Boris Kachka

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One of my favorite works on the history of ideas is an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, titled “Whomst Among Us Let the Dogs Out.” For most of the show, an artist named Ben Sisto investigates the origins of Baha Men’s 2000 earworm, “Who Let the Dogs Out,” tracing the song back, across multiple versions, to a chant from a 1986 Texas high-school football game.

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This week, my colleague Lily Meyer investigated “what happened to the radicals.” In her article, she was writing about a type of plot shared by several recent books, as well as the Oscar-winning film One Battle After Another.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Sometimes the smallest detail can change the way you think about the world. This happened to me in 2009, when I read The Original of Laura—which consists of unedited fragments of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished last novel—and noticed that, after 35 years of writing in English, the author had still struggled to spell bicycle.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Book publishing has, let’s say, a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Anthropic settled a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion after training its chatbot, Claude, on pirated text; hundreds of such copyright lawsuits against data-scraping tech companies are still making their way through the courts.

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One of the more common clichés of modern travel is calling any trip—even a subway ride to an Instagram-famous coffee shop—a pilgrimage. The word originally applied to journeys made to holy places by people so devout that they were willing to endanger their lives to get there.

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Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway turned 100 this spring—not quite double the age of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, who, as Woolf writes, “had just broken into her fifty-second year.” The book pops up less frequently on lists of the best fiction of the 20th century than James Joyce’s Ulysses, the libidinous classic to which Dalloway is often read as a side-eyed response.

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This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
If you were judged on the basis of your darkest dreams, what could you be found guilty of? Moral debasement? Murderous intent? Desperate, cringey behavior? Thankfully, no one can spy on the sordid or embarrassing acts that may transpire in other people’s sleep. But two recently published books connect dream behavior to real-world implications.

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Last week in Los Angeles, the author Roxane Gay gave the keynote address at the AWP Conference & Bookfair, the U.S.’s largest annual gathering of creative writers.

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At a moment when just asking questions can feel synonymous with bad-faith arguments or conspiratorial thinking, one of the hardest things to hold on to might be an open mind.

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If I were to assign one book to every American voter this week, it would be Alexei Navalny’s Patriot. Half memoir, half prison diary, it testifies to the brutal treatment of the Russian dissident, who died in a Siberian prison last February. Still, as my colleague Gal Beckerman noted last week in The Atlantic, the writing is surprisingly funny.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Plagiarism is constantly in the news. In politics alone, the charge has been leveled at Melania Trump, former Harvard President Claudine Gay, President Joe Biden (long ago), and Vice President Kamala Harris (just this week). In literature and journalism, the accusation is even more commonly thrown around, generating decades-long controversies, resignations, and lawsuits.