Graphing is the practice of visualizing the abstract—the use of the coordinate plane not to map a territory or to demarcate a two-dimensional surface but to track a measurable quantity across space and time, quantities such as position, velocity, temperature, and brightness. Its invention can be traced to Nicole Oresme, bishop of Lisieux, courtier to Charles V, and scholastic philosopher-­polymath who held forth at the College of Navarre of the newly founded University of Paris. His Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum (Treatise on the Configurations of Qualities and Motions) from 1353 lays out early versions of what we now call functions and the x and y axes, which he referred to as “longitude” (the axis of the independent variable) and “latitude” (the perpendicular axis for plotting the values of the dependent variable). What made these pictures not merely illustrational but statistical “graphs” was Oresme’s radical insistence on presenting the variables in accurate ratio, with some accord of scale between the unit of measurement and the object or subject or process being measured. His key principle, at least when it comes to the visual, is: “The measure of intensities can be fittingly imagined as the measure of lines.”

Not content to have merely created graphing, Oresme also speculated about creating graphs of graphs, so­-called complementary graphing that goes beyond the charting of an individual phenomenon into the charting of the relationships between sets or groups of multiple phenomena, an innovation that took the statistical combination of algebra and geometry just up to the border of what would become modern calculus.

It’s striking to note what phenomena—and what relationships—Oresme thought worthy of graphing. His examples include motion and heat and cold, but also varying definitions and degrees of the qualitative, including grief or sorrow, in effect prophesying the future of infographics, which don’t purport to measure just production, consumption, price fluctuations, or the orbits of stars, but also the ebb and flow of human opinion.

This is a profoundly contemporary desire, to metricize and parameterize our own thoughts and emotions, and to create dynamic models from those standards to show—to make seeable—our social and political life.

Congratulations! You made it to Friday. You deserve a bunch of bookish goodness as a treat.

🎧 Here are Libro.fm’s most pre-ordered audiobooks of summer.

🏆 Can you guess the most-read books on Goodreads this week?

🛀 These books will help you elevate your everyday routines into meaningful rituals.

🍿 60% of Netflix’s most popular shows are based on books and comics.

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

New AI App Turns Authors Into Virtual Lit Professors

Roxane Gay, Marlon James, Margaret Atwood, and John Banville are among the well-known authors who have lent their voices and expertise to Rebind, a new AI-powered app intended “to replicate the dialogue between a student and teacher.” Rebind is the brainchild of John Kaag and Clancy Martin, philosophy professors and friends who believe that studying the classics can improve people’s lives if only they’d actually read them.

Drawing on their own experiences in the classroom, Kaag and Martin theorized that more people would be more willing to engage with classic texts if they could do it with the help of a knowledgeable guide. The solution? The pair spent the last two years having lengthy conversations—sometimes up to 20 hours—with authors and experts who agreed (for pay) to let Rebind turn them into chatbots. When Rebind launches on June 17, you’ll be able to read The Age of Innocence with guidance from Roxane Gay, get Marlon James’s take on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and consult John Banville about James Joyce’s famously difficult Dubliners.

This is the most creative and interesting book-related AI tech I’ve seen so far, and I’m happy to see big-name authors leading by example with their openness to exploring generative uses of this technology. What a refreshing change of pace from the publishing industry’s experiments with consumer-facing AI, which have been almost exclusively limited to (pretty disappointing) book recommendation tools to date! Yesterday, I told one such tool that my favorite book is Beloved by Toni Morrison, that I read for education, exploration, and curiosity, and that I wanted my next book to make me feel informed. Its top suggestions were The Alchemist and The Night Circus. So. The bar is low. Whether Rebind will clear it remains to be seen, and I’ll be watching with great interest.

I’m curious, readers: what do you think about Rebind and other book-related AI experiments? Have you seen anything awesome? Are you ignoring them in hopes they’ll go away? Let’s talk.

Several states nationwide have floated legislation to curtail book bans this year. Some of those bills, like the one proposed in Utah, were not only voted down but were superseded with bills that actually further fuel book bans. Other anti-book ban bills, however, made their way successfully through to law.

Let’s take a look at the states that have addressed the right to read and access materials at the library by law. This is as comprehensive as possible, with the acknowledgment that other bills may be pending as of writing or maybe in the works for the next legislative session. It does not include bills that address other library-related issues.

Illinois

Passed in 2023, the first-in-the-nation anti-book ban bill in Illinois ties funding to intellectual freedom policies in public and public school libraries. Basically, if a library wants access to a pot of state money for their institution, they need to have in their collection policies the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights and/or a comparable statement upholding the rights of everyone to access materials in the collection. Books and other items in the library cannot be removed for partisan or discriminatory reasons.

This is a great first step, though certainly, it hasn’t ended book bans in Illinois over the course of its first year as a law because it is fairly limited in scope (it was easy for a school board to ban an entire book reading program, for example). It also does not apply to prison libraries. But the signal this bill sends to libraries that the state is paying attention cannot be downplayed.

California

Also passed in 2023, the California anti-book ban bill applies to school boards specifically. They are unable to censor or ban books, curricula, textbooks, or other learning materials from the districts they oversee. The bill does not apply to public libraries or prison libraries. It also has not stopped school boards from censorship since implementation (not to mention that it’s public libraries bearing the brunt of censorship right now), but, like the bill in Illinois, it is at least an acknowledgment of an ongoing reality, even in a “blue” state like California.

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes, these books are brand new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. This week, let’s talk about one of this year’s most anticipated reads for Pride Month!

Beloved by Gen Z and millennials, why the 'fusty' craft of needlepoint is back

The waiting is finally over everybody, the Euros are here!! Today, Marcus, Luke, Jim and Pete are here for a complete Euro 2024 preview.

Positive Peter gets behind Scotland and backs them to get something against Germany while Marcus is extremely worried for England after reading Portugal’s squad list. Plus, news reaches the Ramble that Phil Foden visited a psychic. Please say she predicted a France meltdown…

We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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June 1 – 29, 2024

May 24 – July 18, 2024

I think most people like to walk away from a dinner party saying, “What a lovely evening.” I do. But I don’t feel compelled to do that. I know it’s not always possible. Also, I prefer people who don’t necessarily regard the warm glow of candlelight or the sound of a thirty-seven-dollar bottle of listán negro being poured into a glass as an automatic call for politeness, regardless of what is being said, or happening in the world. It’s commendable to walk into a dinner party assuming you’ll have a nice time but wise to prepare yourself for the wrong-thinking of your fellow guests.

There are people who never become openly enraged at dinner parties but I am probably not interested in knowing them. I love telling people stories about me getting upset at dinner parties. Here is one: I was at a small dinner party recently where my companions started talking about what they perceived as the huge problem of anti-Semitism on college campuses. While I do not doubt anti-Semitism exists on college campuses, I would not classify resisting and protesting Israel’s seventy-five-year occupation of Palestine, near twenty-year blockade of Gaza, and killing of tens of thousands of people as anti-Semitism. 

All I could manage in this situation was a dismissive snort. I was asked to explain my snort, but I knew that if I did I would be beaten to death with facts from one newspaper, which I also read and with whose arguments I have become numbly familiar, so I just snorted again, left the table, and went to bed. Now, the hosts of this dinner party were my own parents. I got lucky in this instance. Most dinner-party invitations do not include a bed and an en suite bathroom. Whatever you are willing to say you must also be willing to stew in.

I have a friend who is a film critic who was at a dinner party several years ago when another guest proclaimed, “If Walt Whitman were alive today, he would definitely be writing for television.” No one has ever said to me that if so-and-so dead writer were alive today they would definitely be writing for television. But my friend, because of his job, has similar observations made to him “about every eighteen months.” So he was prepared with a response: “That’s a ridiculous thing to say. You don’t know what you’re talking about. What makes you think that Walt Whitman would ever write for television?”