Age Gap

The U.S. Book Show kicked off yesterday with a suite of programming that highlighted some generational fault lines among industry professionals on issues like work-life balance and social media. Once again, the Trump administration wants to defund the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the upcoming fiscal year—and once again, library advocates are imploring Congress to not only protect but increase the agency’s budget. And across the globe, reading is increasingly becoming a social activity, with book lovers gathering online and IRL to build community around their favorite fictional worlds. For the Chronicle of Higher Education, Tyler Jagt sounds the alarm over the “collapse in literacy” that he’s witnessing among his students. Meanwhile, the New Yorker’s Jay Caspian King argues that AI is incapable of producing writing that people actually want to read. In a conversation with the Observer, Otter.ai founder and CEO Sam Liang envisions a future in which AI could make typing obsolete. On Substack, Rebecca Makkai pulls back the curtain on book prizes. And longtime distribution executive Gilbert Perlman has died at 72.