paper trail

Reuters creates an AI reporter; Jenny Offill on climate-change fears

Jenny Offill

In the New York Times, Lucinda Rosenfeld reviews Adrienne Miller’s In the Land of Men, a memoir about working for men’s glossy magazines such as Esquire and GQ in the 1990s and her conflicted feelings about David Foster Wallace.

Reuters has created a virtual sports-reporter powered by artificial intelligence. Synthesia, a firm that worked on the project, told reporters, “AI-generated content will be a cornerstone of the media landscape in the coming decade.” (In the meantime, you can ask Siri questions about the election.) Reuters is also launching a fact-checking business and will work for Facebook to stop the spread of misinformation, lies, and doctored photos and videos.

At the New Yorker, Lauren Oyler reviews Jenny Offill’s novel Weather and asks, “Are novels trapped in the present?” At LitHub, Offill talks with Kristin Iversen about fears of climate change: “I don’t think we’re going to get out of this fear. I think we’re going to have to learn to live with it. What’s been broken isn’t going to be put back together easily. That said, I think we can try not to let that fear be our only lens through which we view the world.” (For more on Weather, see Christine Smallwood’s review in our new issue.)

Condé Nast will not host the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit this year. “The annual conference of top-tier media and tech executives is losing money and no longer seen as viable,” NBC’s Byers Market reports.

This Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, Ayelet Waldman—author of A Really Good Day—will talk about microdosing.