That’s the Spirit!

Canadian authors may soon join the fray of U.S. and U.K. writers seeking copyright damages from AI companies, with Vancouver-based journalist J.B. MacKinnon filing class action lawsuits against Anthropic, Databricks, Meta, and Nvidia. We rounded up the fall season’s religion and spirituality book offerings and highlighted new books that take on the rise of Christian nationalism. The new priorities at the National Endowment for the Humanities are on full display in the agency’s latest cycle of grants. On Substack, Erik Hoel critiques the “literacy lag” among American children, and Gary Marcus argues that despite Big Tech’s forecasts, AI agents have so far proved mostly burdensome and incompetent. Naomi Alderman, Curtis Sittenfeld, and other authors talked with the Financial Times about the threats AI poses to the future of fiction publishing. Writer Beware raises flags about a new book marketing email scam that uses AI-generated insights to con authors. Cosmo shouts out Hasbro’s new party game based on Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing series. File 770 offers a peek into a little-known part of Hugo Award history. And trailblazing editor Ann Harris has died at 99.