Read the Room, Reese

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Reese Witherspoon to Exhort Adults to Read to Kids, Jumps on AI Bandwagon

Bit of a mixed bag for Reese Witherspoon’s on-going rise at Literary Celebrity #1 yesterday. In a big announcement from Hachette, Witherspoon will be voicing a call for adults to read to kids at the end of Hachette audiobooks, with a similar "call to action" appearing at the end of the Hachette print and digital books. (Witherspoon is publishing her first book, co-written with Harlan Coben, with Hachette’s Grand Central Publishing imprint next month).

On the same day while promoting the latest season of The Morning Show, Witherspoon called for women to get onboard with AI in film: “it’s so, so important that women are involved in AI because it will be the future of filmmaking,” Witherspoon said. “And you can be sad and lament it all you want, but the change is here. It will never be a lack of creativity and ingenuity and actual physical manual building of things. It might diminish, but it’s always going to be the highest importance in art and in expression of self.”

I am less anti-AI than some who make their living in the world of books and reading, but I doubt I am the only once wincing that the newly appointed Voice of Reading is Important is such an uncritical champion of AI technologies, which undeniably use, without compensation, the work of others in their models.

AI Writing and Automated Detection

Speaking of AI messes, one of the great challenges is parsing what is written with/by AI and what isn’t. Given the choice, I certainly would at least like to know if what I am reading/watching/listening to is the product of AI. And there seems to be some evidence that detecting AI writing might be quite possible . One of the detecting tools tested, Pangram, "maintains near-perfect accuracy across long and medium length texts." My suspicion is that this will be a never-ending arms race in the vein of performance-enchancing drugs or SEO optimization. But I will take a never-ending struggle to full capitulation any day.

The Shortlist for the Most Lucrative Prize for Non-Fiction is Out

There is a good chance that even you, someone reading a newsletter about book news, does not know what the Cundill Prize is. That’s ok, because folks who write non-fiction surely do, as it has the largest cash prize for non-fiction out there, with $75,000 going to the winner (even two runners up grab 10k each, nice). I cannot say that I have read any of the finalists , but am glad to know about them (shouts to Princeton University Press with three titles on the list).

The It Books of September 2025

Rebecca and I are back to crown the It Book of September.