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Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Local bestsellers for the week ended July 20
3. Atria Books 4. Wally Lamb S&S/Marysue Rucci Books 5. Doubleday 6. Sarah MacLean Ballantine Books 7. Ruth Ware Gallery/Scout Press 8. Alison Espach Henry Holt and Co. 9. Penguin Press 10. Tor Books HARDCOVER NONFICTION 1. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster Advertisement 2. John Green Crash Course Books Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 3. Mel Robbins Hay House LL C 4. Sophie Elmhirst Riverhead Books 5. Penguin Press 6. Scribner 7. Random House 8. Crown Advertisement 9. Robert Macfarlane W. W. Norton & Company 10. Caroline Fraser Penguin Press PAPERBACK FICTION 1. Harper Perennial 2. Ecco 3. Berkley 4. Vintage 5. Andy Weir Ballantine 6. Sangu Mandanna Berkley 7. Crown 8. Riverhead Books 9. Emily Henry Berkley 10. Crown PAPERBACK NONFICTION 1. Crown 2. Michael Finkel Vintage 3. Vintage 4. Vintage 5. Robin Wall Kimmerer Milkweed Editions 6. Matt Kracht Chronicle Books Advertisement 7. Ta-Nehisi Coates One World 8. Heather Cox Richardson Penguin 9. Harper Perennial 10. Amanda Montell Harper Perennial The New England Indie Bestseller List, as brought to you by IndieBound and NEIBA, for the week ended Sunday, July 20, 2025. Based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound. For an independent bookstore near you, visit
Mint
9 hours ago
- Mint
Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem
The Optimist. By Keach Hagey. W.W. Norton; 384 pages; $31.99 and £25 Empire of AI. By Karen Hao. Penguin Press; 496 pages; $32 and £25 IN GREEK MYTHology Prometheus stole fire from the gods and brought it to Earth. He paid for that by being bound for eternity to a rock face, where an eagle tormented him daily by pecking at his liver. Such was the price of humanity's first great technology. In the 21st century the story of Sam Altman, the co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, has a Promethean ring to it, too. He spearheaded the creation of ChatGPT, which was launched in late 2022, stunning the world: suddenly the revolutionary capabilities and risks of generative artificial intelligence (AI) were unleashed. A year later the capricious gods—that is to say, OpenAI's non-profit board—sought to banish him. Unlike Prometheus, however, Mr Altman emerged unscathed. This story is the subject of two excellent new books. They explore the murky mix of missionary zeal, rivalry and mistrust at OpenAI in the run-up to the birth of ChatGPT. The tensions are even more apparent in the chaos leading up to the attempt to fire Mr Altman during the abortive boardroom coup in November 2023. It is testimony to the skill of the authors, who are journalists, that they have produced deeply researched, gripping accounts, both published on May 20th, almost exactly a year and a half after that event. Better still, they tell the story in different ways. Keach Hagey's 'The Optimist" is what could be called the authorised version. She had access to Mr Altman and many of the main characters in his story, including his family and friends. His personality is vivid and complicated enough that her story never flags. It is no hagiography. Karen Hao got no such access for 'Empire of AI". OpenAI kept her at arm's length, which gives her account more bite. Both books reveal disturbing traits about Mr Altman, OpenAI and the culture of Silicon Valley that are useful to bear in mind amid the hype about generative AI. Mr Altman is a beguiling character. As Ms Hagey says, the first things you notice about him are his slight stature and the intensity of his gaze, 'as though he is speaking to the most important person in the world". Brought up in the American Midwest, from a young age he was a technology whizz who was surprisingly witty. He proved a natural crusader: at 17 he shocked a school assembly by revealing his homosexuality in order to promote gay rights. Throughout his career, he has combined an ambition to create world-changing technologies with a gift for storytelling that helps him raise large sums of money to fund his dreams. He started with a location-tracking phone app called Loopt. Since then, his large bets have included a cryptocurrency backed by eye scans to certify digital identity in a world of AI; life extension through cellular-rejuvenation technology; nuclear fusion; and, of course, the quest for superintelligence. Some liken his abilities to Steve Jobs's 'reality distortion field"—the Apple co-founder could make people believe in what they thought was impossible. But unlike Jobs, who was often abrasive, Mr Altman is a sensitive listener who knows how to frame what he offers in ways that people find alluring. From early on, his people skills have attracted powerful mentors. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator (YC), a startup incubator, said of Mr Altman: 'You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he'd be king." Indeed Mr Graham and his partner, Jessica Livingston, handed the reins of YC to Mr Altman within a few years, elevating him at the age of 28 to a position of near-unrivalled power in the Silicon Valley startup scene. Playing with fire Even then, there were misgivings about his candour. 'If Sam smiles, it's super deliberate," a former YC founder tells Ms Hao. 'Sam has smiled uncontrollably only once, when [Mr Graham] told him to take over YC." At Loopt, which he sold for $43m in 2012, his colleagues twice sought to convince the board to sack him as CEO because, as Ms Hagey says, he pursued his own ideas without informing them. Their concerns about his trustworthiness are recounted in both books—even if, in the end, his financial backers remained loyal. Likewise, at YC, Mr Graham and Ms Livingston grew frustrated with Mr Altman's moonlighting at OpenAI, which he started with Elon Musk and others in 2015, while still running YC. Ms Livingston fired him but, as Ms Hagey recounts, he left chaos in his wake. Not only was he overseen by a non-functioning board, he had also used YC equity to help lure people to OpenAI. She says some YC partners saw a potential conflict of interest, 'or at least an unseemly leveraging of the YC brand for Altman's personal projects". These details are important. Both accounts suggest that his ambition, speed and silver-tongued way of telling people only what they want to hear have come close to unravelling OpenAI. Paradoxically, some of these same traits helped OpenAI amass the huge amounts of money and computational power, not to mention the troves of data scraped from the internet to feed its models, that helped give the firm the lead in generative AI. On one occasion, known as 'the divorce", he so alienated some of OpenAI's researchers focused on safety that they left the company and founded one of its main rivals, Anthropic, in 2021. On another, known as 'the blip", he was sensationally fired after his top lieutenants and the board lost trust in him because, as both books say, he told them conflicting stories and failed to give them straight answers about his and OpenAI's investment activities. Yet he returned triumphantly a few days later when they realised that the company might collapse without him. Underpinning both these episodes, and running through both books, is the ideological struggle between those who favour speed over safety when rolling out generative AI. OpenAI has suffered heavily from an internecine rift between 'doomers" and 'boomers". Many of the doomers are part of the effective-altruism (EA) movement, a philanthropic philosophy aimed at finding the most potent way to help others, which took a keen interest in the possibly catastrophic risks of AI. The boomers, or 'effective accelerationists", are more concerned that if America does not win the AI race, China will. In reality, as Ms Hao points out, they are two sides of the same coin. Each is striving to push the boundaries of machine superintelligence as far as is safe or possible—even if one warns of 'fire and brimstone" and the other offers 'visions of heaven". Equally interesting are the rivalries in a field full of quasi-geniuses and the technological leaps they perform to keep ahead of each other. Both books chronicle the falling-out between Mr Musk and Mr Altman, which is vividly catalogued as part of a lawsuit Mr Musk has filed against OpenAI, its boss, and Microsoft, the biggest investor in OpenAI's for-profit entity. Throughout, the two books diverge in ways that underscore the question at the heart of their common story: does the end, the quest for superintelligent AI, justify the means? Ms Hagey appears to think so. She explains away some of Mr Altman's behaviour as aversion to conflict and a 'move fast and break things" mindset common in Silicon Valley. Ms Hao, meanwhile, accuses OpenAI of betraying its mission. She is critical not only of Mr Altman, but of the heads of rival firms, who she insists are in the same power struggle. She says generative-AI models are 'monstrosities", consuming too much data, power and natural resources. She goes too far, however, in likening OpenAi and other labs to colonial empires. But taking the evidence from both books, her concerns about Mr Altman seem valid. In any organisation a CEO who does not seem fully trustworthy is a problem. This is particularly so at the helm of a firm like OpenAI, which is building potentially Promethean technologies. For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
Mint
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Mark Twain was a literary celebrity with a moral compass
Mark Twain. By Ron Chernow. Penguin Press; 1,200 pages; $45. Allen Lane; £40 THE OCTAGONAL study overlooks the green of Elmira College in upstate New York. In it, Mark Twain wrote 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", along with umpteen other stories, articles and speeches. Twain spent his most productive summers on his wife's family's farm in Elmira, writing by day and reading his work to his wife and children on the porch in the evening. The unusual shape notwithstanding, the study is small, austere and unremarkable—three words that are in every way the opposite of Twain's life. In fact, argues Ron Chernow in a titanic new biography, Twain was 'the largest literary personality that America has produced". He is the first literary figure to receive the Chernow treatment: in the past the Pulitzer-prizewinning biographer has focused on tycoons (John D. Rockefeller), presidents (George Washington) and treasury secretaries (Alexander Hamilton, a book which, improbably, inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit musical). Mr Chernow argues that Twain 'fairly invented our celebrity culture". It is true that Twain's biting wit, along with his oratorical and self-promotional skills, made him a star, as beloved by the crowds who packed into halls to watch him speak as by presidents and the literati. But that is not why generations of American children read him in school, nor why he still deserves to be read today. What he really invented was a way of being American in the world and on the page: bold, irreverent and unpretentious. Twain was the laureate of America's unruly adolescence. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30th 1835, Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. His father was anxious, stern and, as Mr Chernow notes, 'forbiddingly humourless"; his mother was pious and quick-witted. Like Abraham Lincoln, Twain was a product of the American frontier. What he lacked in formal education he made up for in ambition. Hannibal sits on the banks of the Mississippi river, which, in the pre-railroad days, was perhaps America's most important commercial artery. The river gave the author his name: the cry 'mark twain" from a boatman meant that the river was of safely navigable depth. To him the river represented liberty and a connection to the wider world. In his most famous novel, 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", Huck (the narrator) and Jim (his enslaved companion) were free and relatively equal on the water, but harassed by the law and a host of unsavoury characters on land. Twain's upbringing put him in close contact with black Americans. The Missouri of Twain's youth was a slave state. His father owned and rented people. His mother took a dim view of abolitionism. Yet as a boy Twain enjoyed listening to people telling stories in the 'negro quarter" of his uncle's farm. He became an ardent opponent not just of slavery, but of racial discrimination in almost any form. In his writings he railed against the vile bigotry common in his day and supported women's suffrage long before it was popular. William Dean Howells, Twain's editor at the Atlantic, called him 'the most desouthernised southerner I ever met. No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery." That abhorrence comes through clearly in 'Huckleberry Finn", from which Ernest Hemingway claimed 'all modern American literature comes". Twain quipped in a preface to the novel that 'Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Both moral and plot are evident in the book. In its celebration of vernacular speech, sympathy with the underdog and lack of pretence, the book created a uniquely American style of fiction. Jim was Twain's most radical creation. Readers today might be put off by his stereotypical dialect, superstition and devotion to Huck, but he was perhaps the first nuanced black character written by a white novelist. Jim is thoughtful and decent, possessed of all the compassion that Huck's own father, an abusive drunkard, never provided, Mr Chernow argues. Once a mainstay of school curricula, in recent years 'Huckleberry Finn" has fallen out of favour. The book is 'banned from most American secondary schools", Mr Chernow writes, 'and its repetitive use of the n-word has cast a shadow over Twain's reputation." But readers who see past the use of that ugly word (common in Twain's time) will find a work that—in its panoply of cruel southern whites blind to Jim's intellect and manifest virtues—shows how bigotry not only harms its victims, but also deforms the people who spout it. Huck yes Mr Chernow devotes curiously little space to the novel. Instead, his biography spends a great deal of its 1,200 pages on topics such as the young Twain's hair-care habits, his opinion on street cleaning in the city of Buffalo and his disappointments later in life. By around page 700 even the most devoted Twainiac may wish the book had a more vigorous editor. Still, Mr Chernow's doorstopper is worth reading for its portrait of an author sure of himself and his gifts, even as he toiled as a steamboat pilot or printer's devil, and its insight into the frenetic, violent, optimistic country that made him. For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
Boston Globe
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Local bestsellers for the week ended July 13
3. Penguin Press 4. Doubleday 5. Atria Books 6. Gary Shteyngart Random House 7. Ruth Ware Gallery/Scout Press 8. Sarah MacLean Ballantine Books 9. Tor Books 10. Berkley HARDCOVER NONFICTION 1. Sophie Elmhirst Riverhead Books Advertisement 2. Mel Robbins Hay House LL C Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 3. Scribner 4. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster 5. Penguin Press 6. Random House 7. Pantheon 8. John Green Crash Course Books Advertisement 9. Crown 10. Maybell Eequay Summersdale PAPERBACK FICTION 1. Harper Perennial 2. Ecco 3. Berkley 4. Crown 5. Vintage 6. Andy Weir Ballantine 7. Riverhead Books 8. Random House Trade Paperbacks 9. Crown 10. Emily Henry Berkley PAPERBACK NONFICTION 1. Michael Finkel Vintage 2. Vintage 3. Crown 4. Vintage 5. Knopf 6. Rebecca Solnit Haymarket Books 7. Holt Paperbacks Advertisement 8. Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. Penguin 9. Harper Perennial 10. Griffin Dunne Penguin Books The New England Indie Bestseller List, as brought to you by IndieBound and NEIBA, for the week ended Sunday, July 13, 2025. Based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound. For an independent bookstore near you, visit
Los Angeles Times
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The week's bestselling books, July 20
1. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine Books: $30) A story of friendship, love and adversity during the 1980s Space Shuttle program. 2. Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House: $28) A tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart. 3. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press: $30) An unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond. 9 4. My Friends by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books: $30) The bond between a group of teens 25 years earlier has a powerful effect on a budding artist. 5. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' 6. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab (Tor Books: $30) A vampiric tale follows three women across the centuries. 7. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau: $30) A suspenseful family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence. 8. My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende (Ballantine Books: $30) A young writer in the late 1800s travels to South America to uncover the truth about her father. 9. The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley (Ace: $30) A romantasy following an assassin and a healer forced to work together to cure a fatal disease. 10. The Wedding People by Alison Espach (Henry Holt & Co.: $29) An unexpected wedding guest gets surprise help on her journey to starting anew. … 1. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can't control. 2. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $30) A study of the barriers to progress in the U.S. 3. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer on how to be a creative person. 122 4. A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead Books: $28) The true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea: a partnership stretched to its limits. 5. Lessons From Cats for Surviving Fascism by Stewart Reynolds (Grand Central Publishing: $13) A guide to channeling feline wisdom in the face of authoritarian nonsense. 6. 2024 by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, Isaac Arnsdorf (Penguin Press: $32) The inside story of a tumultuous and consequential presidential campaign. 7. Super Agers by Eric Topol (Simon & Schuster: $33) A detailed guide to a revolution transforming human longevity. 8. The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad (Random House: $30) A guide to the art of journaling and a meditation on the central questions of life. 9. We Can Do Hard Things by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle (The Dial Press: $34) The guidebook for being alive. 10. The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Burgoyne (illustrator) (Scribner: $20) On gratitude, reciprocity and community, and the lessons to take from the natural world. … 1. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20) 2. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Ballantine: $20) 3. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18) 4. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $19) 5. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17) 6. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $19) 7. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner: $20) 8. One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune (Berkley: $19) 9. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22) 10. Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood (Berkley, $20) … 1. The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne (Penguin: $21) 2. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21) 3. The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (Vintage: $19) 4. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12) 5. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (Amber-Allen: $13) 6. Sociopath by Patric Gagne, Ph.D. (Simon & Schuster: $20) 7. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17) 8. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18) 9. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $20) 10. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. (Penguin: $19)
