Some Writing (& Such) Links
A curated collection of writing (& such) links.
The Final Flight of the Airline Magazine
In discussions about the form, the idea of a “captive audience” comes up repeatedly—or, as a master’s thesis I found from 1972 put it, airplane magazines exist in a “laboratory situation” in the sky. “Minds are conceivably unoccupied and their bodies captivated by a plush foam-covered rubber,” the student wrote. “Is the in-flight magazine received by its audience as an appealing, high-quality, well-written publication or is it perceived as ‘just another handout behind the airsick bag’?”
A Venerable and Time-Tested Guide
The 201-page book (the press still offers up a free facsimile edition online) provides pointers “jotted down at odd moments for the individual guidance of the first proofreader; [then] added to from year to year, as opportunity would offer or new necessities arise; revised and re-revised as the scope of the work, and, it is hoped, the wisdom of the workers, increased.” They call it “the embodiment of traditions, the crystallization of usages, the blended product of the reflections of many minds”—a compendium of “fundamentals.” Chicago’s editors say they do not want their manual’s proposed new rules and regulations to be considered definitive, or to be treated by any readers with, as they put it, the “fixity of rock-ribbed law.” Their little manual “lays no claim,” they write, “to perfection in any of its parts; bearing throughout the inevitable earmarks of compromise, it will not carry conviction at every point to everybody.” First copies go on sale right after the World Series for 50 cents.
Margaret Atwood Says She's 'Too Old' to Worry About AI
Renowned Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who is currently writing her memoir, said in an interview that she is too old to be worried about the rise of artificial intelligence.
AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
Earlier this year, WIRED asked AI detection startup Pangram Labs to analyze Medium. It took a sampling of 274,466 recent posts over a six-week period and estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated. “This is a couple orders of magnitude more than what I see on the rest of the internet,” says Pangram CEO Max Spero. (The company’s analysis of one day of global news sites this summer found 7 percent as likely AI-generated.)
Writing in Pictures: Richard Scarry and the Art of Children’s Literature
In my grandparents’ second-floor guest room, formerly my mother’s childhood room, one bookcase had a row of children’s books slumped to the side, offering a chronological core sample of my grandmother’s attempts to busy not only her own kids, but all the grandkids who’d stayed there before me. There were the original Oz books, a copy of Ferdinand the Bull, Monro Leaf’s inexplicably compelling yet mildly fascistic Manners Can Be Fun, some 1950s and 1960s Little Golden Books purchased at the Hinky Dinky supermarket down the street, and, among many others I’ve now long forgotten, the big blue, green, and red shiny square of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever. The largish (even just plain large if you were smallish when holding it) book offered a visual index of the everyday puzzle pieces of life in humble, colored-in line drawings. Each page was a fresh, funny composition of some new angle on the world, making the book a sort of quotidian picture-map containing everything imaginable and unimaginable a kid might be curious about: where and how people lived, slept, ate, played, and worked.
I Am My Own Legal Department: The Promise and Peril of “Just Go Independent”
A week prior, I’d received an email from an amateurish “reputation management company” offering me $200 each to delete the story and the associated tweet. I replied to inform them that, while I’m always happy to correct any errors, I do not remove posts simply because their subjects don’t like them. “I understand. You are right as such there are no errors,” they replied, then upped their bribe to $500. I stopped responding, and assumed that was that.
Character Amnesia in China
How common is this problem? There have been very few empirical studies assessing the extent of the phenomenon. Informal surveys carried out by China Daily and other publications report that roughly 80 per cent of respondents experience character amnesia in their daily life. Some research projects have been initiated to examine the factors that contribute to the problem, but the data are hard to assess in terms of differences in occupation and level of education.
