This week we catch up on two pieces that caught our eye: one on the modernization of older children’s literature to match contemporary culture, and another on how every LLM chatbot keeps telling stories featuring the same vaguely aggrieved fictional guy. It’s weird! The goblins are closing in!

Episode 188—The Red-flagisode

Print Run is a podcast created and hosted by Laura Zats and Erik Hane. Its aim is simple: to have the conversations surrounding the book and writing industries that too often are glossed over by conventional wisdom, institutional optimism, and false seriousness.
 
We’re book people, and we want to examine the questions that lie at the heart of that life: why do books, specifically, matter? In a digital world, what cultural ground does book publishing still occupy?
 
Whether it’s trends in the queries from writers that hit our inboxes or the social ramifications of an industry that pays so little being based in Manhattan, we’re here for it. Probably to laugh at it and call it names, but here for it nonetheless.
 
Print Run is the happy-hour conversation after a long day at a catalog launch; it’s the bottle of wine you drink most of on a Tuesday when the manuscripts are no good. We’re for writers, for publishers, for anyone who’s opened a book and wanted to know—really know—what goes into getting the damn thing made.
 
Join us. We’ll talk about the worst sex scene we’ve ever read and wonder aloud about how millennials will affect the books of the future. We’ll figure out why Jonathan Franzen wants to replace your child with a penguin and whether or not that penguin will be buying hardcovers when he grows up.