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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Here are the biggest headlines from last week.
Authors Can See If They Can Get a Piece of that $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement
There is $1.5 billion (less lawyer fees and administrative costs) up for authors to grab if their work was among the training data subject to the massive (but maybe even somehow still too small) lawsuit against Anthropic, and authors can now officially see what works are in there and how to get in on the settlement. The FAQ is your best place to start. You do have to file a claim through the website to be eligible for a payout and taking that payout also means you are giving up your right to sue Anthropic individually. All claims will be paid out equally, so if you are Stephen King or….not Stephen King, you will be paid the same for each valid claim. Weirdly, the fewer claims made, the more per claim the payout will be. I tried to do some math based on the number of works in the dataset, but there are too many confounding factors. I will wait to see some screenshots of happy/sad/resigned awardees.
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A Lot of People Are Buying 107 Days
Simon & Schuster announced today that Kamala Harris’ 107 Days has sold 350,000 copies across all formats in the seven days since it was published. This puts it on track to be the best-selling memoir of 2025 (though it is a relatively low bar. I cannot summon what the second best-selling memoir of the year is). I wondered what the appetite for this book would be, but clearly there were a bunch of people ready to hear from Harris on her unprecedented presidential run. If I might double down on my curiosity: might sales be front-loaded to very enthusiastic Harris supporters? How many that wouldn’t fit that definition will be picking this up over the course of the fall?
Opening Track on Taylor Swift’s New Album is one for the Bard-heads
Look, I don’t know that Taylor Swift’s reference to Ophelia on “The Fate of Ophelia”is particular original or interesting. The song is about being in love with somebody, so avoids Ophelia’s fate, here figured as dying out of scorned affection. Is this what actually happens to Ophelia? Maybe (I am of the camp that her father’s sudden death is more responsible than Hamlet’s antic disposition). Am I just happy that Shakespeare references are coming out of the mouth of the biggest celebrity in the world? ““As merry as the day is long.”
What a profound pleasure it was to get into Toni Morrison’s stunning, revolutionary debut novel, The Bluest Eye, for Zero to Well-Read. I hope you will consider giving it a listen.