequa Park, Long Island, and in Rutherford, New Jersey. In November, 2016 she was named one of the city's Literary Lions by the New York Public Library.

“The attack on books, the attack on teaching, the attack on libraries, in – how can I put this – Florida, has never been more dangerous, never been more important to fight,” he said. Rushdie spoke at the PEN America Gala in New York City, praising the literary and free speech advocacy group for its latest efforts to block politicians and local officials seeking to ban literature concerning race and gender identity. PEN America, along with book publisher Penguin Random House and several parents and authors, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday challenging Florida’s Escambia County school district’s removal of certain books on race and LGBTQ issues from school libraries. “I was really proud to hear yesterday that PEN America, together with my publisher Penguin Random House, has taken this step of bringing a lawsuit in Florida,” Rushdie said. “Tonight, we recognize the courage of an Iranian writer, and we’ve done so over and over (with) writers from all over the world.

☆ 10 things in tech: Musk believes remote work is morally wrong, BookTok a kingmaker, and AI press releases
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Michael Cogley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

It will be interesting to see what enlarged role social media stats will also have on the publishing industry, given TikTok has assumed the position of a literary kingmaker. But before I pitch you my novella that's sure to be a social media hit, let's jump into today's tech news. He also revealed that he planned to rehire some of the thousands of staff he laid off after he assumed control of the social media giant. A new PR tech company is using AI to write press releases. Apple unveiled a new set of accessibility features this week, including "Personal Voice," which aims to replicate a user's voice with AI after 15 minutes of training.

☆ Salman Rushdie Makes Surprise Appearance at PEN America Gala
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Jennifer Schuessler | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“We see free speech threatened on all sides, from the left and the right,” Suzanne Nossel, who has been PEN America’s chief executive since 2013, said in an interview before the gala. But this is a really important time to shore it up as a cultural and constitutional value. That’s part of what the gala does.”The gala itself has been affected by the complexities of the current moment. “As a free speech organization, we must go to the utmost lengths to avoid sidelining speech or being seen to do so,” she said. “Nothing puts you at ease at an event like seeing Salman Rushdie,” he said to titters.

☆ A Centuries-Old Mystery: Did This Elusive Viking City Exist?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( Andrew Higgins | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

After the local government decided to build an observation tower atop a sandy hill on Wolin, an island in the Baltic Sea, a Polish archaeologist was called in to check the site before construction and look for buried artifacts from the spot’s macabre past. Hangmen’s Hill, a public park, had in earlier times been an execution ground, a cemetery and, some believe, a place for human sacrifices — so who knew what grisly discoveries were in store? But what the archaeologist, Wojciech Filipowiak, found when he started digging caused more excitement than distaste: charcoaled wood indicating the remains of a 10th-century stronghold that could help solve one of the great riddles of the Viking Age. Was a fearsome fortress mentioned in ancient texts a literary fantasy or a historical reality? It has long been known that Nordic warriors established outposts more than a millennium ago on Poland’s Baltic coast, enslaving indigenous Slavic peoples to supply a booming slave trade, as well trading in salt, amber and other commodities.

☆ Read Your Way Through Los Angeles
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Héctor Tobar | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books. Outsiders often think of Los Angeles as an anti-intellectual place, all Hollywood glitz and no substance, but writers have always been drawn to my hometown. In David L. Ulin’s “Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology,” I read about Simone de Beauvoir’s 1947 journey to L.A.’s Eastside, where she learned about the city’s anti-Mexican prejudice and admired Dia de los Muertos skulls. It’s no accident that two very different, canonical works of L.A. literature climax with riots, even though they were written more than a half century apart: Nathanael West’s 1939 novel “The Day of the Locust,” and Anna Deavere Smith’s play “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.”Is there a book, or a writer, who captures the essence of Los Angeles? With her iconic 1960s and ‘70s essays about Los Angeles and the West, in collections such as “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion helped invent New Journalism.

☆ Opinion: The banned Russian landmine with a deceptively poetic name
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Opinion Sasha Dovzhyk | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +8 min

A great deal of eeriness is due to the highly explosive Russian “petals.” “Petal” — or, “lepestok,” in Russian — is the poetic name of an internationally banned Russian-made anti-personnel landmine. The Russian wish for Ukraine appears to be death: to render Ukrainian land uninhabitable, to maim and kill those who live on it. But as one learns from Kataev’s tale, the Russian petals travel far and know no borders. In November, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reported that 200,000 hectares (almost 50,000 acres) of Ukrainian land were contaminated with unexploded mines and shells. The rusted remains of a tank in Sviatohirsk, Donetsk region, pictured during a PEN Ukraine trip in April 2023.

☆ Wisconsin lawmaker from the city where a teacher was suspended for playing Miley Cyrus' 'Rainbowland' now wants to make it so that teachers can be sued for 'obscene' books
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Kenneth Niemeyer | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Wisconsin lawmakers introduced a bill that would allow parents to sue teachers over "obscene" books. In April, the district suspended a teacher who played the song "Rainbowland," which is about acceptance. The first bill recommends that the state strip school employees and teachers of their protections against prosecution for "displaying obscene material," the release says. The other bill would prohibit the use of public funds to purchase "obscene material." In April, the Waukesha School District suspended Melissa Tempel after she included "Rainbowland," as part of a planned performance with her first-grade class.

☆ TikTok has influenced nearly every aspect of book publishing and helped push sales to record highs. 25 insiders describe how it's changed their industry.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Marta Biino | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

The BookTok phenomenon helped send book sales to an all-time high and reignite a love for reading. From authors to stores, the book world is turning to TikTok to drive sales and build community. Still, while authors might feel pressure to try TikTok, industry experts say it's better to focus on craft than marketing. Aster is one of the hundreds of authors who are benefitting from the success of TikTok and its book-related hashtag #BookTok. But TikTok's influence on publishing has also dialed up the pressure on authors to be marketers, as well as writers.

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