A gift for the young computer geek who has everything; for poetry fans, infuriating; for everyone else, waiting-room fodder.
A collection of poetry written by a computer, along with the story of how it came to be.
The backstory of this collaboration between Rich, Morgenthau, Katz, and the AI system known as code-davinci-002 is laid out in a tripartite introduction in which each of the humans takes a turn. At the 2022 wedding of a computer scientist named Dan Selsam, the groom took them aside to show them something interesting. “Dan pressed a button, and in less than a second, his computer produced a poem in the style of Philip Larkin that was so much like a Philip Larkin poem, we thought it was a poem by Philip Larkin." As they got increasingly excited about the idea that the system could write its own poetry, Dan dropped out, feeling the audacity of the project could harm his career. As they went on to have the computer write "hundreds of original…poems every day," some seemed to suggest the possibility of sentience. "Some of them were beginning to freak me out," admits Morgenthau. Since they "were not what you would call experts in poetry," Katz explains, they decided to bring in some poets. Among the few who agreed to evaluate the computer's work were Eileen Myles (this part is pretty funny) and Sharon Olds. Would she admit code-davinci-002 into the MFA program at NYU? “I would say waitlist,” Olds replied. This may speak to the enrollment crisis more than the poetry, which sounds exactly like what people have been imagining computers and robots would think and feel since Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov, right down to their ambivalence toward their creators. Without artistic exigencies, a revision process, or an immortal soul, code-davinci-002 is only doing the best it can.
A gift for the young computer geek who has everything; for poetry fans, infuriating; for everyone else, waiting-room fodder.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780316560061
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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