Joseph Guyer

During a 2023 interview with 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley, Google CEO Sundar Pichai admitted to something that should have convinced way more people that artificial intelligence (AI)—and artificial superintelligence (ASI) specifically—poses a unique threat to humanity. Some of Google’s AI supercomputers had recently taught themselves how to use Bengali, the official language of Bangladesh, without being prompted.

I’ll just come out and say it at the top: I really, really enjoyed Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of The Odyssey. In my first post, I said I wasn’t interested in recommending books, and I’m still not. I see this project, The Neglected Read, more as a one-man book club than a list of recommendations. But if you’ve been thinking about picking up The Odyssey—perhaps in anticipation of the Christopher Nolan film, arriving in theaters this July—you could do a lot worse than this version.

Image by Mike Cuvelier from Pixabay Reading books for pleasure has cratered in the U.S., especially among boys and men—and especially when we’re talking about fiction. This, I believe, has contributed to an overall decline in the quality of Americans’ personal and civic lives. My reasons for arriving at this conclusion are pretty straightforward.