Marmalade bagels at the ready: London’s Paddington Bear musical is to open on Broadway next spring. The phenomenally successful show, which won seven prizes at the Olivier awards, will begin performances on 30 March at the Al Hirschfeld theatre in New York, currently home to Moulin Rouge! The Musical.

Luke Sheppard, the director of Paddington: The Musical, said that the well-mannered ursine hero “approaches life with curiosity, kindness and an unwavering sense of adventure – and what an adventure Broadway will be”.

It’s a long way from 32 Windsor Gardens, where the clumsy but lovable bear from Peru is taken in by the Brown family and (eventually) wins over the whole neighbourhood. The show, based on Michael Bond’s 1958 book A Bear Called Paddington and the 2014 film adaptation, opened in London at the end of last year to many five-star reviews, including in the Guardian. The production received nine WhatsOnStage awards and won the Critics’ Circle award for best new musical.

Paddington: The Musical has a book by Jessica Swale and music and lyrics by McFly’s Tom Fletcher. “The response from West End audiences of all ages has been unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” said Fletcher. “It’s a great privilege to welcome New York audiences into Paddington’s world of curiosity.” Producers Sonia Friedman and Eliza Lumley said: “As the home of so many of the world’s great musicals, there is no more exciting place to produce new work than New York, and we cannot wait to share Paddington’s world with Broadway audiences.”

Casting for the Broadway run has not yet been announced. In London, the bear is played by a duo: James Hameed provides the voice and is the remote puppeteer, while Arti Shah performs wearing the furry costume. Together they won the Olivier award for best actor in a musical, while Tom Edden (as the local busybody Mr Curry) and Victoria Hamilton-Barritt (as the dastardly Millicent Clyde) also won Oliviers for their performances.

Tickets for the New York run will start at $69 and are now on sale. The majority of London performances for the musical in June and July are sold out on the official website. It is booking at the Savoy theatre until February 2028.

Andy Warhol sent Paul a Brillo box. Fran Lebowitz called Peter “a genius about sex”. The ending of Susan Sontag’s second novel was inspired by a bunch of Peter’s photographs. Sontag dedicated two books to Paul, and went to bed with him. The two men’s long list of admirers in the second half of the 20th century included Cy Twombly, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and Alex Katz. The question, then, as with any once celebrated artist largely ignored by the history books – who were they, and what happened?

In this intimate and vibrant double biography, the author and critic Andrew Durbin reveals how the painter and sculptor Paul Thek and the photographer Peter Hujar slipped from the centre of the New York creative scene to obscurity. It begins in 1954 (a few years before they met as soul-searching twentysomethings) and ends in 1975 (a decade before they died of Aids). It tells the story of friends and lovers who, together, matured as artists and men; exceptionally talented, charming, sometimes cruel. They pushed the possibilities of what a gay relationship looked like – “open, and unapologetic” – and helped to define the New York art scene’s “cool”.

When we meet them, they’re seeing other people; only a quarter of the way through the book do they get together. No letters tell of how it happened, but Durbin, who’s also a novelist, niftily plugs the gaps of that fateful night in 1960: “the look in Peter’s eyes when he saw Paul at a bar on Washington Square, the way Thek minded whether Hujar laughed at his jokes, how Peter squeezed close when there was plenty of room on the couch”.

Durbin writes of bodies tilting towards each other and love making a person feel light. At times, it’s corny – boys kiss under “lavender skies” and dance until dawn. He’s at his best when describing the inner lives of his subjects, who were, in many ways, opposites: Hujar “dignified and remote”, Thek “cuddly and sensual”. While Hujar immersed himself in the gay scene, Thek occasionally fooled himself into thinking he should find a wife (in his notebooks he remarked that bisexuality was “BLAND”). Neither was interested in the cocktail circuit. “They cared more for integrity – for authenticity of vision – than to be wooed and feted,” writes Durbin. “They would sooner go hungry than compromise, and often did.”

Thek shot to stardom in the mid-1960s with his meat pieces, beeswax replicas of hunks of flesh housed in sculptural vitrines that appalled and amazed. That Brillo box Warhol sent him? He used it as packaging. If you only know one photograph by Hujar, it’s probably Orgasmic Man (1969), a closeup of a young man’s face as he climaxes, eyes squeezed shut, hand pressed to cheek, used as the cover art for Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life. At first, Hujar, who’d been drawn to photographing the people surrounding him since he was a boy, resisted homosexuality as a subject. By the 1960s he was regularly photographing his flings and friends naked. He photographed Thek masturbating on a mattress. He also turned the lens on himself, capturing his nude body mid-dance. In 1967, Thek made a replica of his own body, eyes closed, tongue poking out. Hujar photographed that too.

Early on, Durbin informs us that, unlike many stories of artists who died of Aids – which are often “read backward, through the lens of the disease” – this is the tale of Thek and Hujar’s lives before their deaths. Instead of presenting them as “tragic, twilight figures”, he offers a tender yet unflinching view of their choices, thoughts, feelings, what made them lovable, and what made them difficult to be with.

He isn’t the only one telling their story: a new book of photographs and letters was published last year; a biopic starring Ben Whishaw came out in January. History may have forgotten them, but there is always the possibility of revival. As Thek wrote in his notebook, “The tremendous event is still on the way!”

More than 40 years ago, Jay McInerney’s debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, captured the glamour and desperation of 1980s New York. The book’s spectacular success launched its author’s career, earning him comparisons to F Scott Fitzgerald, another midwesterner with a complicated relationship with the US’s fantasies of wealth and social mobility. In 1992, Brightness Falls introduced readers to a fresh cast of young New Yorkers, but was primarily focused on a central couple, Corrine and Russell. McInerney returned to these characters in two subsequent novels; See You on the Other Side completes the tetralogy.

The book opens at the start of 2020 with the bright young things now in their 60s, coping with erectile dysfunction and marital woes, and fretting about the job prospects of their twentysomething children. In addition to the eternal problem of ageing, Corrine and Russell are about to confront the events of that tumultuous year: the pandemic, protests for racial justice and a bitterly fought presidential election campaign. Russell is the book’s main character, although we spend time with Corrine and make excursions into the points of view of their daughter, Storey, an aspiring chef, and her biracial boyfriend, Mingus.

At its best, See You on the Other Side offers the reader the chatty, undemanding companionship of commercial fiction. Will Russell be able to resist the extramarital attractions of hot young literary talent Astrid? Will Storey’s new restaurant thrive in spite of the regulations imposed during the pandemic? Will the ageing couple’s immune systems manage to fend off the virus?

One early challenge is that any reader will know of many people who suffered through much more during that terrible time. Still, it’s sort of fun being reminded about the inconveniences of lockdown, and I had forgotten about watching My Octopus Teacher.

A different issue is this. McInerney doesn’t seem to have made peace with the fact that he’s turning out a potboiler and keeps offering us glimpses of more tormented and ambitious writers. Alongside its title – a quote from a poem by the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe – the most memorable thing about Brightness Falls was the character of the brilliant but doomed writer Jeff Pierce. In the present novel, his circle of ageing friends are still haunted by the idea of him and the thought that they have “in one way or another, compromised the high artistic ideals of their youth”.

Russell himself is a talented and successful fiction editor. “You have an amazing track record as a publisher,” Astrid tells him in a flirty encounter. “You’ve published some of my favourite contemporary novels.” There’s something so clunky and implausible about that second line of dialogue that it made me wonder what Russell would have made of the manuscript of See You on the Other Side, had it crossed his desk.

“Each marriage is a mystery,” McInerney tells us early on, “an iceberg of which only a fragment is visible from the outside, above the surface.” Russell would surely have excised this double cliche from the text. He would also notice a lot of relaxed-fit writing in the book. Things get repeated, often many times, as though the reader might not be paying attention. “He felt a stirring in his loins, an engorgement of his cock.” “Coke had once been a part of his life, the great social lubricant and love potion, the fuel of late nights on the town …” Wait! There’s more. “… the fairy dust of his youth.”

This verbosity makes a weird contrast with underwritten sections elsewhere. The tragedy of a disappointing fine wine merits many more words than the violent suicide of its owner a few paragraphs later. Half a dozen lines is all that’s needed to cover a man having a drug overdose at a Thanksgiving dinner. And when Russell encounters his son Jeremy in extraordinarily tense and unexpected circumstances, McInerney forgets to tell us if he’s surprised, or, in fact, if he feels anything at all.

The perfunctoriness of such moments gives rise to a feeling that the author isn’t really interested in them. What he wants to do – and does at great length – is write about wine, food, restaurants and real estate. Often these sections seem grouted in from magazine articles. Instead of describing a location, McInerney gives weird capsule reviews that read as if they’ve been lifted from Condé Nast Traveller. “They agreed to go to Marlow & Sons, the Williamsburg bodega-café-restaurant that was the mothership of the postmillennium Brooklyn dining boom.” Russell has no feelings when he is present at the overdose, but when he goes to an old-school Italian restaurant, he takes “a kind of ironic delight at its every kitschy detail”, and recalls that “a pair of younger New York chefs … polished and updated this formula and sold it back to the hipsters and finance bros who were desperate to pay fifty dollars for a bowl of penne alla vodka …” And so it goes on.

The bloviation seems mainly to reinforce the author’s claim to be a well-informed New York insider – a claim that was never in doubt. And yet, something interesting happens when Russell’s curmudgeonly brother Aidan shows up from Michigan, very late in the book. Aidan hates New York, and his reasons stir up something in Russell. “In times of crisis and self-doubt, Russell agreed with his brother, felt his midwestern soul quailing and recoiling [note those repetitions!] from the artifice and ego and excess [a hat trick!] of his adoptive home.”

But this intriguing version of Russell – depressed, suffering from impostor syndrome – is never on display in the novel. We are exposed to a character in lockstep with the values of his time and place, who never exhibits much curiosity about those beyond his social circle.

The early comparisons between Fitzgerald and McInerney now ring very hollow. Fitzgerald wrote with great precision and his vision of life was tragic, at odds with the dominant ethos of his time. McInerney’s prose is loose to the point of absurdity and he seems fully to embrace the materialism that surrounds him. It’s like seeing the world of Gatsby through the eyes of Tom Buchanan; a man clear-eyed about possessions and real estate, but not much interested in people’s internal lives, or given to wondering if the trappings of privilege are worth what their pursuit entails.

Robert F Kennedy Jr once cut the penis off a road-killed raccoon in an incident that is just one of several involving dead animals that the controversial US health secretary has been involved in.

A new book called RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise was published this week and reveals a diary entry for Kennedy that describes the prominent vaccine critic and leader of the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement stopping his car on a New York highway on 11 November 2001.

“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be,” Kennedy wrote in the journal.

He added: “My kids waited patiently in the car.”

Isabel Vincent, the author of the new book, told People that he took the raccoon’s genitals so he could “study them later”.

Kennedy has long had a fascination for animal bodies, especially those he finds dead which he sometimes collects and studies. Elsewhere in the book, the author notes that a journalist traveling with Kennedy in Long Island in 2001 reported that he was fascinated by dead seagull corpses.

“I’d like to pick up some of these dead seagulls for my skull collection,” the book quotes Kennedy as saying, though his schedule on the day did not allow him to pause his journey and harvest the bones.

There have been numerous stories involving Kennedy and his treatment of dead animals.

Environmental groups were outraged over a story which revealed the former presidential candidate once severed the head of a washed-up deceased whale with a chainsaw and strapped it to his car’s roof. He also once confessed to dumping a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park, attempting to make it look like the creature was killed by a bicyclist.

What would Marcus Aurelius have made of the Kardashians? Would Seneca have been amused by mindfulness apps? These were questions I had never consciously pondered before reading Maria Semple’s new novel. Neither, in my irrational and unvirtuous state, had I spent much time considering the application of Stoic philosophy to any other key aspects of modern life.

Semple, best known for her exuberant, ingenious bestseller Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, here presents us with Adora Hazzard, Stoic philosopher and divorcee. Adora lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side, spending her days tutoring the twin sons of an old-money family in philosophy and seeking to live according to Stoic virtues, without recourse to destabilising “externals”. But her settled life is soon disrupted by that most classic of externals, the handsome stranger. “Curse these alluring men who throw us off our game!” (Marcus Aurelius, paraphrased.)

What follows is tricky to categorise. Is it a knockabout comedy about the collective power of midlife women? (No, it isn’t, though it seems to gesture in that direction at the start.) An art heist caper? (Sort of.) A thriller? (A bit.) A romcom? (Sort of, I guess?) A cry of female rage? (Briefly.) A paean to the virtuous joys of Stoic philosophy? (100% yes!) Ultimately Semple seems to have resolved not to agonise over genre for too long. We could look at this as a gift: several books for the price of one.

Stoicism is not traditionally – I know this won’t hurt Marcus Aurelius’s feelings – very sexy, but Semple makes it feel fresh and exciting. Reflecting on a conversation with another character, Adora says, “I was all over the place. Which is what happens when I get started on Stoicism. Fuelled by enthusiasm, I talk faster and faster, bouncing between subjects, repeating myself. It’s like running downhill. … All I can do is keep going and pray I’ve got a shred of dignity left when I reach the bottom.” Adora’s enthusiasm is contagious. For some time after finishing the book, I found myself murmuring, when encountering a mishap, “The cucumber is bitter. Throw it away.” (Marcus Aurelius again.)

And Semple writes with immense charm. The book fizzes with funny lines, as when Adora remarks of one incidental character, with startling specificity, “His face looked weirdly polished, like a Polly Pocket doll that had been licked.” The madcap energy works well for long stretches of the book. Characters come and go. We get to know some of them. Plotlines come and go. We’re able to follow some of them. It’s buoyant and fun.

But at times this merry chaos tips over into a less satisfying disjointedness. There is a clunky section in which the deterioration of Adora’s marriage is charted through time-stamped nuggets, anchored to a whistlestop tour of the big hits from the recent political landscape: “Spring of 2016: I got swept up in Bernie mania”; “September of 2018: #MeToo erupts”, and so on through Brett Kavanaugh, Trump, George Floyd, the riots, some of these elements thematically pertinent but none given enough space in the narrative to feel properly relevant. Meanwhile, Adora’s ex-husband Hal is not fleshed out enough for us to care much about either the beginning or end of the marriage.

Elsewhere, Semple’s energy and economy with backstory are brilliantly deployed, as in the fast and harrowing account of Adora’s ill-fated career as a comedy writer. This compelling section is, in some ways, the centre of the novel (I’m hedging here because Adora’s embrace of Stoicism leads her to reframe how she views this episode), and its strongest element.

The book is a zany high-wire act and the main plot, which at times seemed like a shaggy dog story, is ingeniously wrapped up at the end. For me, the whole doesn’t really cohere, but as Marcus Aurelius said, everything is perspective, not truth. I felt both cleverer and sillier after finishing this book, which is a lovely way to be left.

The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.

It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.

The New York Times launched an investigation, during which Preston admitted that he had used AI to assist writing the review and did not spot the sections that were pulled from the Guardian before submitting it. In a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Preston said that he was “hugely embarrassed” and had “made a serious mistake”.

The New York Times alerted the Guardian to the overlap in an email sent on Monday, and added an editor’s note to the review acknowledging the use of AI and linking to the Guardian piece. “A reader recently alerted the Times that this review included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in the Guardian,” reads the editor’s note. “We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an AI tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on AI and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of the Times’s standards.”

Language that appears to be lifted from the Guardian review includes descriptions of characters – “lazy Machiavellian Stefano” appears as “lazy, Machiavellian Stefano” in the New York Times version – and the concluding assessment of the novel: the Guardian review states that the book is “most significantly a song of love to a country of contradictions, battered, war-torn, divided, misguided and miraculous: an Italy where life is costume and the performance of art, and where circuses spring up on wasteland”; while the New York Times version says the characters “populate what is ultimately a love song to a country of contradictions: battered, divided, misguided and miraculous. This is an Italy where life is performance, where circuses rise on wasteland.”

A spokesperson for the New York Times told the Guardian that Preston would no longer write for the paper. Preston wrote six reviews for the paper between 2021 and 2026, but told the New York Times he had not used AI to aid any of his other articles.

“I made a serious mistake in using an AI tool on a draft review I had written, and I failed to identify and remove overlapping language from another review that the AI dropped in,” Preston said in his statement to the Guardian. “I am hugely embarrassed by what happened and truly sorry. I took responsibility immediately and apologised to the New York Times, and I also want to apologise to Christobel Kent and to the Guardian.”

Preston has written extensively for the Observer and the FT, as well as contributing to the Guardian and the Economist. He is a six-time author whose most recent book, A Stranger in Corfu, was published in February, and is also the head of advisory at investment management firm Man Group. Earlier this year, he wrote a piece for the Man Group site titled The AI Bubble: Hidden Risks and Opportunities.

Brandon Taylor’s third novel, following the Booker-shortlisted Real Life and 2023’s The Late Americans, is full of hands. It’s set in the years after a pandemic that made many people desperate “to touch and be touched”. Long before then, no one had ever held the hand of its chief character, a young painter called Wyeth – not even his mother. In the doldrums, he recalls a conversation with a printmaker who extolled lithography because the images it produces reveal the strength and dexterity of an artist’s fingers: human marks. Poring through a company’s digital files, he has a near-seizure when he comes across a handwritten ledger: “There was something almost romantic about the curves of the numbers, elegant and swooping.”

Wyeth was born in Virginia, a state where, within living memory, Black farmhands developed cancer because they weren’t given gloves to pick the tobacco that would later poison their blood. He grew up in a trailer park with his white mother, a nursing assistant. To be working class, fatherless and from the south: this was, for him, a kind of isolation chamber. It led him to imagine that “the future and history belonged to another species of human that did not include him and his family and their distant relations”.

Now he’s in New York. It’s summertime, meltdown time. Wyeth worries he ought to be out on the streets photographing righteous protesters, but neither his heart nor art is in it. He has gigs at a Chelsea gallery and as an art-restorer, but his own work seems to be going nowhere. His small-scale canvases feature scenes from European auteur cinema – Rohmer, Bergman – with the white characters replaced by Black figures. One friend tells him they’re “thought experiments, not paintings”. Another criticism he hears is that they’re “bourgeois, betraying a desire for black ease and affluence”.

Minor Black Figures is stacked with Wyeth’s thoughts about the state of Black art and aesthetics in the modern USA. Some are catty takedowns of what he calls “diasporic grifters”, opportunists who turn their “identity into a political glaze to be slathered all over their brand”. Some are specific: of Kehinde Wiley, whose portrait of Barack Obama hangs in the Smithsonian, he complains, “Yes, he painted beautiful people, but the nakedly commercial enterprise of it, the representational politics of ‘Black is beautiful’, was as arid and tedious as secular liberalism.”

Taylor is echoing Rachel Hunter Himes who, in a recent issue of Triple Canopy, argued that too many critics applaud the work of Black artists for being “urgent, relevant, and timely”, and that “understood as a shorthand for artistic meaning, blackness can short-circuit other potential or latent meanings”. Wyeth asks: “Could there ever be a painting of a black figure that was not reenacting some gross historical harm?” He believes, “Even the phrase negro figuration presupposed a constructed social identity that had to be wrenched open and climbed out of in order to get to a place of actual subjective experience.” The issues at play here are important, but the language in which they’re couched is often crabbed and inert, redolent of academic conferences and earnest art journals.

Just as enervating is Wyeth himself. “I’m exhausting and cynical,” is his belated self-diagnosis. He’s not wrong. When his observations about New York – it’s noisy! – aren’t hackneyed, they’re fastidious and finicky. He sees a girl holding a balloon and wonders, “What did it mean to her, this shape, this object? What was the source of her delight in it? The texture? The tension of the rubber?” It’s unclear whether Taylor is making fun of him or trying to reveal how artists look at the world. His use of free indirect speech adds to the uncertainty – lights are “uncannily egg-like”; a boy’s face has “a curious luminance”; in a park a character feels “a certain upward titration of his risk”: is such clumsy language meant to index Wyatt’s gaucheness, or does it reveal that of the author?

There are people in Wyeth’s orbit – waspish painters and video-makers with whom he shares a studio – who might have offset his stilted sententiousness. Too often they’re portrayed in slapdash fashion: one of them, we’re told, “like many gay men in their early thirties, always looked severe and angry, like he was contemplating voting against the end of slavery out of sheer spite”. Late evening, at a bar, Wyeth meets a former priest called Keating who is described as beautiful – “Not in some cheesy way, not in the Raphaelite sense that made a great beauty out of every twink and skinny white man”. Given his tendency toward ornery pomposity, I can’t imagine Wyeth saying or thinking this.

Wyeth and Keating’s relationship grows, falters, drifts. It’s tentative, almost as lethargic as summer. They talk – sometimes seriously, sometimes boringly. They have a bit of a hiatus after Wyeth asks Keating why, after he’s been hanging about with a group of homeless men and women, he washes his hands. Hot priests may be all the rage these days, but it’s hard for us to get worked up about their affair. Early on, in one of the many chunks of authorial didacticism that bung up Minor Black Figures, Wyeth wonders if it’s possible to “preserve the insignificance of the ordinary. Render it in its natural mode.” Perhaps it is. Not here, though.

There is a long tradition of stories about artists that are also about the question of how to represent life in art; novels about artists with toxic female friendships are more unusual.

Enter Anika Jade Levy’s slim and sharp debut Flat Earth, which shares its title with a film made by a woman whom Avery, the narrator, identifies as her best friend. Frances is a rich and beautiful twentysomething who becomes a “reluctant celebrity in certain circles” after her film, “an experimental documentary about rural isolation and rightwing conspiracy theories” in the modern-day United States, premieres to critical acclaim at a gallery in New York. Avery, meanwhile, is struggling to write what she describes as “a book of cultural reports”.

Frances’s success isn’t easy for Avery. The two women met as undergraduates, but Avery hasn’t got family money. She maxes out her credit card and does occasional escort work to meet tuition payments. What makes her most resentful, though, is that Frances has dropped out of grad school to get married. Back in New York, panicked about her prospects, Avery goes out with a string of men – none significant enough to be referred to by their actual names – and ends up taking a job at a rightwing dating app called Patriarchy.

While this is Levy’s first book, she has made a name for herself – in certain circles – as a founding editor of Forever Magazine, a trendy publication for alternative literature and arts. “A big thing,” Levy has said when describing its editorial preferences, “is style over plot. We really care about language.” This approach is reflected in Flat Earth – and some passages from the book are edited versions of stories that Levy wrote for the magazine. The prose is, for the most part, simple and precise, punctuated with bursts of imagery (“I fluttered around the windowless room like a pigeon in an airport”) as well as short extracts from what appear to be Avery’s cultural reports, which read almost like poems – strange visions of an apocalyptic present or near future.

It’s true, too, that there is not much in the way of narrative here. Levy sneaks in a joke about this, with Avery admitting that “when I did manage to write there was no plot, just prose. I told myself this was because I was a socialist or something, uninterested in the commercial potential of books.” There’s a wedding, a funeral, gallery openings and other events – but really these are occasions for Levy to describe the world that her characters move in.

The book is itself, in a sense, a cultural report. Sometimes it gets a little too hyperspecific, as in the satirical depictions of New York’s downtown arts scene. But the bigger picture – late-stage capitalism segueing into techno-feudalism, eco-pessimism, a moral arc of the universe that seems to bend not towards justice but away from it – is bleakly relevant to all of us.

Perhaps the most vivid aspect is how thoroughly Avery has absorbed the worst values of the contemporary moment, especially in the way she sees herself and Frances as competing objects of sexual commerce. She has no time for feminism, which she notes is no longer fashionable. “It comes as a relief when our romantic relationships reconfigure around regressive ideas about gender,” she writes in one of her reports. She takes tips from an online life coach on how to behave as femininely as possible so that men will want to look after her. She is terrified of ageing. At one stage, she wears a cow-print outfit to a party “to signal fertility”.

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Avery is, of course, miserable – cynical participation in a rigged system can only get you so far. Flat Earth is not, unsurprisingly, a joyful book. But somewhere in all the irony we might find a glimmer of hope: the hint from Levy that there might be other ways to see the world, which our narrator has not discovered. A therapist, for instance, suggests that she work to “cultivate an inner life”. Avery may feel as though her youth is already dwindling, but she’s only in her 20s. There’s still time for her to grow up.

Trump sues Penguin Random House, ‘New York Times’ for $15 billion

Sep 16 2025

President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit in Florida accusing the New York Times and its reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker, and Michael S. Schmidt, of disparagement. Penguin Random House, which published Buettner and Craig’s book based on their reporting, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success (Penguin Press), is also named as a defendant. Trump had previously threatened to sue PRH last year over the book.

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Twelve US copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft have been consolidated in New York, despite most of the authors and news outlets suing the companies being opposed to centralisation.

A transfer order made by the US judicial panel on multidistrict litigation on Thursday said that centralisation will “allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings”.

Cases brought in California by prominent authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and the comedian Sarah Silverman will be transferred to New York and joined with cases brought by news outlets, including the New York Times, and other authors including John Grisham, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult.

Most of the plaintiffs opposed consolidation, arguing that their cases were too different to be combined. However, the transfer order states that the cases “share factual questions arising from allegations that OpenAI and Microsoft used copyrighted works, without consent or compensation, to train their large language models (LLMs) … which underlie defendants’ generative artificial intelligence products” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.

OpenAI had proposed consolidating the cases in northern California. The judicial panel ultimately transferred the cases to the southern district of New York, stating that centralisation would “serve the convenience of the parties and witnesses” and “promote the just and efficient conduct of this litigation”.

“Given the novel and complicated nature of the technology, there likely will be overlapping experts” across the cases, read the order. Consolidation will “conserve the resources of the parties, their counsel and the judiciary”.

Tech companies have argued that their use of copyrighted works to train AI is permitted under the doctrine of “fair use”, allowing the unauthorised use of copyrighted works under certain circumstances.

An OpenAI spokesperson said: “We welcome this development and look forward to making it clear in court that our models are trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation,” reported Reuters.

Steven Lieberman, the attorney representing Daily News, said that the company looks forward to “continuing to prove in New York that Microsoft and OpenAI committed widespread theft of millions of Times and Daily News works”.

Many of the prominent authors suing OpenAI have also sued Meta for copyright infringement in its training of AI models. A January court filing by Coates, Silverman and Díaz among others alleged that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the company’s use of a notorious “shadow library”, LibGen, which contains more than 7.5m books.

On Thursday, authors gathered outside the Meta offices in London to protest the company’s use of copyrighted books. Placards at the demonstration included “Get the Zuck off our books” and “I’d write a better sign but you’d just steal it”, according to trade magazine the Bookseller.

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Thursday also saw Amazon confirm that a new Kindle feature, “Recaps”, offering users refreshers on storylines and character arcs of a book series to review before they pick up the next book, will be AI-generated. “We use technology, including GenAI and Amazon moderators, to create short recaps of books that accurately reflect book content,” Amazon spokesperson Ale Iraheta told TechCrunch.

“By adding a new level of convenience to series reading, the Recaps feature enables readers to dive deeper into complex worlds and characters without losing the joy of discovery, all while ensuring an uninterrupted reading experience across every genre,” wrote the company in a blogpost. However, Reddit users raised concerns about the accuracy of AI-generated summaries.

Earlier this week, it emerged that the UK government is trying to placate peer and Labour backbencher concerns about its copyright proposals – which involve allowing AI companies to train models on copyrighted materials unless rights holders opt out – by pledging to assess the economic impact of the plans.