BOOK OF THE WEEK
Could AI help us talk to whales? “Even by human standards,” the great American environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert explains in her new book, “sperm whale chatter is insistent and repetitive.” Supplied with enough whale conversations, the theory goes, a ChatGPT-type LLM might be able to predict whale talk; one day, we may even be able to speak whale ourselves. This is one of many fascinating projects described by Kolbert in Life on a Little-Known Planet, a new collection of her New Yorker essays reviewed this week by Kathleen Jamie. There are plenty of reasons to be fearful, and Kolbert’s writing keeps circling back to the CO2 emissions that are causing catastrophic global warming – but she is also drawn to the visionary, eccentric, committed individuals who are seeking to understand and protect our planet. Read the review | Buy the book
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Anatomy of a crash
Related articles:
1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Allen Lane)
A stock market bubble forming around the promise of rapidly innovating technologies, businessmen playing politics, a country deeply divided over the role of the state and an explosion of private credit – the parallels between 2025 and 1929 are alarming. The repercussions of the Great Crash have rippled throughout the 20th century, and in his book 1929 Andrew Ross Sorkin (author of Too Big Too Fail) tells its story, with a repertory of compelling characters and some stark lessons for the politicians and economists of the present. Read the review | Buy the book
Austenmania
On 16 December it will be 250 years since the birth of Britain’s great social novelist. From an early “footstepping” biography to a dazzling account of the novels’ afterlives, Paula Byrne chooses three landmark books that changed our understanding of Austen. Read the list
ENDNOTES
Sean O’Hagan has reviewed Namanlagh, Tom Paulin’s first poetry collection in more than a decade. In the late 90s and early noughties Paulin was a highbrow celebrity: an academic, poet and disputatious public intellectual known for his spats with Germaine Greer on Late Review. What happened next? Here’s Sean:
“I first came to Tom Paulin by way of his prose rather than his poetry when, at some point in the mid-1980s, a friend lent me a copy of the pointedly titled essay collection Ireland and the English Crisis. Amid his ruminations on the likes of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and Patrick Kavanagh, there were also some combative assaults on the Irish historian, political thinker, diplomat and one-time Observer columnist Conor Cruise O’Brien, and the demagogic Free Presbyterian preacher and arch loyalist Ian Paisley.
It was heady stuff from a literary activist who did not play by the unspoken rules of academic etiquette. When I met him in 2002, he turned out to be charming, funny and generous, though given to sometimes startling conversational swerves that echoed his writing style. He’s been away for a worrying long time; it’s good to have him back, and – as his new poetry collection Namanlagh shows – in fine, if somewhat more reflective, form.” Read the review | Buy the book
Illustration by Charlotte Durance