Author George R. R. Martin turned 78 this past Sunday, and I can’t deny I have a bit of trepidation about the title of tonight’s diary. I don’t want to jinx him or anything, given that millions of eager readers have been waiting years for a new book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Rest assured, I did not write that quote. No, it is one of the many ghastly sentiments expressed by tech bros in newly unsealed documents in the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and many individual authors against ChatGPT and Microsoft. That lawsuit alleges for copyright infringement for using works of fiction to train Open AI’s ChatGPT. Earlier this month, the plaintiffs requested a summary judgment from the judge, claiming that the weight of existing evidence was so great that the issue should not even need to go to trial.
The Authors Guild has highlighted some of the now public comments made by OpenAI executives in the case. “The better we do on GPT-X, the more worried genre fiction authors will become about us substituting for them on Amazon,” OpenAI policy director Jack Clark stated in testimony given in May 2020. He further acknowledged that while “there will be a point where a bunch of artists express worry about what we’re doing here and we’ll likely ignore their concerns and release anyway.”
The filings also point to the hiring of Tarun Gogineni in 2022 to lead OpenAI’s efforts to improve the writing quality of its models. The documents show that Gogineni stated that his “research mission” was to create a machine that would supplant human authors…..
The hubris Gogineni exhibited about AI replacing human authors is perhaps best exemplified in a tweet that appeared in testimony that if George R.R. Martin dies early “GPT can write the next [S]ong of [I]ce and [F]ire book.”
George R.R. Martin was one of the initial authors bringing the lawsuit. Many more authors are part of it, including David Baldacci, Taylor Branch, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, Christopher Golden, Andrew Sean Greer, John Grisham, David Henry Hwang, Jodi Picoult, Stacy Schiff, and James Shapiro. But Martin has been a thread running throughout the plot twists of this case.
For example, the tech bros have maintained in their defense that ChatGPT transforms the texts it digests, and does not merely regurgitate the content.
The defendants discuss an OpenAI expert’s search for regurgitated passages from the plaintiffs’ books, saying that the plaintiffs’ “expert spent significant effort trying to brute force OpenAI’s LLMs to reproduce text,” by creating millions of prompts. “The longest span of contiguous text he could generate was a 1,899-word excerpt from A Game of Thrones, which is only 0.62% of the book,” the defendants write.
In another phase of the ongoing legal clash of kings, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein noted that a ChatGPT-generated idea appeared to have breached Martin’s copyright.
The prompt saw ChatGPT generate an alternative sequel to the A Clash of Kings that would see the story veer in a radically different direction to A Storm of Swords. The AI decided to give the novel the title ‘A Dance With Shadows.’ How (un)imaginative!
The novel had a number of simply awful ideas, including a new claim to the Iron Throne from none other than some of the Children of the Forest, and even “a distant relative of the Targaryens” called Lady Elara.
So, buy books! Support authors! And fight against a future day when we will have nothing to read but AI-generated slop.
And now, on to this week’s new nonfiction:
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
An Unexpected Life: A Memoir, by Gloria Steinem. In her final memoir, Gloria Steinem offers a candid, inspiring portrait of her early life and journey as an activist, while looking ahead to the next chapters of the fight for equality—a rare opportunity to learn directly from one of feminism’s most enduring voices.
Before she became a feminist leader, Gloria Steinem was a curious child: going on road trips with her itinerant father, caring for her mother, and devouring every book she could find. In An Unexpected Life, Steinem reflects on the unlikely experiences and pivotal moments—from a childhood rat bite that opened her eyes to the dangers of poverty to the 1970 Women’s March honoring the right to vote—that shaped the visionary woman she would become.
She shares her years living in India, learning from the nonviolent movement there, and her travels around the world advocating for women’s rights. Along the way, she honors the people who influenced her most, including trailblazers, writers, and thinkers who expanded her understanding of power, community, justice, and solidarity.
Moving between past and present, Steinem examines the progress and setbacks of six decades of activism. As she reflects on the movements she helped build and the victories won for women’s and human rights, she also looks ahead, urging new generations to imagine bolder, more inclusive paths forward. Description from the publisher Random House.oir
“This is a fiercely beautiful book about how we survive, how we learn, how we keep faith with one another, and how an unexpected life can become a formidable force for freedom and connection.”—Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist
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Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, by Kelly Lytle Hernández. In Racist by Design, award-winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernández reveals how generations of lawmakers and law enforcers built the American immigration system to encourage white immigrants while targeting nonwhite migrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal. The goal, often explicitly stated by the system’s architects, was to create a permanent caste of undocumented and criminalized workers to provide cheap labor for the American economy.
Many Americans’ understanding of the immigration system begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. Lytle Hernández expands that history by a full century, showing how the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s inspired not only America’s first immigration bans (to prevent news of a free Black republic from reaching our shores) but also its first refugee resettlement program (to welcome and support Haiti’s evicted enslavers.) She explains how Chinese Exclusion led the Supreme Court to disconnect immigration laws from the constitution. She reveals how eugenicists and Jim Crow segregationists built much of our current immigration regime as expressly “whites-only,” and shows how during the Civil Rights Movement, Congress amended this system but never abolished it, leaving many of the regime’s racist rules and rituals intact today. Description from the publisher W. W. Norton & Company.
“It is tempting to see this enormous crackdown as a distortion of immigration enforcement, a system bent to authoritarian purposes by a president unusually willing to test its limits. UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, offers a more disturbing explanation: Trump did not have to build this apparatus. America built it for him.” — Jimmy So – The New Republic
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Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, by Akbar Shahid Ahmed. Following Hamas’s horrific October 7 attack, Israel launched an offensive of staggering violence in Gaza, saying it targeted militants while regularly striking hospitals, schools, and homes. Critically acclaimed journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed offers extensive reporting and chilling new details about how the Biden administration enabled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—ignoring warnings from government experts and implicating Americans in thousands of apparent war crimes. Washington did little to free Israeli hostages or shield innocent Palestinians as protests grew nationwide and international human rights principles crumbled. Still, President Joe Biden denied he was giving Netanyahu a blank check. He set a “red line” over the town of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians were sheltering, saying an assault there would risk Israel’s pipeline of American bombs. Yet after Netanyahu’s advance began, deepening Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe, Biden’s team kept weapons flowing.
In vivid prose and with unparalleled access to insiders, Ahmed depicts a White House that resisted a course correction as its failures became undeniable. He probes Biden’s inner circle: a paranoid and imperious group shaped by the War on Terror, whose choices fueled tens of thousands of avoidable deaths among Palestinians, Lebanese, and Israelis, torpedoed long-time standards for warfare, and created a more dangerous world for us all. The Biden administration’s decisions drove voter backlash that helped Donald Trump regain power, and established patterns of impunity that have spurred wider bloodshed under Trump. Description from the publisher W. W. Norton & Company. CLICK HERE to read a review of this book in The New York Times.
“With exceptional sourcing and clarity, journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed reveals Israel’s U.S.-enabled genocide in Gaza as the greatest moral failing of the Biden administration.…that stained what could have been a transformative presidency.” — Joy Reid, NAACP Image Award winner and New York Times best-selling author of Medgar and Myrlie
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History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings & Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery, by Richard Kurin. In 2011, staff at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History discovered what appeared to be a hair—light red, possibly human—pressed between the pages of the Thomas Jefferson Bible. That hair sparked an unprecedented scientific quest: determining if modern genomics could recover Jefferson’s DNA and finally resolve the most divisive and enduring question surrounding his life—the paternity of the children of Sally Hemings, one of hundreds of African Americans enslaved by Thomas Jefferson.
For over two centuries, the Jefferson–Hemings controversy has shaped American debates about race, power, slavery, and the mythology of the Founding Fathers. Historians have argued fiercely. Descendants have lived with uncertainty. DNA technology in the 1990s brought us closer, but not all the way; the evidence remained incomplete. Until now. In this riveting narrative—part scientific detective story, part historical epic—Richard Kurin, distinguished scholar and museum official, leads readers through the fifteen-year-long genomic investigation conducted with leading DNA scientists, archaeologists, genealogists, forensic experts, and Jefferson and Hemings’ descendants across the country.
The result is the first conclusive, scientifically validated answer to a question that has reverberated since the eighteenth century. Description from the publisher Crown Books. CLICK HERE to read a review of this book in The New York Times.es
“Richard Kurin’s brilliant book is a spellbinding detective story that solves one of the towering puzzles of American history. It shows how science and deeply humanistic ideals can supercharge the study of our past and reminds us, above all, that we Americans are one great and glorious family.”—Michael Beschloss, author of Presidents of War
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The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life, by Barry Werth. In the early part of the 20th century, patients routinely died from the flu, if they didn’t contract a deadlier disease such as rubella, mumps, or polio first. But with advances in technology, the young talent at universities across the country, and the significant investment from a federal government eager to prepare for a second world war, medicine exploded in the 1930s to the 1960s to finally meet the needs of a sick populace. Vitamins, penicillin, wide-spectrum antibiotics, cortisone, a polio vaccine, and cancer chemotherapy revolutionized health care.
Werth brings medicine’s unsung heroes—including Max Tishler, James Conant, George Merck, Alfred Newton Richards, Vannevar Bush, and Selman Waksman—to life in this impassioned and compelling chronicle of the golden age of scientific progress. He also shows us how this crucial investment in science modernized the United States, establishing a scientific powerhouse for decades to come.
A lively work of science history, The Age of Cures is a case study of the values that made American research a model for the world, and a reminder of how society relies on investments in its scientists. Description from the publisher Simon and Schuster. CLICK HERE to read a review of the book in The Wall Street Journal.
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Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, by Benjamin Moser. In Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, Benjamin Moser uncovers a suppressed tradition that has shaped Jewish thought for generations. Through a cast of artists, rabbis, poets, lawyers, activists, journalists, and politicians—from Europe and Africa and Asia and Latin America—Moser traces a lineage of Jewish dissenters who confronted Zionism’s moral and political stakes—often at devastating personal cost, including censorship, exile, and death.
Their lives form a sweeping, global narrative that dismantles a powerful myth: that anti-Zionism is synonymous with antisemitism. Spanning continents and centuries, these voices—people from the right and the left, Reform and Orthodox, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, men and women, gay and straight—differ sharply in belief and background, yet converge on a shared warning about the consequences of a nationalist project built on exclusion. What emerges is not only a rediscovered tradition of Jewish moral thought, but a startling reappraisal of Zionism itself.
Moser’s work restores the full scale and depth of Jewish ethical imagination, affirming that Judaism is older and larger than any single political project. Lucid, unsparing, and deeply humane, Anti-Zionism cements Moser’s place as one of our foremost Jewish writers and presents a framework through which this history—and its meanings—will be understood for years to come. Description from the publisher Doubleday. CLICK HERE to read a profile of the author in The Jewish Forward.
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Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy, by Amy Westervelt. Whether it’s the tobacco industry lying about the health dangers of cigarettes, Big Pharma burying studies that make its products less marketable, or Big Oil misleading the public on the dangers of the climate crisis, we all know corporations use doubt and science denial to avoid responsibility. So why do we continue to let them get away with it?
In Brought to You By, Amy Westervelt exposes the plot hidden within the familiar story of science denial. Over the last century, Big Industry has built a vast apparatus of think tanks, lobbyists, sponsored university labs, and obliging news networks to con the public and fool decision-makers, poisoning the informational ecosystem and warping the nature of truth along the way.
With her signature wit and incisiveness, Westervelt shows how the masterminds of corporate misinformation-people like Herb Schmertz, the public relations pioneer who made Mobil “the thinking man’s oil company,” Richard Edelman, the PR guy who helped the dairy industry vilify oat milk, and David Petraeus, the disgraced spy chief using counter- insurgency tactics to discredit climate science, have ushered in an era of unprecedented corporate control. Description from the publisher Bloomsbury Publishing CLICK HERE to read an interview with the author on the website DeSmog.
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Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War, by Sharon Weinberger. Drawing on deep, exclusive reporting, a veteran national security correspondent reveals how a new military-industrial complex is arising from the cradle of Silicon Valley, with vast implications for American democracy and the global balance of power.
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Alexander Karp. These tech titans are fast becoming some of the most powerful figures in the realm of national security, with enormous implications for us all. As Sharon Weinberger reveals in this gripping account, the American military and spy agencies helped to create Silicon Valley as we now know it, and some of its biggest and most valuable companies today owe much of their success to the Pentagon and CIA. Beginning with the War on Terror and accelerating under Donald Trump, however, the old alliance between elected leaders in Washington and the unelected CEOs of Silicon Valley has grown increasingly uneasy as power has shifted to the private sector and Big Tech exerts greater and greater influence over its old patrons. Companies such as SpaceX and Palantir, along with newer entrants to the field such as Anduril, are proudly supporting—and quietly shaping—US national defense, whether by providing spies and soldiers with AI and cloud-computing tools or actual military hardware such as microwave weapons, hypersonic missiles, and advanced drones.
The implications of this historic shift are poorly understood and fraught with peril. What happens when mercurial billionaires like Elon Musk control weapons and technologies that were once the preserve of the US government? How will this new military-industrial complex affect the way wars are fought, or even which wars are fought? That is the urgent question before us today, at the dawn of this new era—and as Weinberger reveals, it is one on which our collective future might well hinge. Description from the publisher Little, Brown and Company. CLICK HERE to read an op-ed by the author in The New York Times.
“The military-industrial complex is changing fast, and this riveting book captures the earthquake in vivid detail. It’s a shocking story about big money, military might, and a technological revolution that will change our country and the future of war. A masterwork of investigative reporting that reveals a network of billionaires and power brokers at the heart of American empire.”—Christopher Leonard, author of Kochland
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Pay Attention: How the Algorithms and Media Wars Are Suppressing Truth and Rewiring Your Brain, by David Pakman. Has the dystopian future of 1984 and Brave New World arrived? As Pakman forewarns in Pay Attention, we confront a very Orwellian threat of totalitarianism, as technological “advancements” have rendered us not just passive but willing participants in a Huxleyesque world where our humanity becomes swallowed by the Attention Economy. Drawing on his experience fighting in the digital trenches, Pakman illustrates how and why political news and commentary has become more fragmented, extreme, and divisive in a self-fulfilling, self-feeding media environment. His reports from the front line of the media and culture wars are beyond eye-opening, including:
The future is already here—and with AI creep, it’s only accelerating!
How a requirement for controversy means we are already losing the battle for truth
How audience capture is rewiring our brains
The dark science behind thumbnails
Why the Right is built for the Attention Economy
The myth of media “independence”
How the user has become the product…and why we no longer even need human creators to mine this product.
Description from the publisher Harper Books.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think Pakman has been reading my mind. Literally. Pay Attention is a sharp, unsettling look at our well founded anxieties over how the attention economy and AI-driven media are warping our politics, our psychology, and our sense of reality—and what it will take to reclaim them. Pakman is well positioned to take on this challenge: his livelihood depends on understanding how algorithms reward outrage, punish nuance, and quietly rewire our brains. We can’t afford to keep our heads buried in the proverbial sand any longer and Pay Attention will help you understand the challenges we face—and how we can overcome them.” — Jessica Tarlov
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No One Loves an Angry Woman: An Exvangelical Coming-of-Rage Story, by Gemma Hartley. Gemma Hartley grew up in an Evangelical household where she was raised to become an obedient wife from the time she was a little girl. A sexual assault as a teenager upended her evangelical world, and that coupled with an upbringing steeped in purity culture led her to internalize guilt, silence… and anger.
The good girl conditioning of the church demanded that Hartley seek the narrow path of womanhood that emphasized service to others, to swallow the discomfort and rage that simmered just below the surface – but when political events reawakened her trauma, she began to come apart at the seams. Here she unravels the threads of her upbringing to weave a new story, one where women’s anger is not sinful and dangerous – it is information, and often the most rational response there is.
Whether or not you’ve ever set foot in a church, Christian patriarchal norms have shaped American culture in ways that are far-reaching and insidious. From restrictive legislation that takes away women’s bodily autonomy to cultural norms that expect women to pick up after their husbands and joyfully give up their careers to care for children—these are all standards informed and fed by Christian culture.
“This is a book you’ll be pressing into people’s hands for years. Come for the memoir, leave with a whole new relationship to your own fury.” —Amanda Montell, New York Times best-selling author of The Age of Magical Overthinking
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Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain, by Marion Gibson. Predating the Salem witch trials by decades—though linked by ideology and, in some cases, by ancestry—these trials began in southeastern England and the Scottish Lowlands in the early 1640s and spread rapidly through Britain. Fueled by religiosity, misogyny, and the economic stresses of war, the trials soon grew into a mass panic that transformed the nation—and led to the deaths of over three hundred people during a ten-year span.
Moving across England and Scotland, Witchland shows how the chaos and economic deprivation of wartime can exacerbate existing divides within communities, leaving those already without power particularly vulnerable. Drawing on newly discovered historical documents, Gibson gives voice to the accused and defenseless—telling stories that have been hidden for centuries. With each chapter focusing on a different town and the lives and deaths of the people within it, Witchland is a gripping historical drama that plays out on both the small scale of the town square and the large scale of the nation. Description from the publisher Scribner Books.
“Witchland is a remarkable feat of scholarship and empathy, a journey through 1640s Britain to explore an outbreak of “well-meaning mass murder.” Marion Gibson painstakingly excavates and recenters the lives of the victims; she proves this panic was neither inevitable nor inexplicable and reminds us that resistance was – and is – possible. A chilling and timely read!” —Shelley Puhak, author of The Blood Countess
True North: On the Road in Canada, by Paul Theroux. For more than half a century, Paul Theroux has traveled the globe and chronicled its far corners with curiosity, wit, and an unflinching eye. With True North, his twelfth travel book, he turns that eye to a country that has long been his quiet neighbor: Canada.
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What begins as the completion of a North American road trip trilogy becomes something more personal. Theroux traces his own ancestral connection to Quebec, where his forebear Antoine Theroux arrived in the 17th century. Theroux meets his Quebcois friends and relations, then travels more widely through remote villages, multicultural cities, and sweeping landscapes that have defined modern Canada. Along the way, he speaks with farmers, refugees, writers like John Irving and Michael Ondaatje, and Indigenous leaders such as Tanya Talaga, listening as Canadians reckon with identity, belonging, and patriotism, often in response to the jabs and provocations of their southern neighbor.
From snowbound Ottawa at the height of political protests to the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, from Toronto’s “ethno-burbs” to Vancouver’s Pacific gateway, True North is a panoramic portrait of a vast country both familiar and elusive. Description from the publisher Mariner Books. CLICK HERE to read a review of this book in The New York Times.
“Like me, Paul Theroux is a fellow New Englander who has traveled – we’ve both lived a lot of our eighty four years outside our birth country. We both know that before you can be a good writer, you have to be a keen observer.” – John Irving
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Music Sets You Free, by Ryuichi Sakamoto, translated by Sam Bett. One of Japan’s most influential artists and composers, Ryuichi Sakamoto was a man of multitudes. Perhaps best known as the Oscar-winning composer of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and a founder of the groundbreaking electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto was a pop icon, an avant-garde visionary, a techno innovator, and a proud environmentalist. While his unique brilliance transcended mediums as well as borders, Sakamoto himself was curious about how he came to be the complex phenomenon known as “Ryuichi Sakamoto”—a journey to answer the question, “Why do I lead this life?”
Filled with candid photos, Music Sets You Free is the incredible chronicle of a life excitingly lived: an intimate, contemplative, and fascinating recounting of his life story as a musical journey, from his first childhood encounter with a piano to his rise as a global pop star and award-winning composer. Sakamoto’s boundless curiosity led to myriad experiences: producing catchy yet experimental hits with YMO, starring with David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, collaborating with pop geniuses such as David Byrne, Iggy Pop, and Brian Wilson, appearing in a Madonna music video, and even modeling for the Gap.
Throughout his career, Sakamoto was also a dedicated social activist, avidly protesting nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, and restoring a tsunami-damaged piano for his 2017 album async. While the pain of surgeries and treatments left him both emotionally and physically vulnerable in his later life, Sakamoto pushed through the pain to record his final artistic evolution into more avant-garde work after a transformative trip to Greenland during which he witnessed the effects of global warming first-hand. Sakamoto passed away at the age of 71 in 2023. Description from the publisher HarperVia.
“Sakamoto was such a genius, and such a delight to collaborate with — and now this unexpected chance to come know him so much more closely. I’d recommend this book to anyone, and most especially to those not yet familiar with his work.” – William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
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Birth of a Culture, by Grandmaster Flash, with Robert “Scoop” Jackson. Step into the vibrant streets of the 1970s Bronx and witness the exact moment a global movement began. Birth of a Culture gives you a front-row seat to the origins of hip-hop, told through the firsthand experiences of Grandmaster Flash—one of the founding pioneers who helped build the culture from the ground up.
When you read this book, you feel the pulse of the neighborhood parks, hear the scratch of the vinyl, and experience the raw energy of a community turning its daily struggles into a revolutionary art form. This is not just a collection of dates and facts. It is a deeply personal narrative written by Grandmaster Flash and coauthor Robert “Scoop” Jackson that brings you into the rooms and onto the streets where music changed forever.
This book cuts through the myths to deliver an authentic, chronological history—bringing you alongside Grandmaster Flash as he invents the groundbreaking Quik Mix Theory and helps transform a landscape of social unrest into a global movement. With turntables and microphones, the young innovator sparked a cultural explosion that quickly swept the world.
More than a timeline of musical milestones, this Birth of a Culture explores the profound power of community, resilience, and unapologetic creativity. The challenges and triumphs detailed within these pages mirror the social issues we still face, proving that music remains our most vital tool for connection and change. Description from the publisher Amistad.
“Offering part-autobiography and part-narrative, Flash provides a captivating insider look at the emergence and dominance of the now ubiquitous hip-hop culture that music enthusiasts will relish.”- David Szatmary, LIBRARY JOURNAL
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Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music, by Chuck Klosterman. Kaleidoscopic culture critic Chuck Klosterman rewrites the history of reality in a work of speculative nonfiction based on a question that has never been considered or (in all likelihood) even asked: What if The Beatles had only developed a cult following while the Velvet Underground emerged as the most popular band in the world?
The Velvet Underground & Nico was released in the spring of 1967. For decades, the cliche has been that it initially only sold 10,000 copies, though everyone who bought it supposedly started a band. It is the definition of a record whose influence outstrips its mass popularity. But what if the opposite had transpired? What if instead of selling 10,000 copies, it had sold…10 million copies? What if it had sold 100 million copies? What would have happened if the Velvet Underground had inexplicably become the biggest group in the history of popular music, and everything about the rest of the 20th century was merely a footnote to that phenomenon?
Whatever answer you imagine is an infinitesimal splinter, at least when compared to Rock*. Chuck Klosterman has generated a fictitious universe where almost everything is different, except for the songs. The songs remain the same—the difference is how they are heard and what they now mean. Lou Reed is a messiah, reversing the monoculture and dictating the outcome of presidential elections. The Beatles disappear, though they never break up. The Rolling Stones collapse while Led Zeppelin goes bankrupt. Punk rock fills stadiums, undermined only by insouciant radicals like Boston and Van Halen. Disco is destroyed. Hip-hop becomes country. The 1980s are defined by disposable pop icons (like G.G. Allin) and Christian revivalists (like Madonna). Lenny Kravitz lets love rule, Oasis collides with a wonderwall, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are somehow blamed on the Strokes.
Presented like The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll if written by Philip K. Dick, Jorge Luis Borges, and Patrick Bateman, Rock* intermixes satiric contrarianism and Spinal Tap-ish absurdity with darker theories about what makes art popular, how success delineates perception, and the inescapable consensus of subjective history. It is not, nor does it claim to be, the greatest book ever written about rock and roll. But it’s probably the last one that ever needs to be written. Description from the publisher Da Capo.
“Gather round, rock fans, and enjoy…a poke at both the sneering condescension of the music snob and the dubious enthusiasms of the music-listening public. Astonishing here is the steadiness of Klosterman’s hand: Even rock nerds will find themselves googling to learn whether some reported bit of rock excess is the author’s invention or actually happened…. Ingenious. Hilarious.”—Kirkus Reviews
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| DAY | TIME EST/EDT | SERIES | EDITOR(S) |
|---|---|---|---|
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| (LAST SUN OF THE MONTH) | 7:30 PM | LGBTQ Literature | Chrislove |
| MONDAY | 8:00 PM | The Language of the Night | DrLori (RIP to our guide to the language of the night) |
| TUESDAY | 8:00 PM | Contemporary Fiction Views | bookgirl |
| 10:00 PM | Nonfiction Views | DebtorsPrison | |
| WEDNESDAY | 8:00 PM | Bookchat | cfk et al. |
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| (FIRST THURS OF MONTH) | 2:00 PM | Monthly Bookpost | AdmiralNaismith |
| FRIDAY | 7:30 AM | WAYR? | Chitown Kev |
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| 9:30 PM | Classic Poetry Group | Angmar | |
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| 9:00 PM | Books So Bad They’re Good* | Ellid (*on temporary hiatus) |
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