Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Neil Gaiman’s Alleged Victims Speak Out
It’s been six months since news broke that two women were accusing author Neil Gaiman of sexual assault. A month later, more women came forward. In the time since, multiple of Gaiman’s projects have been canceled, but publishing media has remained largely silent…until today. Vulture‘s Lila Shapiro delivers a deeply reported and even more deeply disturbing piece built on interviews with four of the five women who have gone public with allegations against Gaiman, along with reviews of their diaries, contemporaneous text messages and emails with friends and Gaiman, and police documents. The details of Gaiman’s alleged decades-long patterns of abuse are about as bad as they could be, especially for a man who had built “a reputation as an outspoken champion of women” in both his work and personal life. Warning: the story includes graphic details of sexual assault and non-consensual BDSM activities.
Jacob Elordi to Star in Adaption of The Dog Stars
Jacob Elordi is set to star in The Dog Stars, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Peter Heller’s 2012 novel by the same name. Elordi will play Hig, a man who is one of the few survivors of a virus that has all but ended the world. Hig lives in an airplane hangar with his dog and his neighbor and sometimes takes his Cessna out for short flights…until a radio transmission leads him to believe there might be hope beyond the boundaries he’s been living in. What will he find when he flies past the point of no return?
Books That Will Help You Think About AI
The dominant narrative about AI coming out of the book world can be summed up as “it’s bad.” That’s an understandable position given that many of the big tech companies trained their large language models using thousands of copyrighted books without publishers’ or authors’ permission, but it’s not a nuanced response, and the hope that AI will go away if you ignore it long enough is not a realistic one. If you’re interested in deepening your thinking about AI and developing a more complex take, here are 10 books that explore AI from a variety of angles.
