Welcome @tamarawinter! Tamara is the Commissioning Editor for Stripe Press. I like to think of Stripe Press as a distribution channel for the most interesting ideas in the world. She has kindly agreed to do an AMA. Reply with your questions :)

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Finished Odyssey reread. Haven’t seen movie yet but those imax 70 mm tix are starting to become available… Biggest hot takeaway: wow for much of human history until end of bronze age the entrepreneurs were literally warriors, professional killers. Go out, get land and treasure, then have slaves raise cattle and crops. Let’s not go back there. Beyond that I’m reminded of the theory of Julian Jaynes on the bicameral mind where the voices of gods were just the “inside voice” of thoughts and consciousness back then. So much of Odyssey can be read as a metaphor for consciousness. I’ll explore this in longer form in a bit… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind

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★★★★½ to “The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence” (480pp) by Sebastian Mallaby, book #8 of 2026 Cemented my admiration for Demis/DeepMind while also serving as a great primer on early-modern AI + LLM development https://bookshop.org/a/88484/9780593831847

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my personal reading log as a stack of books (WIP)

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Where no hope remains, we must invent it. The habit of despair is worse than despair itself. — Albert Camus

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Theory upon rereading The Odyssey, it’s a bit of an allegory of the psyche. Very Joseph Campbell, Jungian. Dopamine is the siren’s song. It feeds the ego and inspires short-term thinking and action that is often self-destructive. Half way through, trying to finish this weekend.

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@athreya

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https://www.apocalypse-confidential.com/defenders-of-the-text/

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who read East of Eden?

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Performatively reading Journey to the West until Lattimore’s Odyssey becomes available. Gotta say it’s kind of badass that mythic action scenes are done as poetry breaks.

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Of course this hits an emotional nerve. Books being destructively scanned somehow is painful. Like you can hear them scream. On the other hand: have you recently tried to off-load your books to a second-hand book seller? Nobody wants them anymore, because nobody buys them anymore. Or at least very few people. Many, including myself, are reading ebooks, which is the least worrying reason for the lack of interest in second-hand books. What I do find problematic, though, is that buying up second-hand books to destructively scan for training AI seems to be a blunt evasion of paying due copyright fees. And that, I do find problematic. What do you think? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o arkeshare

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Some say Odyssey has always been woke, and may have been written by a woman. Joseph Campbell knew a thing or two about the Hero’s Journey. Campbell often cited Butler's 1900 prose translation and his literary commentary The Authoress of the Odyssey during his lectures on the return of the goddess. Campbell emphasized how the psychological shift in The Odyssey mirrors a transition away from male-dominated war psychology (The Iliad) toward an education in life provided by feminine and goddess archetypes.

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Finished reading The Physician by Noah Gordon this weekend. In the end, it was one of those books that I didn’t love while I read it, but I am left with a feeling of complete satisfaction and I think I will remember the characters and the story for a long time.

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Detail of the writing and printing workshop in the oldest book museum in the wotld.

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