The People's Bookshelf in the atrium of the National Library of Latvia (NLL) is one of the central design elements of the building. The Bookshelf stores books donated to the Library and currently is home to almost 8 000 books in 50 languages from all over the world. Everyone is asked to donate a book – of special importance to themselves – to the NLL, also writing a message or personal story relating to the book on its title page.

Article in Atlantic claims The Blue Fighter was artificially generated, days after it won Caine prize for African writers

The Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using AI to write a prize-winning short story after an article in the Atlantic said software had flagged it as almost completely AI-generated.

Kundizeza’s story The Blue Fighter was announced as the winner of the prestigious Caine prize for African writers on 6 October. Five days later, The Atlantic published an article by the author and journalist Vauhini Vara titled: “Yet Another Literary prize winner Seems to Be AI.”

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© Photograph: pr image

© Photograph: pr image

© Photograph: pr image

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Can AI design new life forms? In 2025, Stanford University PhD student Samuel King came up with a preliminary answer when he used a generative AI model to propose genetic blueprints for microscopic viruses. It isn’t yet an example of AI-generated life, but that could be next. Watch as senior AI reporter James O’Donnell interviews King about his work, being named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 and new ways of seeing biology.

Speakers: James O’Donnell, AI Reporter, and Samuel King, Bioengineering PhD Candidate, Stanford University/Arc Institute

Recorded on Friday, October 16, 2026

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• He asked an AI to design viruses … and it worked.
• AI-designed viruses are here and already killing bacteria

Virgil, Texas, isn't real ... It's a backwoods Brigadoon on the edge of exurban creep, suspended between the shopping malls and semiconductor factories of our modern civilization and the last vestiges of the open plains. Virgil is a myth, and like all American myths, it's steeped in the tension between our desire for freedom and the capitalist conformity obstructing our horizon like the drab, prefabricated metal buildings of which, as True Stories says, Texas is the leading producer.

Karin Wulf (9/2026), "The Family History of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, and the Politics of Genealogy": "a team ... has been working with a strand of Thomas Jefferson's hair to compare recovered DNA with that contributed by descendants of Sally Hemings ... More problematic is the failure of most of the flurry of media attention ... to resist tired and tiresome framings ... History regularly skips or dismisses the essential history of family." Wulf's other posts on "Reading Family History" (2, 3, 4, 5, 6), her course on "Gender, Sexuality and Family in the Early Modern Atlantic World," and other posts / tidbits. Also this month, an interview with Marcia Biederman on a later family's history: "the true story of an Alaska Native woman" with "villainous relatives: the mother- and sister-in-law from hell, who welcomed Agnes by showing her to a stark, unheated attic room." Via.

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The US has spent billions building a “virtual wall” of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundbreaking investigation by MIT Technology Review has documented over a thousand people who moved through areas watched by these towers without being reached or apprehended, and who ultimately died there. Some were even under the watch of newly installed AI-powered towers designed to spot people automatically.

Our findings reveal a humanitarian crisis more visible than previously known, and repeated failures of the virtual wall’s basic security promise. Watch a conversation examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands.

Speakers: Mat Honan, editor in chief, James O’Donnell, senior AI reporter, and Eileen Guo, senior features and investigations reporter

Recorded on September 28, 2026

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• The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch people before they die?
• How we made the first comprehensive map of deaths along the US border’s “virtual wall”
• 4 ways to address the failures we found along the US border’s “virtual wall”

Anthony Tommasini (LitHub, 9/10/26), "Beauty in Ambiguity: On Marian Anderson's Lifelong Love For Schubert": "When selecting songs ... she always looked first to Schubert, 'the composer I love best,' who wrote 'hundreds of them,' each 'more beautiful than the last.'" E.g.: Ständchen (No. 4 in D. 957); Der Tod und das Mädchen (D. 531); Ave Maria (D. 839); and Erlkönig (D. 328) i.e. Goethe's poem based on a ballad also adapted in Benedikte Naubert's 1792 "The Erl-King's Daughter." Classical Voice North America on Tommasini: Anderson "feared she would be remembered for breaking barriers rather than for her artistry." At LitHub, Tommasini discusses "Wohin?" and "Ungeduld" from D. 795, but also "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." He mentions Roland Hayes singing Schubert as an influence. At Largehearted Boy, he makes more suggestions.

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Employees at the world’s leading AI labs are saying there’s a real possibility that advanced AI could destroy humanity. Are they right? Or is this more scaremongering and hype? Watch a conversation unpacking AI extinction fears: where they come from, whether they hold any water, and, if so, what we should do.

Recorded on September 15, 2026

Speakers: Niall Firth, Executive Editor, Will Douglas Heaven, Senior AI editor, and Grace Huckins, AI reporter

Since we couldn’t get to all of your questions during the session, Will and Grace answered the most popular ones in their piece: Could AI really kill us all? Your questions, answered.

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• Here’s why AI agents lie and cheat to reach their goals
• AI’s recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all
• Bill Gates says we’ve passed AI’s danger thresholds. Now what?
• The inside story on why OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

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The “censorship-industrial complex” is an idea that a network of government, tech, and research groups is collaborating to suppress conservative online speech. This was fodder for the right-wing information sphere for years—then it began making its way into US policy. Watch a conversation exploring how it started, where it’s going, and what it means for the future of democracy and the internet.

Speakers: Amy Nordrum, Executive Editor, Operations, and Eileen Guo, Senior Reporter, Features & Investigations

Recorded on August 13, 2026

Related Story:

• How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy