A great Swedish-Egyptian noir movie, rich-kid art, and more underrated trip-hop

Roundup 6/26/2022

“Tudor painting of monarchs playing RTS game on computers” generated by Dall-e 2 from a prompt by Shashank Joshi

Greetings from Read Max mobile HQ! This week’s column, available for free to all, was about the question of who should feel most threatened by GPT-3 (the answer: posters). This email features GPT-3-generated texts, including “Transcript of Donald Trump rally in which Trump goes on a rant about Tony Soprano joining Hezbollah” and “Story about Tony Soprano joining Hezbollah in the style of Jane Austen.” Check it out if you want to read something that isn’t about contemporary American politics:

AI Is Going to Put Posters Out of Business

A quick request of readers:

Have you been on the receiving end of text-scams that open with innocuous (but often strange) sounding messages from seemingly wrong numbers? I want to write something about this wave of spam and am looking for more examples. If you have screenshots of particularly good (funny, weird, interesting) examples, please send them my way at maxread@gmail.com.

On to this week’s recommendations, which include a great mystery, two great “lost” trip-hop albums, and a clutch of smart essays and columns. As always, the recommendations are for paying subscribers only, so please consider throwing a few bucks to Read Max to subscribe:

And if you’re in a money-spending mood, consider donating to abortion funds around the country at this link.

What I’m reading