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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
AI search engines cite incorrect news sources at an alarming 60% rate, study says
This study by the Columbia Journalism Review finds that AI search engines not only get it wrong most of the time (to the tune of 60% of the time), they are also pretty confident in the answers they give that turn out to be wrong. This largely matches my own experience using LLMs for search-related things: you just cannot trust it. Now, how wrong are the answers people finding using more traditional search engines is an interesting question I don’t know the answer to, but this study suggests that even regular Google results are worse than they used to be. Not great.
Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature
Chris Ware (Building Stories) offers a lovely and informative appreciation of Richard Scarry on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go that turns into a miniature history of children’s books moving from luxury gift items to the everyday objects we have come to now. There are little gems throughout like this one:
“…Scarry continued to produce books for another two decades, all of them featuring animals in place of humans. This actually caused a mild panic at Random House when What Do People Do All Day? was being published, with the staff asking: Shouldn’t it be called What Do Animals Do All Day? The dispute was short-lived since the answer (“No!”) was so obvious, but it hints at something important about the narrative energy on which Scarry’s engine runs.”
I recommend bookmarking and reading later if you can’t get to it right now.
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2005 Pride & Prejudice To Be Re-Released Into Theaters on April 20th
Before the Knightly/McFayden P&P, the Colin Firth BBC adaptation was the canonical version. I don’t think that’s true anymore. This one is a regular rewatch for me, with McFayden, Sutherland, Knightley, and Pike being the repeat draws (though Tom Hollander’s Mr. Collins and Dame Dench’s Lady Catherine being wonderful villians to hate). The book will always be primary for me, but I have to admit that film can do things that books sometimes can’t, and for me there is no better example than McFayden/Darcy’s hand flex in the climactic meeting with Lizzy. I don’t think I caught this in theaters twenty years ago, so this gives me a chance to remedy that.
“Considering book bans are as much a historical as modern phenomenon, you might not be surprised to learn that historical fiction isn’t exempt from censorship, either. Just because something is historically accurate or important doesn’t mean it’s safe. These four banned historical fiction books tell important stories about the history of this country and others — but there are people out there who don’t want you to read them. Which is, I think, all the more reason you should.”