Weekend Whats
What to Eggers: Leave it to Dave Eggers to write an excellent and perfectly timed novel. His latest, Contrapposto, about art and artists, hits with particular force at this moment when we’re willingly handing our creativity over to machines. You can’t beat a human when it comes to art and storytelling, and that’s particularly true of this writer and this novel, which Andrew Sean Greer calls “a book of profundity, humanity, and ravishing beauty.” While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive, check out this interview with Dave on NPR’s Wild Card. Through 826 Valencia and other orgs, Dave has been working with young writers for decades. He has a message: “This is the first time in history when a whole generation is being told or tempted to have a machine write for them. You are one of one, unprecedented in the history of human evolution. There’s only one of you. So to give your voice to a machine to say speak for me, I’m going to be silent, is such a crime against yourself. It’s so dystopian, beyond anything I could do in a dystopian novel, and I did a lot.”
+ What to Watch: Alice and Steve on Hulu is a really fun and funny show in which Alice is devastated when her best friend Steve starts dating her 26-year-old daughter Izzy. The show stars Nicola Walker, Jemaine Clement, and Yali Topol Margalith. (Some trivia: Margalith is the granddaughter of Topol from Fiddler on the Roof, so she’s following in the family Tradition!)
+ What to Book: Few writers trace the way humans communicate and share information as well as Alex Wright. In his latest book, Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper, Alex “traces the evolution of the American news trade from the Revolutionary War to the dawn of the twentieth century, in search of the messy origins of modern media … As the American newspaper trade mushroomed from a tiny handful of publications in the mid-1700s to more than 20,000 by 1900, it evolved into a noisy, chaotic media ecosystem that often feels surprisingly familiar.” (One thing that kept coming to my mind. So many of our advances in tech and media have been about communicating with one another, while our latest advance (AI) seems more likely to isolate us from one another while we interact with a machine.)
+ What to Wear: Right now, you can score a NextDraft T-Shirt for only 13 bucks using the code LUCKY13 at checkout.
