Jason Boog

Jason Boog (JB) is the West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly and was previously publishing editor at Mediabistro. He is also the author of The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today. Jason here. Depression-era America, not unlike COVID-era America, was a terrifying time for writers, artists, and other creatives with already-precarious finances. One magazine captured their sentiment and situation precisely. That magazine was New Masses. Beginning circulation in 1926, just a year after The New Yorker, and published during the last moment in history when the term “communist” could still hold positive connotations for mainstream American audiences, New Masses was bursting with Communist kitsch, eye-popping art, and great work from writers like Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, and Langston Hughes.For a few glorious years, New Masses printed manifestos (Are you bored with the prostitute press which feeds you on canned releases cooked up in the propaganda kitchens of Wall Street and Washington?”), grim cartoons (like the one where college kids step off the graduation podium and head straight into a breadline), and Communist classified ads ("Make This a RED CHRISTMAS!)"Why is this interesting?The Riazanov Library has mounted the epic task of digitizing the magazine, giving 21st Century readers free access to the New Masses’ digital archives. This free site collects more than 800 issues of the publication, taking us back to a miserable and revolutionary moment in American history.  I consulted this archive weekly while writing The Deep End, because nobody covered the 1930s the way they did. While researching my book, I found a distinct discrepancy between mainstream coverage and New Masses coverage of crucial moments in the Great Depression.When massive protests broke out in Harlem in 1935 after a young Black boy was detained and beaten at a department store, New Masses published eyewitness accounts of the event, as well as reporting on the repressive and impoverished conditions in the community that led to the unrest (April 2, 1935 issue). In that issue, New Masses described this epic demonstration as a revolutionary turning point in the 1930s, laying out the brutal facts at the heart of the uprising:“The events in Harlem on March 19 frightened the authorities out of their wits and started a train of activities that may provide a great impetus in the fight of the twelve million Negroes in the United States for freedom ... Why did the beating of one Negro boy set off a popular explosion that ripped open dozens of stores, brought thousands of police to the scene, threw the fear of the proletariat into them to such a degree that they they fired their guns to intimidate the crowd? First of all 65 to 80 percent of Harlem is without jobs. Landlords there are thieves who jack up the rents fully 100 percent to Negro tenants. Harlem is the dumping ground for all inferior food products in the city. The owners of the large stores practice such brazen discrimination that they refuse to hire Negro workers.”The New Yorker barely even blinked during those same tumultuous months. According to my keyword search through the digital archives, The New Yorker only mentioned Harlem four times throughout 1935. In the days after the Harlem uprising, the magazine published a breezy shout-out to Morris Ernst, the crusading attorney who joined the city’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem and helped write a government report on the suffering and discrimination endured by Harlem residents. In 1936, New Masses would publish a leaked copy of that commission’s report, giving the news top billing on the magazine’s front cover (July 14, 1936).In contrast, The New Yorker ran a single “Talk of the Town” paragraph praising Ernst for his work that ends with a condescending and cringe-worthy joke about upper-class parents “quelling a riot in the nursery.”“To be a person of liberal tendencies in these times must be extremely trying—there is so much to be done. We are thinking of a person like Morris Ernst, the liberal barrister, who is called upon to serve the community in every calamity, and who does. When taxi-drivers grow disgruntled, Mr. Ernst is invited to bargain with them. When a fine book is branded obscene, Mr. Ernst is elected to defend it against censors. When a birth-control clinic is raided by a snoopy police woman, Mr. Ernst turns up in court, champion of freedom. When Harlem erupts, the mayor of the town looks around for a liberal man, and there is Mr. Ernst. Such a man amazes us—us whose liberal tendencies are exhausted by 9 A.M. in simple home matters such as defending a puppy against a cook or quelling a riot in the nursery.”Alongside this commentary, The New Yorker ran an ad full-page advertisement with sketches of women wearing French lingerie. One silky offering cost $95, which translates to around $1,820 in 2020 dollars. “We urge you to see the rest before you complete your spring wardrobe plans,” gushed the ad placed alongside a snickering piece about how a starving community had the bad manners to “erupt.” In October 1935, The New Yorker’s final mention of Harlem during that bleak year, the Talk of the Town ran a brief “Anthropological Item” with monstrously racist implications.“A horrid piece of news comes from the Harlem Branch of the Public Library. A little colored girl-not a day older than Shirley Temple - asked for, and was given a book on cannibalism. She took it away with her. That’s all our informant knows about it. That’s all we know.”In a very literal way, the New Masses subscriber base threatened to overthrow the bourgeoisie readership of The New Yorker at this juncture in history. The Communist Party counted 30,000 members in the United States in 1935, and Depression-era evangelism stoked membership to 80,000 in 1944. At the height of this radical explosion in the 1930s, the circulation of the New Masses surged past 100,000 copies—the peak print run of its entire life as a magazine. New Masses covered the suffering and anger simmering beneath the headlines of the mainstream press, routinely antagonizing the ruling class that kept these emotions out of newspapers and magazines. New Masses also reported on the alarming rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the South, the struggles of farmers in Mexico, and Hitler’s earliest atrocities in Germany. Between 1930 and 1935, they told the stories of hundreds of thousands of people who lost their jobs and thousands of families that were evicted from their homes. Unemployment peaked at 25 percent and the streets filled with hungry and angry people. “Hungry people don’t stay hungry for long,” goes the old Rage Against the Machine song, reminding us how hard times can kindle radical solutions. Economic recovery requires many years of turbulence, but New Masses shows us how the blast furnace of the Great Depression forged some of the New Deal’s most creative initiatives: the Federal Writers Project that put thousands of writers back to work and the Federal Arts Project that painted murals around the country. I can’t help but wonder, what sorts of things will we be reading in 2025? What sort of crazy solutions will we find?  A Pink Floyd-esque New Masses cover from the July 24, 1934 issueA New Masses cartoon from the May 8, 1934 issueClassified Ads from the March 13, 1943 issue of New Masses(JB)Cartoon of the Day:A cartoon printed in the April 30, 1935 issue of New Masses, the perfect inversion of a New Yorker cartoon. (JB)Quick Links:The text-based video game AI Dungeon has updated with GPT-3, the supercharged version of Open AI’s language model that can imitate human writing styles. An AI-generated never-ending story.  (JB)“History works like science fiction: We want to know who did what and why they did it, even if we know who wins in the end." Wired magazine looks at Afrofuturism as a guide through the chaos of 2020. (JB)Darius Kazemi explains how and why you should make a small social network for you and your friends.I can’t stop thinking about what poet Ocean Voung said about the yin/yang of creativity, so effortlessly explained during a Q&A period.Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Jason (JB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The New Masses Edition

Jason Boog (JB) is the West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly and was previously publishing editor at Mediabistro. He is also the author of The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today.Jason here. Quarantine collapsed my ten-year-old daughter’s social universe, canceling all her playdates, curtailing her rapidly expanding independence at school, and ending her beloved after-school theater program. Now she spends as much free time as she can hanging out with her friends inside Roblox, a gaming platform that hosts millions of homemade and indie video games created with Roblox Studio, the company’s proprietary engine that allows anybody to make games. According to the New York Times, these game creators “are mostly teenagers, college students and young adults operating solo or with a small team.” This rowdy gaming ecosystem has everything from first-person shooters to tower-climbs to disaster escapes to hide and seek to open creative builds.Roblox games are reportedly played by three-fourths of all 9- to 12-year-old kids in the United States at the moment, with well over 150 million monthly users. Kids invest great time, effort, and funds into improving their Roblox lives and the most popular games have spawned elaborate community wikis cataloging the intricacies of each virtual world. The platform’s digital currency is called Robux, purchased with real money and membership subscriptions, to buy everything from sparkling clothes to an extra-cartoony avatar face to wings to a digital pet. Out of the millions of Roblox games to choose from, about 20 have managed to earn more than one billion visits. My daughter and her friends spend the most time in four of those super-popular games. She returns to school with Royale High, a game that combines Hogwarts and a Disney castle (4.2 billion plays). She gets a spooky thrill with Piggy, a game where kids play detectives fleeing a murderous pig (5 billion plays). She creates in Bloxburg, an imaginative sandbox where kids build second lives for themselves (2.9 billion plays). But most of her time gets spent in Adopt Me!, a game where kids mingle and trade cute creatures for hours (8.8 billion plays). Earlier this month, a record-breaking 1.7 million players simultaneously jammed themselves into the Adopt Me! servers when the game added “Fossil Eggs.” Kids mobbed the game for a chance to purchase these carefully commodified items randomly doled out through a gigantic Gumball Machine inside a virtual pet store complex.My daughter’s avatar outside the Fossil Egg Gumball Machine in Adopt Me! Roblox is preparing to go public, and some speculated recently that the company could be valued as high as $8 billion. That’s double its valuation in February 2020, when, just weeks before the pandemic lockdowns, Roblox raised $150 million in series G funding from Andreessen Horowitz. During that pre-quarantine raise, kids already spent 1.5 billion hours every month on the platform. An Economist report said that gamers spent 3 billion hours on the platform in July and Roblox expects its developers to earn $250 million this year—up 44 percent from pre-pandemic earnings. And Roblox is now the most popular allowance expense in the United States.Why is that interesting?My daughter’s entire generation will camp out in this tween Matrix for the rest of our COVID-19 experience and beyond. It’s more than a gaming platform, it is a single digital location that now offers all her old activities: playground, schoolyard, theater, and mall all in one. Roblox has hosted so many moments in my daughter’s fractured quaran-tween life. During the mornings she used to spend with friends in the school courtyard before school, she now hangs out with her friends on the most popular Roblox games. After Zoom school is over, she edits elaborate YouTube videos about her adventures in these digital realms. She arranged her birthday party inside Adopt Me!, receiving gift-cards loaded with Robux instead of real-life presents. She’s already picked out her Halloween costume and goes trick or treating in Royale High. We can’t go out and collect candy in real life, but Roblox developers have already rolled out thousands of holiday accessories.My daughter’s Halloween costume in Royale HighIn the relatively sunnier days of 2018, journalist Keith Stuart wrote the most insightful things I ever read about Fortnite, the last video game trend that spawned thousands of trend pieces:“People who don’t play Fortnite, or video games in general, often say it’s sad that modern teens aren’t going to skateparks and roller discos and that they’re getting these formative experiences online instead. In some ways, I guess it is, but kids aren’t necessarily to blame here. Teenagers are caught in a crappy sociocultural Catch-22: Adults are worried their kids are spending too much time on smartphones and consoles, but at the same time they’re constantly policing and restricting access to physical environments.”That assessment sounds quaint in October 2020 when parents around the world have policed and restricted kids’ physical environments in ways we never dreamed. We grownups broke the world and now these kids have no choice but to spend every precious minute of hangout time online. “All my friends are in Roblox. Why won’t you let me see my friends?” my daughter sobbed one afternoon when I kicked her off Roblox to do her homework. I remembered all the fury I felt when my mom wouldn’t drive me to watch a movie with my friends back in the 1990s. I felt marooned on the family island because life was elsewhere and I was missing it all. My daughter saves her math homework and violin practice for last every afternoon because the analog world just slows her down. Cut off from the rainbow landscapes of Roblox, she can’t see her quarantined friends or enjoy her virtual superpowers. And honestly, the real world is awful: COVID-19 fears poison every outdoor interaction and the grumpy adults in her indoor life spend too much time stumbling between Zoom meetings. When Roblox goes public we’ll surely see hundreds of hand-wringing thought pieces about the monetization of kids’ attention and the bazillions of hours kids spend in front of screens. I’m just heartbroken for all these kids, just as confused and worn out as I am, searching for friends in a virtual landscape. None of us ever find what we really want, life the way it was before. (JB)Overpriced Facial Expressions of the Day:Every single detail of your avatar can be customized in Roblox, for a price. That includes your facial expression. In the Roblox digital catalog, these are the most expensive faces players can buy with Robux. You can use this handy Robux Currency Converter to see just how much these custom faces really cost. (JB)Quick Links:Brittle Magazine is giving away a free ebook collection, Africanfuturism: An Anthology. It has a story by the great Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor who developed the concept of “Africanfuturism,” along with work by seven other African science fiction authors.  (JB)I’ve always been obsessed with the relationship between the CIA and the arts, and this Counterpunch essay looks at all the presses and literary journals that took CIA funding. (JB)As my free reading time diminished these last few months, I’ve used the accessible reading tool Voice Dream to catch up on my reading. With some of the best AI-generated voices I’ve ever heard, this app instantly converts PDFs into audio experiences. (JB)  Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Jason (JB)

Why Is This Interesting? - The Roblox Edition

Jason leads editorial at Fable, a social reading platform for book clubs. He is also the author of The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today and contributor of The New Masses Edition and The Roblox Edition for WITI.Jason here. Way back in 1953, Roald Dahl, the author who chronicled the disruptive career of a candy baron and predicted the devastating consequences of genetically modified fruit, imagined a punch-card computer that could write a novel in 15 minutes flat. That story was called "The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” describing how aspiring novelists wrestled buttons, stoppers, switches, and knobs on a massive writing machine. “By so doing, he was able continually to modulate or merge fifty different and variable qualities such as tension, surprise, humor, pathos, and mystery,” wrote Dahl, as the machine speed-typed publishable pages every few seconds. Of course, computers couldn't write novels in the 1950s. But Dahl wasn't mocking computers. He was mocking the dwindling integrity of the publishing industry and its output which, to Dahl, increasingly felt like the product of a soulless factory.But what Dahl satirized seventy years ago is almost a reality now. I can recreate many of the Grammatizator’s functions using the API for OpenAI’s language model, GPT-3. Language models are artificial neural networks that use probability, machine learning, and a huge body of training texts to master language prediction skills and provide increasingly human-like responses to text-based prompts. Released a year ago, the company’s beta API program lets civilians access GPT-3 remotely. Instead of punch cards, this language model trained with a massive selection of textual datasets, including the Common Crawl corpus (around one trillion words gathered through eight years of web searches), two “internet-based books corpora,” and the English-language version of Wikipedia. Through carefully structured prompts, I can enter all the “variable qualities” I want into OpenAI’s Playground interface, adjusting fields like “Presence Penalty” to keep the GPT-3 focused on certain themes or “Temperature” to control the randomness of the model’s sentences. It would cost about six dollars (and many, many hours of clicking) to generate a 75,000-word novel through OpenAI’s beta API. A screenshot of the playground interface that gives users access to OpenAI's API. Here, GPT-3 re-completes the first paragraph of this WITI newsletter (human writing in bold).Dahl's story ends with the Great Automatic Grammatizator replacing about 70 percent of published authors. That’s a bit of a stretch. I subscribe to Brier's Law from WITI - The Machine Learning Edition: "The bar to get these things ok is low and great is high." And even when language models like GPT-3 can generate a coherent novel, nobody will be clamoring for AI-written books. We already have millions of human authors struggling to find readers! These language models won’t replace writers, but they will substantially change the way we write. Why is that interesting?OpenAI’s beta API distributes GPT-3 to a rapidly expanding ecosystem of more than 300 apps, powering writing tools that reproduce the functions of “The Great Automatic Grammatizator.” In his 2016 book, The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly predicted an AI distribution model that resembles OpenAI’s API access:The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. You’ll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity.The API doesn’t require any coding skills to use the playground features, so an amateur like me can learn how to craft creative GPT-3 prompts for pennies. That freedom reminds me of my very first Internet experiences, back when my dial-up modem started singing and opened all these new possibilities. If Kelly’s prediction continues to hold, musicians, artists, filmmakers, and game designers will all plug into AI electricity as GPT-4 and other hypothetical models expand their capabilities. And someday, my grandkids will wail and weep when the AI crashes and they lose all their progress in a Holodeck simulation. This API model channels the powers of GPT-3 in specific ways. With AI Dungeon ($9.99 a month), you can generate text adventures, choosing from a whole genre menu that includes fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, cyberpunk, or custom, setting up story flavors as Dahl imagined. With Shortly AI ($79 a month), you can choose the “I’m writing a story” option and give GPT-3 a precise description of a theme and setting you desire. With a few taps, your AI writing partner will start writing a narrative that follows your parameters, without Dahl’s cumbersome knobs and switches. Finally, the invite-only service Sudowrite seems to be adept at mimicking human writing styles. Novelist Stephen Marche test drove the app for The New Yorker and imagined writing a new Jane Austen or P. G. Wodehouse novel with his AI writing partner, “I could do either in a weekend,” he wrote.The API access to GPT-3 has some literal limits. Like other language models, GPT-3 breaks words down into “tokens,” or word segments that are easier for the model to process. When an OpenAI customer uses the playground API access to generate text, the language model will not let the combined prompt text and GPT-3 generated response exceed 2,048 tokens, or about 1,500 words. While I could generate 1,500 words over and over again inside the playground fairly cheaply, those current limits make it virtually impossible to produce a coherent novel-length narrative. These limits also make it hard to fine-tune the language model with longer texts.But even when the API token limits are expansive enough to generate a novel, these tools won't replace novelists any more than the synthesizer replaced musicians. As philosophers consider the implications of GPT-3, the language model's failure at "understanding" is a common theme: how language models cannot replicate the very human ability to connect and make sense of the bewildering array of people, places, and things we encounter on a daily basis. Philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor wrote an essay about how “the labor of understanding” will continue to confound AI research.When GPT-3 is unable to preserve the order of causes and effects in telling a story about a broken window, when it produces laughable contradictions within its own professions of sincere and studied belief in an essay on consciousness, when it is unable to distinguish between reliable scholarship and racist fantasies — GPT-3 is not exposing a limit in its labor of understanding. It is exposing its inability to take part in that labor altogether.Understanding is a key to unlocking the mysteries of consciousness, but it’s not necessary for a tool that helps humans be creative, like a junior copywriter using the GPT-3 powered app HyperWrite (starts at $10 a month) to brainstorm copy. Someday very soon, you’ll have the ability to modulate the tone, style, genre, and narrative direction of your writing from your laptop. Microsoft “exclusively licensed GPT-3” last September, so it could start with a GPT-3 powered version of Clippy lurking around your Word documents. Whatever it looks like, language models like GPT-3 will evolve into ever more brilliant parrots, making our writing stranger, different, and deeper. I would never use a typewriter to draft an article anymore, and future generations will rely on these AI-augmented tools as much as I depend on spell-check. But we will always need humans to do the understanding part. The rest is code. (JB)Vintage Computer of the Day:The IBM 701 was released the same year as Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” short story, an enormous computer the same size as three refrigerators. This high-speed calculator held 72 Williams tubes, each with a storage capacity of 1,024 bits per tube, able to process 16,000 addition or subtraction operations per second. The operator console on the machine (pictured here) resembled the instrument panel of a vintage fighter jet. (JB)Quick Links:IEEE Spectrum senior editor Eliza Strickland wrote about the ongoing struggle to filter the output for language models like GPT-3. “It’s not clear how OpenAI will get the risk of toxic language down to a manageable level—and it’s not clear what manageable means in this context. Commercial users will have to weigh GPT-3’s benefits against these risks.” (JB)I listened to this Why Theory podcast episode dedicated to Tenet five months ago, and I haven’t stopped talking about it. Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley introduced me to Freud’s concept of “Afterwardsness,” an interesting way of thinking about Christopher Nolan’s film and the long-term effects of the pandemic. (JB)Congressman Ted Lieu introduced a “21st Century Federal Writers’ Project” bill last month, looking out for writers rocked by industry shifts since the pandemic. “The project would entail $60 million administered by the Department of Labor to nonprofits, libraries, news outlets and communications unions” writes the LA Times. (JB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Jason (JB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The GPT-3 Edition

Jason Boog (JB) leads editorial at Fable, a social reading platform for book clubs. He is also the author of The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today and contributor of The New Masses Edition and The Roblox Edition for WITI.Jason here. We lost Norm Macdonald this week, the undisputed master of the comedy genre somewhat officially known as the Shaggy dog story, or a “joke” that breaks all the traditional storytelling rules, twisting and extending a stupid, absurd, or obscene concept far beyond its expected limits. While he never categorized his own work, Macdonald’s bit that has come to be known as the “Moth Story” is one of the best Shaggy dog stories ever told, rewatched over a million times since his passing. Without spoiling a single precious sentence of this joke, here’s the set-up: Macdonald tells Conan O’Brien a meandering and surreal four-minute-long fable that he claims somebody told him earlier that day. If anybody else had told this particular story, it would have driven the late-night audience insane with boredom, but through Macdonald’s perfectly disheveled delivery, the story levitates like a superconductor, floating between stand-up comedy and literature. By the most traditional definition, a Shaggy dog story shouldn’t even have a punchline. It’s just one storyteller enticing listeners with the promise of meaning that never arrives. These jokes are endurance tests, every time you tell one, you tightrope across an abyss: how many inconsequential details should you add to the narrative? How long can you tell the story before the listener storms out of the room? What’s the correct expression to wear as you “end” the story? Nobody could land these jokes better than Macdonald. Take some time to listen to a few of his Shaggy dog masterpieces this week, like his take on country life, his memories of a schoolmate who labored under great expectations, or his bleakest and most obscene Shaggy dog story, “Dirty Johnny.”Why is this interesting?Macdonald carried an old art form into the 21st Century with his rambling routines. British etymologist Michael Quinion traced the first printed reference to a Shaggy dog story back to the 1930s, as jokes about people searching for shaggy dogs with absurd results began to surface in popular culture. “We may reasonably argue that the tale is much older than the name and indeed may have been a feature of campfire or fireside tales since roughly the year dot,” added Quinion, speculating that there is something old and deeply human about the storytelling sub-genre. Ted Cohen wrote about the philosophical underpinnings of the Shaggy dog story in his 1999 book, “Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters,” calling them “joke-like concoctions” that wield powers of anti-storytelling:If this is a joke, then it is a joke in the way in which certain works of Dada and Neo-Dada are art …  John Cage's “Four minutes, 33 seconds” is given to an audience expecting to hear audible musical events, and the audience hears no traditional music. The story about the shaggy dog is given to people listening to the narrative and expecting it to culminate in a punch line of a certain kind.Macdonald used the Shaggy dog story format to break out of the dull repetition of late-night television where guests are expected to deliver charming patter and airy anecdotes on command. These shows deliver an anesthetized version of real life, a comedian’s work chopped into shiny and digestible content. We can never replace Macdonald, but we’ve never needed this art form more than we do right now. The Internet overflows with short-form content, and we are losing our ability to focus on a piece of text or video for more than 30 seconds. Shaggy dog artists like Macdonald calculate every single gesture and twist of these seemingly aimless stories, but the jokes give us a glimpse of the meaninglessness and existential menace that talk-show gags and social media scrolls band-aid for viewers during the wee hours of the night. Like the shambly hero of Macdonald’s best jokes, we encounter a bewildering set of experiences as we stumble from one end of our lives to the other. Novelists, newscasters, and TV hosts offer a bit of wisdom or morals to help make sense of it all, but real life is a lot more like a Shaggy dog story. All our analysis and narrative sense is a just flimsy bridge built across a void. Norm Macdonald reminded us that we are all wandering through an ultimately befuddling world, and we can be miserable about that, or we can laugh. Macdonald wrote a one-of-a-kind memoir called “Based on a True Story: A Memoir,” distorting his life story through a funhouse mirror, writing tall tales that mixed equal parts Mark Twain and Hunter S. Thompson. Midway through this novel-memoir, he even reframes his “Moth Story” in a new context, re-wrapping his beloved Shaggy story inside a completely bonkers and imaginary recollection about a visit to a children’s ward at the hospital. The whole book is a Matryoshka doll—as you open one Shaggy dog story, you discover more Shaggy dog stories nested inside the original. At one point, Macdonald discovers a then-erroneous edit to his own Wikipedia page that said he had died. It is spooky to read that passage this week, an eerie dispatch from a comedian who managed, through his memoir and through his career, to turn his life into a magnificent Shaggy dog story that we will spend generations unpacking:So now I start to read this thing on the computer again, only this time I read it the way I imagine a stranger will in a few years or a few decades. When it’s true. In the future, when I was Norm Macdonald. So this is my life, then, these words on this screen? Well, it doesn’t add up to much, just a series of facts, and I suppose that’s what a man’s life is, after all, but it’s more than that too. I mean, it has to be, doesn’t it? And so I decide I will write an account of my life my own self. My side of the story. (JB)Matryoshka doll of the Day:Unsplash photographer Didssph took this photo of a fully unpacked Matryoshka doll, a ceramic version of the Eastern European dolls-inside-of dolls, the most meta of all toys. (JB)Quick Links:I wrote about GPT-3 for a WITI over the summer, but Gwern’s amazing essay about prompt engineering has given me lots of new things to think about and improved my interactions with this super-powerful language model. (JB)The excellent Backlisted podcast always recommends great books, but the episode about Steve Aylett's Heart of the Original has continued to inspire me long after I listened. (JB)I’m not the only person reading this book, but I’ve been telling everybody to try The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Avoid reviews and just jump in: it’s a thriller-type book about a struggling creative writing professor who meets a brash student with a blockbuster idea. (JB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Jason (JB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Shaggy Dog Edition

Jason Boog (JB) leads editorial at Fable, a social reading platform for book clubs. He is also the author of The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today and contributor of The New Masses Edition, The Roblox Edition, and The Shaggy Dog Edition for WITI.Jason here. Like many 80s kids, I dreamed of interacting with supercomputers, seduced by the sleek shell of the War Operation Plan Response (WOPR) in WarGames, the towering tangle of circuitry in Superman III, and the Cobra computer banks in GI Joe. These massive machines looked truly awesome, a mix of 60s-era tape-fed mainframes with the wild exaggerations of science fiction. Every time I logged on to my family's home computer, I always felt a bit disappointed. I just knew that in the Pentagon and Cobra Headquarters, computer specialists operated supercomputers with enough processing power to topple governments, cripple superheroes, and launch nuclear missiles. The idea of a kid like me accessing those same supercomputers was an attractive but impossible fantasy. We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.Coaching for creative professionals who want deeper personal insight, a conviction in their work, and to make waves in the art world. Subscribe to MissionRoyal Braun connects cutting edge companies with key creative talent. Meet Royal BraunNudge, get customer insights with ease. Try NudgeIf only that kid could see me now, running Google Colaboratory (Colab, for short) on my laptop. This Google Research service lets me access computing resources far beyond anything a 1980s screenwriter could have imagined.Why is this interesting? For the last few years, I have been using Google Colab notebooks to run fantastical AI models that would toast my humble laptop in a few seconds. Instead of using my own processing hardware, Google Colab runs my code through Google's GPUs and TPUs. In the cloud, I can access language models like GPT-2 and text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion, experimenting with open-source AI models months before they get commercialized by corporations. A notebook is just a document stored in my Google Drive with cells for text and code. All text is written in the Markdown language and the code is written in Python. The code can be executed through my browser, allowing me to access all that additional computing power.Max Woolf introduced me to Google Colab with his simple “Train a GPT-2 Text-Generating Model w/ GPU For Free” notebook (sadly, it doesn’t work anymore, following some updates to the platform). Using this new writing tool, Woolf outlined every step I needed to follow to use OpenAI’s GPT-2 language model to generate text. The notebook stretched the limits of my coding abilities, but I managed to generate an entire novel by following his directions.Google Colab helps me overcome the tremendous hardware barriers of AI models, but also the wetware limits of my coding abilities. The best Google Colab notebooks have a super simple writing style that walks amateurs through complex code. I recently made my first Google Colab notebook, building an audio transcription and translation machine I can run at home. I recommend trying two notebooks to get a feel for Colab. The Kobold community has built a super simple KoboldAI on Google Colab notebook for generating stories and text-based adventures with AI. The Stable Diffusion with Diffusers notebook gives you access to an open-source image generator that rivals OpenAI’s carefully controlled DALL·E 2.As we stumble into this new age of computing power, it’s worth remembering the climactic battle of Superman III that traumatized thousands of kids. Even though the special effects are laughable by today’s standards, the scene channeled all our 1980s misconceptions and fears about technology as an unlucky henchwoman gets dragged into the depths of a supercomputer. Tangled in webs of silicon and circuitry, she transforms into a hideous cyborg.That once monstrous image perfectly captures our lives now, all of us interlaced with invisible digital threads. This WITI newsletter is a Frankenstein composition of journal entries, dashed-off notes, Wikipedia entries, YouTube pages, email fragments, Google Colab notebooks, and so many other sources spread across several laptops, smartphones, and notebooks. There are supercomputers mapping your journeys, delivering your emails, serving you TikTok videos, and surveilling every one of those actions. Google Colab gives you a tiny measure of control, a way to bend these vast machines to your puny human projects. (JB)AI Generation of the Day:Using Stable Diffusion and Google Colab, I used AI to imagine what it would look like if Hieronymus Bosch painted a supercomputer. The results gave me a spooky vision of a new kind of Hell.  (JB)Quick Links:Stable Diffusion is great for creating supercomputer paintings that evoke the style of long-dead Dutch painters, but it is also used to mimic hundreds of living artists' styles. Everyone needs to read Hollie Mengert’s story as they use these new tools. (JB)Google Colab is not the only service providing computing power access. From the Machine Learning subreddit to this article, you can find plenty of discussions about alternatives. (JB)George Saunders has a new short story collection out called Liberation Day. Every story is great, but this one in particular has become more relevant every day: “The Mom of Bold Action.” (JB)Den of Geek took the time to break down the state of code inside Superman III. (JB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Jason (JB)Why is this interesting? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.