🎩 Rick Perlstein for this image. It’s a pity that we’re at a point, historically speaking, when — justified or not — we view everything through the lens of tragedy rather than comedy. (It seems to me that the idea of “queering” points us toward the exit from that, but I digress.) AI’s tendency to exaggerate, to get things right-sounding but wrong in fact, to generate statistical grotesques on every level — these are all the hallmarks not of tragedy but of comedy: parody, irony, and cartoonishness to the point of slapststickery. It’s basically a stochastic comedy of manners. And in that view, the idea of a book review inventing books to review is brilliant and damning to a degree that would give Swift a run for his money.