in terms of books, she was doing fine

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

Links to learn more about Juneteenth & how to celebrate❤️:

Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture: The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth

Juneteenth: A Feast of Freedom

How to celebrate Juneteenth without misappropriating it

A beginner’s guide to celebrating Juneteenth

Many of us are taught that slavery came to an end with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but for enslaved people in Texas, freedom didn’t come until June 19, 1865.

I received a free copy from DAW via Netgalley in exchange for a fair review. Release date June 16th, 2026.

I liked both of Curtis' previous novels, and I thought the premise of her academia-based latest sounded intriguing. In Heaven's Graveyard, detached academic Coda is summoned back to her hometown with news of a massive archeological find--only to find that the beloved professor who sent the message has been murdered. Chasing stories of her beloved and probably mythical Aleya, Coda is about to be dragged into a plot that is far more than she bargained for.

With its obsessive academic fixated on stories of a dead woman while oblivious to her country's slow slide into war, Heaven's Graveyard sets up obvious comparisons with one of my standout reads of 2025, The Everlasting. Like Owen Mallory, Coda is spectacularly oblivious, paying so little attention to politics that she tries to leave the country without even realizing that her world is on the brink of effectively World War I. Unlike The Everlasting, Coda's indifference to modern events does not become a major thematic element--it just adds a layer of complication in the form of an unreliable narrator who doesn't pay attention to an important chunk of plot. Even if Coda doesn't bother to follow modern events, modern events are about to be deeply interested in her…

It was an interesting decision for Cutis to set a sequel to Idolfire thousands of years later, moving from the mythic past to a world of trains and movies. I liked the emphasis on history fading into legend. Compared to Idolfire, I liked the setting of Heaven's Graveyard better, with its recognizably modern empire teetering on the brink of sectarian violence. It's a fun world, and the book would have been far less compelling set in the usual medieval-generic rather than in the loud clatter of cities and trams and university politics.

Outside of the expansiveness of the world, the story itself was relatively small and compact. The cast is effectively just Coda, her tumultuous ex, her dead professor Marr, and the stiffly religious Thal, who gets dragged into the whole mess. The plot is vaguely murder mystery shaped in that Coda answers an urgent summons only to find a dead friend instead of the promised academic triumph. However, Coda does very little in the way of actual investigating . She's quickly dragged into the archaological find (and the resulting political implications) that Marr was murdered over, and doesn't really get into any Sherlock Holmes type business.

Books of 2026: THE ODYSSEY trans. by Emily Wilson.

"Tell me about a complicated man." (1.1)

Wow, did she ever!! I've been interested in Wilson's translation of THE ODYSSEY since it came out, because I remember reading abridged fragments of it in high school but never The Whole Thing. Since it's been on my shelf for [REDACTED], I put it on my Poetry Quest list.

Wilson keeps the same number of lines as the original text, but she flips it into iambic pentameter for English and modernizes the language at the same time (because, as she says on page 87, "My Homer does not speak in your grandparents' English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own"; the linguistical discussion of just how Weird the ancient Greek is was fascinating). She also does away with a lot of the newfangled patriarchal and Christianity-flavored bullshit that other English translators have added over the centuries; there's still plenty of oldfangled patriarchal bullshit in there, don't worry! (If Odysseus spends seven years fucking a goddess, I think Penelope should get to sleep around a little bit, as a treat, and I don't think the slave girls who fucked suitors should have to clean up the carnage and be killed for sleeping around, but whatever.)

This is a hugely approachable and accessible translation for modern readers. The line I've been citing to my coworkers to prove it:

"Damn! That stuck-up boy / succeeded in his stupid trip. We thought / he would not manage it." (4.664-6)

Wilson absolutely got the Old Timey Hoity Toity Pretentiously Elevated language out of the way to let readers engage with the actual content of the story, which I think is a hugely valuable contribution. (For instance: I had no idea how important hospitality was, as an overarching Theme, which feels Highly Relevant To Our World Today, Still,) And! The mouthfeel was great! I read the first few books out loud, since the original was intended to be recited and heard, which was way more fun than I ever remembered it being in English classes. It made for a surprisingly breezy and quick read, once I got through the ~100 pages of intro material.

Wilson goes into a little more depth on translations here, if you're interested in seeing the "classical" translations vs. how she handled it, and I found all of the introduction material in the book itself very helpful and orienting (ADORED her Translator's Note, all the way through).