Colm Tóibín, Robert Macfarlane, Elif Shafak, Michael Rosen and more share the novels, poetry and memoirs that make the perfect gift

I love giving books as presents. I rarely give anything else. I strongly approve of the Icelandic tradition of the Jólabókaflóðið (Yule book flood), whereby books are given (and, crucially, read) on Christmas Eve. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is the one I’ve given more often than any other; so much so that I keep a stack of four or five to hand, ready to give at Christmas or any other time of the year. It’s a slender masterpiece – a meditation on Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the Cairngorm mountains, which was written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. It’s “about the Cairngorms” in the sense that Mrs Dalloway is “about London”; which is to say, it is both intensely engaged with its specific setting, and gyring outwards to vaster questions of knowledge, existence and – a word Shepherd uses sparingly but tellingly – love.

A buzzy thriller about a Hollywood hanger-on and a moving documentary following the parents bereaved in last summer’s Southport attack. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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Tribute to Sylvia Townsend Warner follows campaign to nominate overlooked women

“The thing all women hate is to be thought dull,” says the title character of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel, Lolly Willowes, an early feminist classic about a middle-aged woman who moves to the countryside, sells her soul to the devil and becomes a witch.

Although women’s lives are so limited by society, Lolly observes, they “know they are dynamite … know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are”.

Halcyon Years by Alastair Reynolds; Paris Fantastique by Nicholas Royle; All Tomorrows by CM Kosemen; The Salt Oracle by Lorraine Wilson; The Witching Hour by various authors

Halcyon Years by Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz, £25)
Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who was the first man in space, is reborn as a private eye on board the starship Halcyon as it draws nearer to the end of a centuries-long journey. Yuri knows he died for the first time back in the 1960s, long before the technology existed to launch such sophisticated spaceships, but believes his remains were preserved and stored for future revival. Onboard life is modelled on classic crime noir from the 1940s: men in hats, cigarettes and whisky, with no futuristic tech beyond some clunky, glitching robots. As he doggedly pursues the truth about the seemingly unconnected deaths of two teenagers from the most powerful families on the ship, Yuri gradually learns about himself. There’s a conspiracy that goes back generations in this clever, entertaining blend of crime and space opera.

Paris Fantastique by Nicholas Royle (Confingo, £9.50)
The third collection after London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny captures both the reality and the mysteries of contemporary life in Paris in 14 short stories, 11 published here for the first time. Royle is a genius at blending the ordinary with the eerie, and his stories range from displays of outright surrealism to sinister psychological mysteries that play out as suspensefully as Highsmith or Hitchcock. It’s a memorable, unsettling excursion through the streets, passages and banlieues of Paris, and a masterclass in writing evocative short fiction.

Her novels, including A Village Affair and Other People’s Children, drew on what Fay Weldon called a ‘gift for putting her finger on the problem of the times’

• Joanna Trollope obituary

British novelist Joanna Trollope, whose portrayals of British domestic life made her one of the nation’s most widely read authors, has died at the age of 82.

Trollope published more than 30 novels during a writing career that began in 1980. Her early works, written under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey, were historical romances, but from the mid-1980s onward, she turned to contemporary fiction, a shift that would define her reputation.

The author on getting hooked on Flann O’Brien, reassessing Kingsley Amis, and why his grandfather was outraged by Watership Down

My earliest reading memory
Not my earliest reading memory, exactly, but my earliest memory of reading with avid enjoyment: The Three Investigators mysteries, a series of kids’ books about three juvenile detectives operating in far-off California (impossibly glamorous to me at the time) under the benign direction of Alfred Hitchcock, of all people. I devoured the first 12 in the franchise.

My favourite book growing up
Like everybody else growing up in the 1970s, I had a copy of Watership Down by Richard Adams on my bedroom shelves – it was the law. I did love it, though. Whatever fondness I have for the English countryside probably comes from that book. I remember my grandfather – a real country dweller – seeing me reading it and being outraged. “A book about rabbits?” he shouted. “They’re vermin!”

Inspired by the scary film franchise, playwright Levi Holloway and Punchdrunk maestro Felix Barrett are bringing the ‘bizarrely joyous’ world of terror to the stage

Malevolent spirits be damned – theatres can be haunted simply by the memory of bad plays and perhaps unscary horror in particular. The last time London’s Ambassadors theatre aimed to give audiences the shivers, with The Enfield Haunting, it led to some frightfully poor reviews. But a couple of years later, this intimate West End playhouse is hosting Paranormal Activity, a new instalment in the franchise that was kickstarted by a low-budget supernatural movie about a couple plagued by inexplicable nocturnal noises. “Hold your nerve” runs the play’s tagline – a directive you suspect applies not just to the audience.

Arriving at the theatre on the day of the first preview, it’s not creepy bumps and thuds that echo through the building but whizzing drills, sound checks and the last-minute discussions of a crew with a deadline. Perched in the dress circle bar, US playwright Levi Holloway and director Felix Barrett (best known as the founder of immersive theatre specialists Punchdrunk) are discussing how rarely they have been frightened in the theatre.

An exuberant, inspiring memoir from the New Yorker writer and author of The Orchid Thief

In 2017, 10 years after Susan Orlean profiled Caltech-trained physicist turned professional origami artist Robert Lang for the New Yorker, she attended the OrigamiUSA convention to take Lang’s workshop on folding a “Taiwan goldfish”. I was with her, a radio producer trying to capture the sounds of paper creasing as Orlean attempted to keep pace with the “Da Vinci of origami”, wincing when her goldfish’s fins didn’t exactly flutter in hydrodynamic splendour.

It was Orlean in her element: an adventurous student, inquisitive and exacting, fully alive to the mischief inherent to reporting – and primed to extract some higher truth. “When we first met you said something to me I’ve never forgotten,” Orlean told Lang. “That paper has a memory – that once you fold it, you can never entirely remove the fold.” Was that, she wondered, an insight about life, too?

Author whose Shopaholic series of romcom novels were global bestsellers and adapted into a Hollywood film

Sophie Kinsella, who has died of a brain tumour aged 55, was one of Britain’s most successful novelists, selling more than 50 million copies of her books, including the globally successful Shopaholic series. Through three decades she retained a loyal and passionate readership with her deceptively light and intricately plotted comic novels.

Like her best-known heroine, Becky Bloomwood, Kinsella began her writing career in financial journalism, but, realising she was uninspired (and probably not very good at it), she wrote a book, The Tennis Party, that was published in 1995, when she was 25, under her given name, Madeleine Wickham (“Maddy”). This was followed by five subsequent standalone “Aga sagas”, which all achieved moderate chart success and critical acclaim.

Bridge theatre, London
Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s fairytale adventure follows its archetypal characters into real-world emotion, brilliantly drawn and sung

Can Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s eternally imaginative Grimm brothers mashup ever disappoint, when its book is so clever and it is driven by the most gorgeous (if tricky) music? Jordan Fein’s production shimmers and shines with all the humour and pathos of these errant fairytale characters who misadventure into the woods, winding their rearranged stories around each other.

The show begins with swift efficiency, racing through some of the early songs, but it gathers feeling and there is picaresque fun. A witch’s curse inflicted on the Baker (Jamie Parker) and his wife (Katie Brayben) for the sins of his father can only be broken if they bring her Cinderella’s shoe, Rapunzel’s golden hair, Red Ridinghood’s coat and the milky white cow so dear to Jack (of the beanstalk).

The historian is set to lead a ‘stellar’ 2026 panel featuring the Pulp frontman and other acclaimed writers, as the search begins for next year’s standout work of fiction

Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker will feature on the 2026 Booker prize judging panel that will be chaired by the classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard.

Novelist Patricia Lockwood has also been named as a judge, along with the poet Raymond Antrobus and Rebecca Liu, an editor at the Guardian Saturday magazine.

Currently in production the second prequel in the series, Sunrise on the Reaping, will likely feature the married couple ‘in a flash-forward’

Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson are to appear in the new Hunger Games movie, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which is in production.

The Hollywood Reporter said it confirmed the pair’s return to the Hunger Games series, in what is the sixth film in the franchise. Both will play the same characters as in the original set of films – Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen and Hutcherson as Peeta Mellark – with the Hollywood Reporter suggesting they will “likely appear in a flash-forward”. At the close of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (released in 2015), Everdeen and Mellark are married with children.

As Foyles names her memoir its book of the year, here’s a guide to the Booker prize winner’s wide-ranging oeuvre of fiction and nonfiction

‘The point of the writer is to be unpopular,” said Arundhati Roy in 2018. Over the last three decades – beginning with her 1997 Booker winner, The God of Small Things, which catapulted her into celebrity – the writer’s works of fiction, nonfiction and essays have indeed been polarising; she has become one of the most prominent critics of the Indian government and Hindu nationalism.

Last year, she was awarded the PEN Pinter prize, given to writers who cast an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world. Earlier this year, she published Mother Mary Comes To Me, an account of her relationship with her mother. The memoir has now been named Foyles book of the year, and was also shortlisted for Waterstones book of the year. Here, Priya Bharadia takes readers through Roy’s essential reads.

This Trinidadian family saga blurs the line between real and imagined to create a multilayered history of an island and its people

Ever Since We Small opens in Bihar, India in 1899. Jayanti dreams of a woman offering her bracelets. Within days, her husband becomes sick and dies. Widowhood is not an option and Jayanti prepares for her own sati. Determined to apply the “godly might of English justice” and uphold a law banning the practice, an English doctor and magistrate muscle in to stop her. In an 11th-hour volte face, Jayanti, desiring life over the afterlife, allows herself to be saved. Triumphant, the magistrate suggests she become his mistress, but instead she opts to be shipped off to Trinidad. The island, she’s told, is a place where the shame of her choice will be forgotten.

Ever Since We Small, Celeste Mohammed’s second novel-in-stories, is a more cohesive work than Pleasantview, which won the Bocas prize for Caribbean literature in 2022. The opening chapter follows on from an academic introduction and Mohammed’s style is more reverent, less ballsy and humorous, than the warts-and-all portraits drawn in Pleasantview; but casting characters from the distant past often has that effect on novelists. The tone is appropriate, however; Mohammed here is the sober observer taking in the fate of women like Jayanti, who if they have choices at all, they are between bad and worse.

In this exclusive subscriber-only eBook, you’ll learn about a new method that scientists have uncovered to look at the ways our bodies are aging.

by  Jessica Hamzelou October 14, 2025

Table of Contents:

• Clocks kick off
• Black-box clocks
• How to be young again
• Dogs and dolphins
• When young meets old

Related Stories:

• How aging clocks can help us understand why we age—and if we can reverse it
• The quest to legitimize longevity medicine

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The ‘queen of romantic comedy’ has died 18 months after announcing her brain cancer diagnosis

Madeleine Wickham, known for writing the bestselling novel Confessions of a Shopaholic under her pen name Sophie Kinsella, has died aged 55.

Wickham, dubbed “the queen of romantic comedy” by novelist Jojo Moyes, wrote more than 30 books for adults, children and teenagers, which have sold more than 45m copies.

Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
This adaptation of the beloved tale about an ogre looks beautiful but does not grow into a giant to rival the company’s hit Roald Dahl musical

The Royal Shakespeare Company is named for its house dramatist but – since its global hit Matilda: The Musical premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon 15 winters ago – Roald Dahl has helped keep it solvent enough to do Shakespeare. An adaptation of Dahl’s 1982 book about a counter-intuitive ogre who befriends an orphan is a hoped-for Christmas gift to the coffers of an organisation making budget-trimming job cuts.

But, where Matilda was always confidently a comedy musical, The BFG feels stylistically to be juggling different shows. Adapted by Tom Wells with additional material from dramaturg Jenny Worton, the show has a strand of spoken drama, somewhat reminiscent of Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, with a quasi-Elizabeth II, sweetly played by Helena Lymbery, saving the nation with child superhero helpers.

This sharp, bleak debut satirises the current cultural moment through the life and loves of a cynical young writer

There is a long tradition of stories about artists that are also about the question of how to represent life in art; novels about artists with toxic female friendships are more unusual.

Enter Anika Jade Levy’s slim and sharp debut Flat Earth, which shares its title with a film made by a woman whom Avery, the narrator, identifies as her best friend. Frances is a rich and beautiful twentysomething who becomes a “reluctant celebrity in certain circles” after her film, “an experimental documentary about rural isolation and rightwing conspiracy theories” in the modern-day United States, premieres to critical acclaim at a gallery in New York. Avery, meanwhile, is struggling to write what she describes as “a book of cultural reports”.

The author of The Power looks to the past for lessons in surviving an era of seismic technological change

Naomi Alderman argues that one of the most useful things to know is the name of the era you’re living in, and she proposes one for ours: the Information Crisis. In fact, the advent of digital media marks the third information crisis humans have lived through: the first came after the invention of writing; the second followed the printing press.

These were periods of great social conflict and upheaval, and they profoundly altered our social and political relationships as well as our understanding of the world around us. Writing ushered in the Axial Age, the period between the eighth and third centuries BC, when many of the world’s most influential religious figures and thinkers lived: Laozi, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Abrahamic prophets and the Greek philosophers. Gutenberg’s printing press helped bring about the Reformation. While it is too early to know where the internet era will take us, in her new book, which she describes as a “speculative historical project”, Alderman suggests that those earlier crises offer clues.

From stealing a photo for the King of Bohemia to battling the Napoleon of crime on a clifftop, Holmes is witty and watchable in these early Conan Doyle-approved dramas

The British Film Institute has restored three of the short two-reel silent films in the Stoll Pictures Sherlock Holmes series from the early 1920s – and very witty, watchable and spirited entertainments they are too. The star is the English stage actor Eille Norwood, whose handsome, troubled, sensitive face looms out of the screen in extreme closeup in the first of these, A Scandal in Bohemia, from 1921. Dr Watson is played in all of the films by Hubert Willis.

In this first film, our hero demonstrates his talents as a master of disguise; Holmes is approached by the King of Bohemia at his rooms in Baker Street, wearing a mask (so concerned is he about being recognised), although Holmes’s powers of deduction (and of course his own superior mastery of this kind of imposture) allow him to rumble the king at once. He wants Holmes to purloin an incriminating photograph taken of him with a young woman – an “adventuress” is how he quaintly puts it – which could be embarrassing. This is the fashionable stage actor Irene Adler, played by Joan Beverley, and Holmes manages to get on stage with Adler mid-performance to carry out a daring stratagem. But very startlingly, Adler appears to be the one person who can outwit Holmes.

Park theatre, London
Gleefully leaning into all the cliches and groansome laughs, Dan Patterson and Jez Bond’s musical vampire romp is supremely silly

If ever there was a show where the title came first, you’d guess it was this one by Dan (Whose Line Is It Anyway?) Patterson and Jez Bond. Why else, if not to justify a pun, would you make an a capella singing version of the Victorian vampire novel? And Dracapella is nothing if not fond of a pun. (“There is a supernatural force at work in Transylvania.” / “Which is?” / “No, not witches.”) There’s lots more where that came from in this spooky comedy romp, in which an undead Romanian count concludes his 400-year search for love to a soundtrack of closely harmonised 80s power ballads and champion beatboxing.

The latter is all provided by ABH Beatbox, a cast member of the BAC Beatbox Academy’s Frankenstein, in whose globetrotting success I discern another (distant) inspiration for this music-gothic crossover. This one’s a more traditional affair, a knowing entertainment forever sending up its own storytelling cliches, and at every turn choosing groansome laughs over thrills. Arguably it lowers the stakes (it’s catching!) when a story about centuries-spanning passion becomes a vehicle for The Play What I Wrote-style larks. But the relentless silliness of Patterson and Bond’s confection amply compensates, as Harker’s train to Dover is decanted on to a rail replacement bus, and Dracula demonstrates his metaphysical powers by having his henchman consume – as if by magic! – a bowlful of marshmallows.

As Wuthering Heights gets a raunchy Hollywood remake, our writer takes a pilgrimage through Haworth, the village where its author lived – and finds her spirit still electrifying the cobbled streets and windswept moors

It’s a crisp afternoon in Haworth, West Yorkshire, and I’m drinking a pint of Emily Brontë beer in The Kings Arms. Other Brontës are on tap – Anne is a traditional ale, Charlotte an IPA, Branwell a porter – but the barman says Emily, an amber ale with a “malty biscuit flavour”, is the most popular. It’s the obvious choice today, anyway: in a few hours, Oscar-winning film-maker Emerald Fennell will be at the Brontë women’s writing festival in a church just up the road, discussing her adaptation of Emily’s 19th-century gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights.

The film, to be released just before Valentine’s Day next year, is already scandal-ridden. It all started with Fennell’s casting of Hollywood stars Jacob Elordi and Margot (“Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Barbie”) Robbie causing uproar. An erotic teaser trailer full of tight bodices, cracking whips and sweaty bodies had the same effect. But heads were really sent spinning by reports of a scene with a public hanging and a nun who “fondles the corpse’s visible erection”.

Talented editor and literary agent who was a co-founder of Women in Publishing

In 1987 Faith Evans, who has died aged 83, set about realising the concept of a small literary agency with a distinct identity, akin to the list or imprint of a publisher. It would focus on ideas and the kind of books that would enable her to combine her editorial, publishing and business experience with making a living. This meant looking out for and thinking up projects to which she could contribute, and which accorded with her political views. The agency was to have fewer authors than most – a dozen rather than several dozen – so she could give them the attention they needed.

She launched her firm, Faith Evans Associates, in shared premises in Dryden Street, Covent Garden. Around this time, she was a juror in a trial in which I was the defending barrister at Knightsbridge crown court. She thought I was a good communicator as a defender of the underdog, and that if I could just translate that on to the page, then I could write.

The reporter’s alleged affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr raises a whole host of questions, few of which get answers in this pretentious memoir

Did he take me seriously?” Olivia Nuzzi wonders in the midst of her infamous alleged affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr. Nuzzi, then Washington correspondent for New York magazine, has just learned that she and the Politician, as she calls RFK Jr in her new book, may overlap during a visit to Mar-a-Lago. Nuzzi, worried Donald Trump will catch on and start spreading rumours, convenes an emergency meeting with the Politician to strategise. RFK Jr – who has denied having an affair with Nuzzi – doesn’t see the big deal.

So, she agonises “Did he take me seriously?” and reflects that she had “little cause to consider the question before now.”

The unlikely story of an English girl catapulted to French fame – and a relationship with Serge Gainsbourg that resembled a piece of deranged performance art

Boarding a flight in 1983, Jane Birkin found herself wrestling with the open straw basket into which she habitually crammed everything from playscripts to nappies. As she reached for the overhead locker the basket overturned, spilling the contents on her neighbour. He turned out to be the chief executive of Hermès, the French luxury goods company, and immediately offered to make her a bag with internal pockets and a secure closure. Birkin sketched what she wanted on a sick bag and “The Birkin” was born: a slouchy trapezoid in finest leather complete with its own little padlock. These days a Birkin bag starts at around £10,000 while the original, made for Birkin herself, was auctioned this summer for £7.4m.

It is a tale that gets endlessly repeated thanks to its neat compression of the main beats of the Jane Birkin story. First, there’s the insouciance, the fact that the Anglo-French singer and actor never seemed to go after anything; rather, it came to her. Then there’s her lack of mortification at having her whole life upended on a strange man’s lap, nappies and all. Finally, there’s her refusal to feel overawed by her bounty. Birkin famously did not treat her Hermès bag with especial reverence, enthusiastically festooning it with charms, beads, stickers and ribbons. The trend for personalising your handbag with bits of tat was ubiquitous this summer, part of a wider revival of the Birkin aesthetic, comprising flared mid-wash jeans, peasanty cheesecloth blouses and ballet flats. You couldn’t avoid it if you tried.

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from a festive mystery to a kaleidoscopic ode to the animal kingdom

The hypnotic third novel in the hit Danish series grapples with the philosophical realities of being stuck on repeat in 18 November

The time loop story, in which characters repeatedly relive the same span of time, has become synonymous with the 1993 film Groundhog Day, but the idea has much older roots. In PD Ouspensky’s 1915 novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, the feckless Osokin is given the chance to live his life over again, only to find himself making all the same mistakes. Like Groundhog Day’s insufferable Phil Connors, Osokin can change nothing without changing himself.

Solvej Balle’s much-lauded series On the Calculation of Volume takes a very different approach. She first began working on the idea decades ago, several years before Groundhog Day was released. The film, she says, “helped me with research by trying out some of the roads I did not want to take”. The books, five so far with two more planned, have proved a literary sensation in her native Denmark, with the first three volumes together scooping the 2022 Nordic Council Literature prize, the highest literary honour in Scandinavia. This is the third to be published in English this year; the first was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker prize.

An esoteric blend of folklore and festivity reveals the lesser known, dark side of Christmas, from horse skulls and Yule cats to Icelandic ogres

Christmas nowadays tends to revolve around family, food and a furtive visit from a pot-bellied stranger down the chimney. But in The Dead of Winter, the historian and folklorist Sarah Clegg reveals a lesser known side to the festive season, unearthing unsettling midwinter traditions and stories that fell out of favour in the Victorian age.

Subtitled The Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas, the book opens with Clegg embarking on a pre-dawn walk to a graveyard on Christmas Eve. She is recreating an old Swedish tradition called årsgång, or “year walk”, which is said to offer glimpses into the walker’s future along with “shadowy enactments of the burials of anyone who will die in the village this coming year”.

Available via WF Howes, 4hr 21min

A meticulously researched account of the controversial businessman’s rise and shocking demise

At least two terrible ironies surround the death of Mike Lynch. One lies in the name of his superyacht, which sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of 19 August 2024. He had named the boat Bayesian to honour Bayes’s theorem, a mathematical rule that helps you weigh up the probability of something given the available evidence, which served as Lynch’s guiding light over the course of a tempestuous career. The theorem was “a beautiful key to our minds”, Lynch believed. But it was entirely incapable of predicting the outcome that morning, when the yacht capsized during a storm, killing seven people, including Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah and his US lawyer, Chris Morvillo.

A second irony lies in the fact that Lynch had just come through the trial of his life, one he felt was bound to end in jail, where he thought he could die. Somehow, to everyone’s astonishment, an American jury had acquitted him and his co-defendant on all 15 counts of fraud.

OpenAI may soon be forced to explain why it deleted a pair of controversial datasets composed of pirated books, and the stakes could not be higher.

At the heart of a class-action lawsuit from authors alleging that ChatGPT was illegally trained on their works, OpenAI’s decision to delete the datasets could end up being a deciding factor that gives the authors the win.

It’s undisputed that OpenAI deleted the datasets, known as “Books 1” and “Books 2,” prior to ChatGPT’s release in 2022. Created by former OpenAI employees in 2021, the datasets were built by scraping the open web and seizing the bulk of its data from a shadow library called Library Genesis (LibGen).

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This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company.

“Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China’s star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as “China’s IBM.” Wan had believed that economic change could lead to political change. He had thrown his support behind the pro-democracy protesters in 1989. As a result, he had to flee to France, with an arrest warrant hanging over his head. He was never able to return home. Now, decades later and in failing health in Paris, Wan recalled something that had happened one day in the late 1980s, when he was still living in Beijing.

Local officials had invited him to dinner.

This was unusual. He was usually the one to invite officials to dine, so as to curry favor with the show of hospitality. Over the meal, the officials told Wan that the Ministry of State Security was going to send agents to work undercover at his company in positions dealing with international relations. The officials cast the move to embed these minders as an act of protection for Wan and the company’s other executives, a security measure that would keep them from stumbling into unseen risks in their dealings with foreigners. “You have a lot of international business, which raises security issues for you. There are situations that you don’t understand,” Wan recalled the officials telling him. “They said, ‘We are sending some people over. You can just treat them like regular employees.'”

Wan said he knew that around this time, state intelligence also contacted other tech companies in Beijing with the same request. He couldn’t say what the situation was for Huawei, which was still a little startup far to the south in Shenzhen, not yet on anyone’s radar. But Wan said he didn’t believe that Huawei would have been able to escape similar demands. “That is a certainty,” he said.

“Telecommunications is an industry that has to do with keeping control of a nation’s lifeline…and actually in any system of communications, there’s a back-end platform that could be used for eavesdropping.”

It was a rare moment of an executive lifting the cone of silence surrounding the MSS’s relationship with China’s high-tech industry. It was rare, in fact, in any country. Around the world, such spying operations rank among governments’ closest-held secrets. When Edward Snowden had exposed the NSA’s operations abroad, he’d ended up in exile in Russia. Wan, too, might have risked arrest had he still been living in China.

Here are two book reviews.

It’s been a month since Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship was published. From what we know, sales are good.

Some of the book’s forty-three chapters are available online: chapters 2, 12, 28, 34, 38, and 41.

We need more reviews—six on Amazon is not enough, and no one has yet posted a viral TikTok review. One review was published in Nature and another on the RSA Conference website, but more would be better. If you’ve read the book, please leave a review somewhere.

My coauthor and I have been doing all sort of book events, both online and in person. This ...

The post More on Rewiring Democracy appeared first on Security Boulevard.

It’s been a month since Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship was published. From what we know, sales are good.

Some of the book’s forty-three chapters are available online: chapters 2, 12, 28, 34, 38, and 41.

We need more reviews—six on Amazon is not enough, and no one has yet posted a viral TikTok review. One review was published in Nature and another on the RSA Conference website, but more would be better. If you’ve read the book, please leave a review somewhere.

My coauthor and I have been doing all sort of book events, both online and in person. This book event, with Danielle Allen at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center, is particularly good. We also have been doing a ton of podcasts, both separately and together. They’re all on the book’s homepage.

There are two live book events in December. If you’re in Boston, come see us at the MIT Museum on 12/1. If you’re in Toronto, you can see me at the Munk School at the University of Toronto on 12/2.

I’m also doing a live AMA on the book on the RSA Conference website on 12/16. Register here.

Earlier this year, Google announced the end of its efforts to get Steam running on Chromebooks, but it’s not done trying to make these low-power laptops into gaming machines. Google has teamed up with Nvidia to offer a version of GeForce Now cloud streaming that is perplexingly limited in some ways and generous in others. Starting today, anyone who buys a Chromebook will get a free year of a new service called GeForce Now Fast Pass. There are no ads and less waiting for server slots, but you don’t get to play very long.

Back before Google killed its Stadia game streaming service, it would often throw in a few months of the Pro subscription with Chromebook purchases. In the absence of its own gaming platform, Google has turned to Nvidia to level up Chromebook gaming. GeForce Now (GFN), which has been around in one form or another for more than a decade, allows you to render games on a remote server and stream the video output to the device of your choice. It works on computers, phones, TVs, and yes, Chromebooks.

The new Chromebook feature is not the same GeForce Now subscription you can get from Nvidia. Fast Pass, which is exclusive to Chromebooks, includes a mishmash of limits and bonuses that make it a pretty strange offering. Fast Pass is based on the free tier of GeForce Now, but users will get priority access to server slots. So no queuing for five or 10 minutes to start playing. It also lacks the ads that Nvidia’s standard free tier includes. Fast Pass also uses the more powerful RTX servers, which are otherwise limited to the $10-per-month ($100 yearly) Performance tier.

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Science fiction has long speculated about the possibility of first contact with an alien species from a distant world and how we might be able to communicate with them. But what if we simply don’t have enough common ground for that to even be possible? An alien species is bound to be biologically very different, and their language will be shaped by their home environment, broader culture, and even how they perceive the universe. They might not even share the same math and physics. These and other fascinating questions are the focus of an entertaining new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions About Science and the Nature of Reality.

Co-author Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, who has worked on the ATLAS collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He’s also a gifted science communicator who previously co-authored two books with cartoonist Jorge Cham of PhD Comics fame: 2018’s We Have No Idea and 2021’s Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe. (The pair also co-hosted a podcast from 2018 to 2024, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.) This time around, cartoonist Andy Warner provided the illustrations, and Whiteson and Warner charmingly dedicate their book to “all the alien scientists we have yet to meet.”

Whiteson has long been interested in the philosophy of physics. “I’m not the kind of physicist who’s like, ‘whatever, let’s just measure stuff,'” he told Ars. “The thing that always excited me about physics was this implicit promise that we were doing something universal, that we were learning things that were true on other planets. But the more I learned, the more concerned I became that this might have been oversold. None are fundamental, and we don’t understand why anything emerges. Can we separate the human lens from the thing we’re looking at? We don’t know in the end how much that lens is distorting what we see or defining what we’re looking at. So that was the fundamental question I always wanted to explore.”

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My latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, will be published in just over a week. No reviews yet, but you can read chapters 12 and 34 (of 43 chapters total).

You can order the book pretty much everywhere, and a copy signed by me here.

Please help spread the word. I want this book to make a splash when it’s public. Leave a review on whatever site you buy it from. Or make a TikTok video. Or do whatever you kids do these days. Is anyone a Slashdot contributor? I’d like the book to be announced there.

When I announced my latest book last week, I forgot to mention that you can pre-order a signed copy here. I will ship the books the week of 10/20, when it is published.

I am pleased to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship: coauthored with Nathan Sanders, and published by MIT Press on October 21.

Rewiring Democracy looks beyond common tropes like deepfakes to examine how AI technologies will affect democracy in five broad areas: politics, legislating, administration, the judiciary, and citizenship. There is a lot to unpack here, both positive and negative. We do talk about AI’s possible role in both democratic backsliding or restoring democracies, but the fundamental focus of the book is on present and future uses of AIs within functioning democracies. (And there is a lot going on, in both national and local governments around the world.) And, yes, we talk about AI-driven propaganda and artificial conversation.

Some of what we write about is happening now, but much of what we write about is speculation. In general, we take an optimistic view of AI’s capabilities. Not necessarily because we buy all the hype, but because a little optimism is necessary to discuss possible societal changes due to the technologies—and what’s really interesting are the second-order effects of the technologies. Unless you can imagine an array of possible futures, you won’t be able to steer towards the futures you want. We end on the need for public AI: AI systems that are not created by for-profit corporations for their own short-term benefit.

Honestly, this was a challenging book to write through the US presidential campaign of 2024, and then the first few months of the second Trump administration. I think we did a good job of acknowledging the realities of what is happening in the US without unduly focusing on it.

Here’s my webpage for the book, where you can read the publisher’s summary, see the table of contents, read some blurbs from early readers, and order copies from your favorite online bookstore—or signed copies directly from me. Note that I am spending the current academic year at the Munk School at the University of Toronto. I will be able to mail signed books right after publication on October 22, and then on November 25.

Please help me spread the word. I would like the book to make something of a splash when it’s first published.

EDITED TO ADD (9/8): You can order a signed copy here.