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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Fare Thee Well, Arthur Frommer
Arthur Frommer, who popularized the concept of budget travel with the 1957 publication of Europe on 5 Dollars a Day: A Guide to Inexpensive Travel, has died at the age of 95. For those of us who grew up on Rick Steves and Anthony Bourdain, it can be easy to forget that for most of modern history, international travel was almost exclusively available to the rich. Frommer started a revolution.
To Mr. Frommer, travel wasn’t just about sightseeing in foreign places; it was about seeing those places on their own terms, removing the membrane that separated them from us. In short, it was about enlightenment. And with the affordability that he could guarantee, it was practically middle-class Americans’ democratic duty, to hear him tell it, to exercise their inalienable right to see London, Paris and Rome.
This is a philosophy Steves would later capture with the catchphrase, “Be a traveler, not a tourist,” and all of us who have had eye-opening, mind-expanding experiences in other countries owe Frommer a debt of gratitude.
To Bot or Not to Bot
In a new study, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found that “nonexpert readers” cannot tell the difference between poems written by beloved authors and those written by ChatGPT in the voices of those authors. Not only that, the participants actually preferred ChatGPT’s poems and were more likely to guess that they were written by humans. It’s a headline designed to incite pearl-clutching, but the details matter. First, sales of poetry books remind us that very few of even the most avid readers reach for poetry. (Per a 2022 study, less than 10% of Americans read any poetry in the last year.) Second, the writers whose work was used in the study—Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot, among others—all have recognizable, easily mimicked styles. Third, most people have not read these writers since high school. It’s easy to trick folks then their baseline familiarity is low to nonexistent.
Do these findings indicate a threat to poetry’s existence and/or bottom line? Only if you believe that there’s meaningful overlap between the “nonexpert readers” enlisted in the study (this is the part where I remind you that most participants in university-based research are undergraduate students) and the <10% of American adults who seek out poetry on purpose. Read more about the researchers’ methods here, and see for yourself what it looked like when one Lit Hub writer asked ChatGPT to mimic iconic poems.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The big screen adaptation of Wicked hits theaters this Friday, and I know I can’t be the only book nerd who has been quietly hoping no one will notice that I don’t really know what it’s about. If you’re in the same situation, let’s link arms and skip down the yellow brick road via this explainer about Wicked and Gregory Maguire’s other books.
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