literary Archives - usatoday24

AI is already winning literary awards, and the only thing we can do to prove that we are human is to write badly

May 31, 2026 by usatoday24

On May 18, several X users They made their suspicions public about the last Commonwealth Prize winner of short stories: the winning story in the Caribbean category, published in ‘Granta’ (a very prestigious British magazine that for decades has been the thermometer of the Anglophone literary canon), reeked of ChatGPT. The author’s photo, in fact, did not seem real either. And when the magazine responded to the scandal, it did so in a way that ended up confusing everything: They asked Claude if the text was from AIand Claude said no. How it is detected. Recognizing the prose of a language model is not as simple as it seems, but it is not as difficult once the eye has been trained for some time. Language models do not write looking for the right word– They generate the statistically most probable token, taking into account the context, and it is a process that can be identified. For example, the famous “it’s not X, it’s Y” structure, used as the Rosetta Stone of text AI identification. But there is more: accumulation of metaphors without clear referents, verbs like “go deeper into”… annotators hired to fit the models using RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback) reward that kind of bureaucratic clarity, which also makes everything more obvious. What does the story have? In ‘Granta’s story things are said like “the humming noon” or the “sweet air with the smell of cane and oblivion.” Some authors, such as Benjamin Breen in this excellent analysis have detailed, many of these turns speak of a special attraction for ambient sounds and vague emotional states (nostalgia, sadness, oblivion), which seem to want to touch upon a materiality that the model does not have and, of course, does not understand. The accumulation of sensory stimuli is a creative writing textbook instruction that models apply mechanically and without discrimination. It’s easy to see once you’ve learned to identify it. Why detectors don’t work (yet). The problem is that recognizing that writing intuitively is one thing, and demonstrating it objectively is another. The first generation of automatic detectors (GPTZero, Originality.ai, Turnitin AI) They have a long history of errors. OpenAI, for example, retired its AI Text Classifier in July 2023 after acknowledging that it only correctly identified 26% of AI-generated text and marked almost 9% of human text as artificial. The only exception to this trend documented so far is Pangram. His technique, called mirror datatrains the classifier with pairs of stylistically identical texts but with different origins. The result, according to the first benchmark independent In September 2025, false positives are close to zero and false negatives are between 2% and 4% in medium and long passages; competitors are scoring around 10-40%. However, again, it is not so easy to trust a tool that sells a “humanizer” along with its text reports about the presence of AI, sometimes with outrageously high percentages. The educational part. In the world of books we are facing a specific scandal, that of ‘Granta’, but in American universities we are seeing a permanent escalation of hostilities. In this extensive reportfor example, we are presented with ten students and teachers trapped in a spiral with no way out: the teachers pass the assignments through AI detectors, the detectors generate false positives on students who have not touched any chatbot, and those students resort to humanizers (or directly to writing worse) to avoid accusations. Joseph Thibault, founder of Cursive, has tracked 43 humanizers with a combined audience of 33.9 million views. Grammarly has developedFor example, Authorship, a tool that records the writing session so that students can prove that they wrote the work: according to the company itself, five million reports of this type were generated in the last year. A teacher states in the article: “The better you write, the more the AI believes you are AI. I put my own articles in the detectors just to understand how they work, and it marks me at 98% every time, without having used AI at any time.” Below are the essays. The ‘Granta’ scandal occurs while the publishing market registers another symptom of the same problem. According to data from the Wall Street Journal that is also collected by Res Obscura, the best-selling non-fiction book of April in the United States (‘London Falling’, by Patrick Radden Keefe) placed 13,468 copies in its first week; the first novel was close to 105,000. The president of Harper Group attributes it to podcasts: according to a recent survey, 62% of men and 54% of women listened to one last month, compared to 46% and 39% in 2023. The reason is the same that led to YouTube before: they promise to satisfy in forty minutes what it takes a book to satisfy three weeks. AI is the next step: it does not compete with books or podcasts, but rather replaces them with a summary generated in ten seconds that answers questions without anyone having to write, edit or read anything. The problem, as Breen points out, is that this model aims for immediate responses and eliminates precisely what makes the nonfiction book valuable: the need for attention, permanence over time and all the reflective nuances that this implies. When the AI copies a specific author. The writer Vauhini Vara went further. As he told on Voxcommissioned researcher Tuhin Chakrabarty to train a model on his three published books and several journalistic articles to generate passages from, theoretically, his next novel. He then mixed them with his own fragments and sent them to his closest friends. No one knew how to distinguish them. What’s more: another conclusion they drew from the experiment is that readers tend to prefer AI text over imitations written by humans when they don’t know the origin. When the source is revealed to them, the text ceases to interest them. Vara draws a conclusion from this: what matters to readers is not whether the text sounds human, but knowing that there is someone real on the … Read more

The ambitious adaptation of a literary classic with 70 million copies sold comes to Prime Video

May 2, 2026 by usatoday24

In 1993, Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons and Antonio Banderas starred in the first adaptation of ‘The spirit house‘but Isabel Allende’s novel did not turn out very well, because the film left its Latin identity behind. Thirty-three years later, Prime Video premieres the first television adaptation in Spanish of the work, filmed entirely in Chile, with an Ibero-American creative team and Allende herself acting as executive producer. Published in 1982, the novel has sold more than 70 million copies worldwide and is considered a classic of 20th century Latin American literature. The Amazon adaptation was conceived by Francisca Alegría and Fernanda Urrejola, who co-wrote the pilot, who were later joined by Andrés Wood, director of ‘Machuca’ and the series ‘News of a Kidnapping’, who directed four of the eight episodes and served as co-showrunner. Isabel Allende herself and Eva Longoria are on the list of executive producers, in a proposal where Wood recognizes a very extensive female presence. The series follows the Trueba family through several decades of the 20th century in an unnamed South American country (although it is unmistakably Chile) undergoing profound political and social upheavals. At the center is Esteban, an ambitious, authoritarian and violent patriarch who builds his fortune by subjugating the peasants who work on his hacienda, Las Tres Marías. In front of him, Clara del Valle, a woman with supernatural gifts, who is gifted with clairvoyance and communicates with spirits, and whose sensitivity contrasts with the brutality of Esteban, whom she ends up marrying. The story unfolds through three generations of women, each facing power in their own way. The series is part of Prime Video’s commitment to Latin American content: according to data from Parrot Analyticsstreaming originals in Spanish and Portuguese grew 266% between 2020 and 2024, outpacing the growth rate of content in any other language. For this series, the platform is betting on a staggered premiere, with three first episodes available from this Wednesday, April 29, two new ones on May 6 and the three on May 13. It is a formula that Prime Video has used with other productions to keep the conversation active for several weeks, unlike the Netflix model. In Xataka | A porn video club in Valladolid in 1998: Prime Video gets naked with ‘Cochinas’

expensive literary retreats to overcome mobile addiction

April 14, 2026 by usatoday24

February weekend, Welsh coast. A group of women sits around a table accompanied by appetizing portions of pasta and fruit. They ignore each other very politely. Nobody looks at their cell phones, but at the voluminous books they carry with them. They open them, begin to read their own in silence, and pay 1,200 euros (or more) for that strange privilege. Expanding business. In the United States and the United Kingdom, a new category of travel experience has been born: reading retreats. A group of people meets in a rural house or hotel boutique during a weekend to advance their personal readings, in friendly silence and without obligation to read a common book, as happens with reading clubs. Very expensive and exclusive, prices vary from company to company Page Break (between $1,000 and $1,200 per weekend) up to Ladies Who Lit (£3,450 for four days in Mallorca) or Bad Bitch Book Club (between $950 and $1,750). It’s his thing. Although today it is perceived as a solitary activity, reading as something introspective is a historically anomalous perception. For centuries, reading was a social practice: families gathered by the warmth of the fireplace to listen to loud sermons, women sharing stories while they sewed, travelers exchanging books in train cars. In fact, the appearance of the railway in the 19th century generated an entire industry: the publisher Henry Walton Smith began selling cheap novels on the platforms of London stations, and Allen Lane installed a vending machine for books from the Penguin publishing house (the Penguincubator) in the subway lobbies. It is read less.The decline in reading rates is well documented. From 2003 to 2023, the share of Americans who read for pleasure daily fell from 28% to 16%, approximately 3% annually. The report from which these data come, prepared from more than 236,000 participants, indicates that the drop is more pronounced among the population with the lowest income and lowest educational level, although the decline affects all demographic groups. Teleworking has also affected a historical reading space: the commute to work. The importance of BookTok. But in the face of this general decline in reading rates, especially in more modest classes, there is a demand for reading as a form of leisure that disconnects from the connected and hyperactive rhythm in which we live. Paradoxically (coming from a social network), the TikTok reading community has a lot to do with this new vision of reading: with 200,000 million views under the hashtag booktokthis social network is already a sales engine that rescues titles from oblivion and catapults works by independent authors to the best-seller lists. According to the founder of The Literary LeagueAccording to Gabi Valladares, who has organized reading retreats at the Scribner’s Lodge resort in the Catskills, “book vacations offer a built-in connection point,” adding that they are “undemanding,” combining time with authors and other fans with free hours to simply read. It disconnects. The idea, even though the Internet is the platform for disseminating this type of retreat and its philosophy, is to disconnect from the online world, in search of recovering uninterrupted reading. As Leah Price points outauthor of ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Books’, the current problem is not work, historically the main competitor to reading, but “the competition from short-form digital content.” The year 2018, when Wi-Fi reached the entire New York subway network, was described as “horrible” for reading in the subway by Uli Beutter Cohen, who interviews travelers about their reading for his Instagram account Subway Book Review. Some clubs. Bad Bitch Book Club was born in 2018 as a Facebook group of friends with common interests. By 2020, confinement boosted the page to 38,000 members worldwide, receiving income of around $200,000 annually through a Patreon subscription of 14 per month. Their summer camps in The Forks, Maine, received 500 applications for 240 spots spread over three weekends. Page Breakfounded in 2024 by Mikey Friedman, has a different proposal: participants read aloud (in turns, we imagine) the same novel throughout the weekend, interspersed with frugal meals and themed games, getting closer to the idea of a traditional book club. For a recent retreat in the Joshua Tree, California desert, the company received 50 applications for 15 spots, which were assigned by lottery. Your goal: millennials and zetas too busy to commit to a conventional book club. Women. The profile of attendees is overwhelmingly female. Emma Donaldson, founder of Boutique Book Breaks (spa hotel retreats in the English countryside), notes that to date she has only had one male guest. The organizers attribute this bias to the feminization of the publishing industry in recent decades and to marketing for these retreats that adopts the language of well-being: candles, bath salts, non-alcoholic cocktails… Theorist DeNel Rehberg Sedo connects the popularity of these women’s reading clubs with the awareness groups of the 1960s and 1970s, speaking of spaces that “continue the training of women and distance them from domestic responsibilities.” The metaphor of well-being is not accidental. When the debate Often focused on choosing between reading as accelerated consumerism or as a reflective practice, these retreats offer a middle ground. The possibility of reading slowly, without being accountable to any algorithm, in the company of other people who also do not understand why the hell reading a book has become something that costs so much work these days. Header | Photo of Michael Kyule in Unsplash

There is a whole literary genre dedicated to perverse crimes in the most cuquis and friendly spaces in the world. And he is breaking it

July 20, 2025 by usatoday24

We identify the black novel, invariably, with what is known as HARD BOILED: hard detectives, bloody crimes, sordid environments. But … what if there was another way to raise gender? Settling in certain classics of the genre, the novels Cozy Mystery (“Cozy mystery”) They are more than a niche: they are a very profitable way to continue taking advantage of a historical style of making crime literature and suspense. But … what are exactly? They are police novels that present the crime and its resolution in “clean” environments: small peoples, picturesque communities or scenarios of everyday life (bookstores, coffees, gardening clubs). Explicit violence and sex are deliberately excluded from the scene, and the narrative focuses on the interaction between unique characters (often an amateur detective, almost always a woman, with a great sense of humor and daily skills) and the logic of the research. But this sounds to me … Of course it sounds to you: the eccentric detective, which takes advantage of its harmless appearance to gain the confidence of the suspects has as famous historical precedents as the Miss Marple Miss Agatha Christie And her most distinguished heiress: the Jessica Fletcher de ‘A crime has been written‘. Its roots can be traced even further: the British mystery novels of the nineteenth century and, in general the peaceful style of the “golden age” of the mystery (whose most popular representative is Christie) and where in addition to amateur detectives such as Miss Marple, we saw rural environments or closed communities, crimes executed “out of the scene” and ingenious resolution. In the 1980s, several writers began to claim and modernize that friendlier and more casual approach to the international boom of the darkest police novel. Since then, the Cozy Mystery He has experienced several popular cycles: the last one we are living now, supported by compartmentalization in increasingly detailed and specific subgenres that the editorial industry lives (of the Romantasy to the stories of Love with skaters). An editorial boom. Not only throughout the world authors such as Richard Osman, Joanne Flike or Kate Carlisle have become stars: also in Spain the subgenre has become a boom. Editorial Alma, for example, has found a real reef, and is exploiting fever by the Cozy With a collection that it already has almost forty titles to which are added, of course, its corresponding Children and Youth Variants. In the collection, titles such as ‘A lovely old woman … and lethal’, ‘Pride, prejudice and poison’ or ‘The last cupcake’ make clear the constants of the genre: kind satire, cuquis crimes and peaceful environments. And together with all these are, of course, the classics: ‘The Thursday Crime Club’, by the aforementioned Richard Osman, was one of the first supervantas of this last success of the genre. What’s behind: feminism … There is an inspiration for the genre that does not go unnoticed: its feminist inspiration. Women are present in Cozy Mystery as authors and also starring the books themselves. Gender can be understood as a reaction to the traditional black novel, historically monopolized by male voices and marked by the representation of women as a victim, secondary or femme fatale. The protagonists of these books are usually common women but extraordinary acuity, carriers of a logical, observer and empathic look. Following Miss Marple’s wake, many of them are mature, widowed characters, retired or housewives, whose age and experience confers authority and charisma. A true disarticulation of gender stereotypes, claiming values such as intuition, daily wisdom and practical sense, with women deeply integrated into their community, which gives a collective dimension to the narrative. A quiet and silent challenge of crime and punishment codes, eminently male law and order of the traditional genre. … and well -being. The warm and comforting style of these books (and their editions, with covers of soft tones and domestic scenarios) point to addresses that have nothing to do with the usual policeman: pleasant routines, the beauty of the everyday. And there is an echo in the prose of these books: light but not banal, ironic without cruelty … that is, a kind of comfortable reading, a very appropriate emotional refuge in these times of crisis, uncertainty and stress. We have spoken on other occasions about entertainments that disconnect us And peace provide us, and without a doubt the Cozy Mystery It has a lot to do with this trend: in a hyperconnected society, we crave return to small, intimate and without shocks. Except for small crime than another, but that is resolved easy. In Xataka | If you join the lifelong hobbies you have the editorial phenomenon that is sweeping in bookstores

This literary science fiction utopia advocates the disappearance of millionaires. And Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg love

May 23, 2025 by usatoday24

The saga of ‘the culture’ of Iain M. Banks is one of the series of Science fiction books most important and influential of the history of gender. And among his fans are names as notorious of the Tech sector as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg either Jeff Bezos. What is still curious: the message and background of the saga are in one direction, it could be said, diametrically opposite to the businesses led by these billionaires. So … why do you like so much? The culture of ‘culture’. The saga consists of no less than ten books, the first of them written in 1987 and the last in 2012. In them there is a society in which the pan-human (similar to us in appearance, but without being completely clear what relationship they keep with humanity) coexist with artificial intelligences, having overcome any problem of scarcity of the past. All citizens can careless work: technology takes care of everything. Until death is a problem of the past: diseases have been left behind, and minds can move from one body to another when bodies do not give more. Below the work. ‘Culture ‘is one of the most clearly positioned science fiction works in political terms, already a difference from conservative thought classics such as’ the rebel rebellion’ of Ayn Rand Or allegations of white supremacism not very camouflaged such as ‘The landing’ or ‘Turner’s newspapers’, leans towards the socialist utopia, more in the line of other classications such as ‘Iron heel’ by Jack London. In the Society of ‘Culture’ goals are reached Socialist theory: Post-scarce society, abolition of money and private property, radical equality, voluntary work, collective management, absence of coercive laws, personal freedom … an authentic utopia. Stones to the roof itself. And since there are no inequalities for economic reasons, the same concept of oligarchs is aberrant. Banks hated the idea that a lot of money will concentrate on a few hands. As he exposed This article in Voxthe solution to antisocial behavior in ‘culture’ is not the legal punishment, but to make the offender a social out of theory, cancellation. Something against what they have manifested openly These billionaires. And well, then there is the subject of the genre completely fluid in this utopian society: the rigid genres are completely overcome. And we already know how little they like Musk, Bezos either Zuckerberg LGTBI ideas. What do you see? It is clear What do they like about ‘the culture’ then: The fascinating vision of technology as a solution to all problems. From facilitating the most daily tasks to overcome in space battles, everything is mediated by artificial technology and intelligences. Of course, for Banks technology is not an end in itself, but a tool in search of a more just and equitable society. And without millionaires. But it is easy for these oligarchs of technology to skip that part, because the comfortable is to get carried away by the sissured show that also proposes ‘culture’ (which are adventure novels, not thesis). Of course, it should be noted that there are voices, such as The journalist Max Readwho affirm that perhaps Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg have not completely misunderstood ‘culture’. Especially if we compare it with the findings of the other utopia par excellence of science fiction, ‘the dispossessed’ of Ursula K. Leguinis of dyes closest to anarchism. Possessing utopias. As technology is more complex, the bridges of understanding between science fiction and innovation are more constant. Science fiction has helped us to imagine the future and carry it out, and therefore the technological elites of Silicon Valley have reinterpreted utopias as inspiration, and even sometimes as Brandingas Musk did Putting Space X ship namesinspiring Neuralink’s own concept and defining itself as an “utopian anarchist of those described by Iain M. Banks.” He is not the only one who appropriates the saga: Bezos will adapt the first book of ‘La Cultura’ In Prime Video. And Zuckerberg promoted the saga in your reading club In 2015. However, this possession of the ideas of Banks or other utopias as a generator of imaginary and technological concepts has very obvious inconveniences when it goes from socialist utopia to business narrative. The critical sense of literary works is diluted and enters a paradox: that of the technocratic utopia. Banks is not here to meet her, but something tells us that he would have produced chills. In Xataka | The groundbreaking world of Chinese science fiction: this is the literature from which ‘the problem of the three bodies “has come out”

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