What to Read Next: May 16, 2025

Issue #378, featuring a new book from a Pulitzer finalist

Happy Friday readers!

Here is what’s on tap this week:

• A review of Vauhini Vara’s new Searches

• A book rec to catch up on Pete Rose’s crazy life story

• 5 Things: Links and Opinions

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Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara

Books about AI are being published at a fast and furious clip. It’s understandable: everyone is trying to figure out how it got so big so fast, how to use it get more productive, the technology behind it all, and, most importantly, what is AI doing to our humanity?

It’s that last question that I’m most interested in, and Vauhini Vara’s new Searches helps answer it as well as anything I’ve come across.

Formatted as a series of experimental essays, Vara spends most of the book playing with AI and with various writing forms — all while dissecting her use of it and exploring what it’s doing to our souls. Throughout the essays, she inserts bits of her “conversations” with ChatGPT — the AI responses are interesting at first but become increasingly dull and repetitive the more you read on, which I found to be a brilliant way of showing just how vapid ChatGPT’s output really is.

Vara includes Amazon reviews, Google searches, self-therapy, and more, making for a probing and creative set of writings that ChatGPT could never come up with. It’s almost epistolary in its form (which I can’t resist), but with a 2025 twist.

A couple of years ago and I read and rather disliked Vara’s novel The Immortal King Rao. It had the makings of a great story but I didn’t feel any emotional connection with it. I’m glad I gave her non-fiction a try; overall I found Searches to be a beautiful and complex portrait of someone fascinated by AI but increasingly wary of its promises and effects. I highly recommend it if you’re interested in AI, technology, and our digital age.

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In the News: Pete Rose

This section offers a book recommendation based on recent headlines, to help you make sense of the world with a bit more depth and context rather than just clickbait.

Charlie Hustle by Keith O’Brien

Pete Rose was recently reinstated by Major League Baseball, wiping away his decades-long ban from the Hall of Fame. Unfortunately, it came less than a year after Rose died, meaning he never got the chance to redeem himself while he was alive. One of the best sports biographies I’ve ever read is Keith O’Brien’s Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose. It’s just a fantastic human story that displays the full realm of complexities that come with being a wildly talented but emotionally and mentally immature professional athlete.

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5 Things: Links and Opinions

1. “Lose Yourself (Sung by 331 Movies)” — watch it above — is the epitome of what makes the internet great. This is the kind of stuff that people were doing in spades a decade or two ago and now simply aren’t (unless it’s sponsored or behind a paywall).

2. “Friendship in the Age of Digital Stimulation,” a new essay by techno-skeptic Nicholas Carr, dissects why social media never will be (and never has been) a replacement for real-life relationships. He argues that by erasing friction, social media has actually turned sharing into mere transmission. To make it even worse, Zuckerberg’s new vision is that all of friends will just be AI chatbots. Gross. Anyways, I always enjoy Carr’s thoughts on technology.

3. A new somewhat tongue-in-cheek Atlantic article talks about “the tyranny of school spirit days.” With three school-aged kids, I couldn’t agree more with this piece. The increasing number of dress up days is just absurd.

4. I thoroughly enjoyed this long Q&A with Peter and Rosemary Grant about their decades-long studies of finches on a remarkably bleak little island in the Galapagos. (This is another plug for The Beak of the Finch, about the Grant’s and their studies, which is fantastic.)

5. There are all kinds of summer reading lists and “Best of 2025 So Far” lists coming out. Ignore them all and read what you want. The book marketing/publicity machine will do everything it can to get you to read the same handful of books everyone else is going to read this summer. Instead, cultivate your own reading taste by going to a bookstore, reading a few back covers, and picking something that interests you.

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Thanks so much for reading. Be good to each other.

-Jeremy