Credit: sompong_tom via Adobe Images UC Berkeley researcher Nina Beguš instructed both humans and AI tools to write a story based on one of two short prompts. She then compared the results, finding that humans still had the edge in creative stories. But recent AI updates have made the platforms better in compelling — and […]
There is so much to complain about in the book world at the current moment, from Amazon’s stranglehold on book retail to the increasing usage of generative AI to replace writers and artists of all kinds. But you’re reading this column on Thursday; I turned it in on Tuesday, Election Day. I have no idea […]
The oldest of my five younger sisters, her first child in the crook of her elbow: I always wanted to be a mother, she says. Which shocked me—I mean confounded me, the idea of wanting to be a mother. And then, variously, each sister declares she wants a family, children, one even seeking out a […]
Malwina Gudoska Considers the Stories of Our Bodies “I am sorry for your loss,” the message lights up the room. After inching my post-surgery body up against the pregnancy-turned-mastectomy pillow, I pick up the phone and type, “Which loss, my breast, or my father?” I delete. “Thank you,” I write instead. “I just heard about […]
Heather McCalden’s genre-defying fragmentary memoir, The Observable Universe , begins with “this book is an album of grief. Every fragment is like a track on a record, a picture in a yearbook; they build on top of one another until, at the end, they form an experience.” And what an experience it is. When McCalden […]
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Advises Students to Listen – and Persevere Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout spoke on campus in conversation with author and English Prof. Andre Dubus III. Elizabeth Strout , Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton books, doesn’t waste words. Yet, everything she said in a campus conversation with author […]
