Video from Glasgow AI Disaster is the Best Wonka Movie Since Gene Wilder’s

This originally appeared in our Today in Books daily newsletter, where each day we round up the most interesting stories, news, essays, and other goings on in the world of books and reading. Sign up here if you want to get it.

Wonka Themed AI-Generated “Experience” Is a Delightful Trainwreck

So hard to pick the best parts of this story. The company behind it is called The House of Illumnati. The off-brand Oompa Loompas were called Wonkioodles. A candy factory room that was more meth lab than confectionary wonderland. Is it just me, or is a fractured adaptation of Dahl’s character where the whole thing is a scam kind of in the spirit of the original? Only thing missing would be a true believer kid that eventually inherits the whole mess.

The State of the Culture, 2024

Ted Gioia’s “State of Culture, 2024” over at The Honest Broker has made the rounds in a way a piece like this just doesn’t anymore. And I think it’s because people knows he’s on to something. There is a lot to unpack here (the phrase Dopamine Industrial Complex alone should get him a book deal), but the central insight that tech platforms, really from Facebook’s move to an algorithm almost 10 years ago all the way to TikTok’s current dominance, is about the construction, mainteance, and monetization of cognitive addiction.

Oprah Picks Memoir as Latest Book Club Selection

Laura Love Hardin has had quite the life. Soccer mom to fraudster to felon. And then to successful celebrity ghostwriter and now mainstreamm book club fodder! What a ride. If Ladbrooke’s took bets on Oprah Book Club selections, the odds on this one would have been short. I bet it’s great on audio.

Ranking the Last 20 Winners of the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar

This one is by yours truly. I did a two-part ranking of the winners of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (part one here, part two here) for Book Riot and enjoyed doing it. I am not a movie critic or an expert in the alchemy of adaptations, but a pretty serious fan of this particular quasi-literature genre.