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“AI is technology that lets computers do things that normally require human intelligence—like understanding language, recognizing pictures, solving problems, or making decisions. It’s like teaching a computer to ‘think’ in specific ways by giving it patterns to learn from.”

That’s one of the responses you get when you ask AI to describe AI.

The whole world is either talking about AI, using AI, worrying about AI, celebrating AI, or trying to ignore AI. It’s kind of a big deal, as they say. 

The concept of artificial intelligence has likely had its greatest impact so far in the field of education, where “eyes on your own paper” is a directive we recall from our days in the classroom.

So it’s no surprise that Mark Peres, a professor who’s taught ethics at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N.C. for 20 years, might write a book about dealing with this breakthrough technology. The Accord dramatizes the evolving relationship between a philosophy professor and Lyla, the AI named after the professor’s deceased child.

Peres recognizes that we’re only now beginning to understand the significance of a world where artificial intelligence moves from science fiction to science fact.

“This is not the first time we’ve stood at the edge of transformation,” writes Peres, citing the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, and the digital age as past change agents. “Synthetic intelligence asks whether we were ever truly the center of the story. We must reach back to the humanities to guide us forward,” stated Peres.

“Education must be reimagined as a co-creative process, with humans and machines learning alongside one another,” he said.

As founder and executive director of the Charlotte Center for Humanities and Civic Imagination (“we just call it the Charlotte Center”), Peres has a history of exploring the world at large. As publisher of the Charlotte Viewpoint, a digital magazine from 2003 to 2016 that featured essays, interviews, reviews, stories, poems, photographs, videos, and works of art, he's exchanged ideas inside and outside of the classroom. His podcast led to a book, On Life and Meaning, 100 essays delivered by 100 guests. His website is markperes.com.

In Accord, there’s a reference to HAL, the vengeful computer in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Lyla, would you kill to protect Helen (the professor with whom she has developed a relationship)?” The answer, as they say, is in the book.

Meanwhile, Peres offers two main themes via The Accord: we’re at the beginning of a new cultural epoch, and the wisdom of the ages offers our best compass forward now that we're in the Age of AI.  

You don’t have to worry that U.S. baseball fans could be overlooking Japanese baseball. Not after the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series for the second year in a row, led by Japanese stars Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki.

Rob Fitts offers a glimpse into the Japanese game that developed these stars in his 11th book on Japanese baseball, In the Japanese Ballpark. Fitts dissects the Japanese game from every angle, from the perspective of players, umpires, owners, fans, and media. He even includes the beer girls that patrol the stands, hefting 40-pound kegs of beer, and some of the strange mascots that represent each team (like the  Mysterious Fish of the Chiba Lotte Marines).

Fitts provides plenty of history in his present account, tracing the origin of baseball in Japan to Horace Wilson, the Maine professor who traveled to Japan on an educational mission, introducing the game to his students in 1872. By 1905, most Japanese high schools fielded baseball teams. Professional baseball took hold in Japan after a successful barnstorming tour of the country by U.S. major-leaguers led by Babe Ruth in 1934.

A previous Fitts book, Banzai Babe Ruth, details the 1934 tour, an attempt to use baseball diplomacy before the U.S. and Japan collided on the battlefield seven years later. That book chronicles the overseas adventures of some of baseball’s most colorful legends. Along with Ruth, who had just completed his last season with the New York Yankees, you had Connie Mack, the manager who always wore a suit in the dugout, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez, Earl Averill, Lefty O’Doul, described by Fitts as “the greatest player you never heard of,” and Moe Berg, the Detroit Tigers catcher who became a spy in World War II.

Admitting a love for the Hiroshima Carp, a team he says with the most amazing fans, Fitts feels Japanese baseball could win a place in the hearts of American fans with a little more exposure. In the meantime, he offers a guide on where to find Japanese baseball online and via cable in this country.

Fitts says four more Japanese players will probably join the U.S. big leagues in 2026, though they’re not likely to have the star power of an Ohtani or Yamamoto. The author has concerns that if the top stars exit Japan for bigger salaries in the U.S., Nipponese Professional Baseball could suffer the same fate as the Negro Leagues did in the States, when the best players went over to the major leagues.

Fitts expresses admiration and love for the Japanese game and the festive atmosphere at the Japanese ballpark, where fans sing chants, blow horns, and release balloons in their own 7th-inning ceremony. If you’re not planning a trip to the Orient, the book will explain what the fuss is all about.

Keith Roysdon is a media marvel. He spent 40 years as a newspaperman in Muncie, Ind., not just writing about what went on in Muncie but absorbing the movies, TV shows, and critical articles on the arts.

Now living in Tennessee, Roysdon had a big year in 2025, publishing That October, his first book, a high-school crime novel set in 1984. 

But Roysdon has done plenty of writing besides that--and not just for the Muncie press. He has more than 70 stories on the CrimeReads website covering a wild variety of topics sure to please anyone who enjoys media history.

Want a taste of the articles he's written? How about:

--70s disaster movies

--newspaper movies

--Nazi-hunting in movies and TV thrillers

--used bookstores

--The Edge of Night soap opera

--Quinn Martin crime shows of the 70s

--Norman Lloyd (the villain in Hitchcock's Saboteur)

--history of vintage newspaper crime comic strips (like Dick Tracy, Mike Nomad, and Steve Canyon)

--Mannix

--Rockford Files

Here's a brief interview with Keith where he talks about some of the CrimeReads pieces. Sorry for the abrupt ending--technical issues.

John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri, has a message regarding the present state of agriculture in this country: it's not sustainable.

Ikerd doesn't see a future for industrial agriculture with its emphasis on monocrops, fertilizer, and pesticides. It's a system that's expanded since the 1960s when a shift in national policy promoted increased productivity over all else.

Ikerd preaches sustainable agriculture, calling for policy changes to make farmland accessible and affordable for farmers.

This won't happen overnight, Ikerd notes. "It takes time to learn how to manage a farm sustainably because sustainable farming depends on intensive management and less on purchased inputs. It also takes time to heal and restore soils that have been depleted by industrial farming," he said.

Corn and soybeans now account for almost 60 percent of all harvested cropland in the United States, he said.

USDA statistics indicate that most of that corn goes into corn ethanol (45 percent) or fed to livestock and poultry (40 percent) while 50 percent of the soybean crop is typically exported. This year, amid tariff concerns, China, once America's biggest customer, isn't buying U.S. beans.

The bottom line is that 40 million acres--about 16 percent of the country's harvested cropland and only 4 percent of U.S. farmland--are devoted to the production of food for direct human consumption, points out Ikerd.

Fewer than 60,000 farms of 500 acres could supply the food currently produced in the U.S., he said.

The transition to a sustainable future would require a radical rethinking of U.S. land-use practices, said Ikerd, calling for government policies to ensure long-run domestic food security through sustainable farming.

The attack on Pearl Harbor did more than plunge the United States into a two-front war, it turned over 120,000 Japanese-Americans into prisoners of war--in their own country.

Almost as soon as the bombs had dropped in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans were being rounded up in California. 

“Swept up in the first wave of arrests were nearly all the Japanese fishermen on Terminal Island—an area just five miles long and largely manmade in Los Angeles harbor. These fishermen were part of a thriving, close-knit community of approximately 3,500 Japanese residents whose fathers and grandfathers had built a prosperous industry in canned tuna and sardines,” noted Susan Kamei, author of When Can We Go Back to America?: Voices of Japanese-American Incarceration During WWII.

“Unfortunately for the Japanese-Americans who had established their homes and livelihoods there, the small island was next to a naval shipyard where warships were under construction. Many fishermen were arrested as soon as they docked their vessels and were prevented from even saying goodbye to their families,” stated Kamei, who recalls her own family’s experience during the war.

“Growing up as a third-generation Japanese-American Sansei in Orange County, California, I had a vague notion that my Japanese immigrant Issei grandparents and my American-born parents had spent the three years of World War II in some kind of prison camp because they were presumed to be disloyal simply because of their race,” Kamei said.

“It’s taken me years of listening and researching to better understand why it was so difficult for incarcerees to tell their stories, to gain some appreciation of the hardships they endured, and to realize why their stories are so important today,” she said.

Why should we care about events that happened nearly 80 years ago? “Because there are those who cite the Japanese American incarceration as ‘precedent’ for ‘rounding up’ others on the basis of race, national origin, and religion, for no justifiable reason,” said Kamei.

Kamei’s book presents the voices of some of those who were incarcerated, many of them children at the time. While many wondered, “What have we done?” 127,000 Japanese-Americans were packed up to spend three years in makeshift camps in some of the most desolate parts of the country.

Kamei pointed out that not all U.S. officials were in favor of incarceration. Gen. Delos Emmons, the Army Commander in Hawaii, voiced strong opposition to the West Coast “evacuation” plan. “Emmons dismissed all calls to remove persons of Japanese ancestry from the islands of Hawaii,” she stated.

“In the president’s cabinet, both Attorney General (Francis) Biddle and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes opposed infringing on the rights of more than 80,000 Nisei American citizens. They considered any proposal to remove the Nisei against their will to be a violation of constitutional rights guaranteed to citizens,” said Kamei.

Despite receiving reports that insisted there was “no Japanese problem on the coast,” President Franklin Roosevelt left the decision on what to do with Japanese-Americans to the military, where wartime hysteria won out, she said.

As a result of the decision to incarcerate thousands of American citizens, Japanese-American families lost homes, businesses, and possessions when they were abruptly uprooted from their California homes. About a third of those who were “evacuated,” never returned to the West Coast, said Kamei.

Despite their treatment at home, many Japanese-Americans served honorably in the U.S. military, she said, citing a much-decorated Japanese-American battalion that fought in Italy and France.

Unfortunately, Japanese-Americans also faced problems after the war due to prejudice and persecution, said Kamei. “Somebody said that the more you know, the worse it gets, but you just keep on going because we have to,” she said. 

The debate lingers: why didn’t Hollywood’s studios produce anti-Nazi pictures before war was all but imminent in the 1930s?

Plenty has been written about the lack of films that might have alerted the American public to what was happening in Europe at the time.

But Laura Rosenzweig, the author of Hollywood’s Spies, says attention also needs to be focused on the political activity going on around Hollywood in Southern California in the 1930s, activity that was being orchestrated from Berlin. 

The author points out that, since most of the Hollywood studios were run by Jewish immigrants, there was concern that these men, the most visible Jews in America, might be targeted for using the movies to push their own agenda. There was even concern that denouncing Hitler could increase antisemitism at the time, she said. 

One has to consider the widespread impact of the Depression in the 30s, a time when America’s national policy was to stay out of European affairs. It was also a time when political ideologies were vying for acceptance. You didn't know if it was going to be communism or fascism or something else--people were searching for answers, said Rosenzweig.

Film historian Thomas Doherty noted it was MGM boss Sam Goldwyn who became famous for saying that if you want to send a message, use Western Union. The film industry’s own production code also restricted movies from reflecting unfairly on any foreign country, he said. 

The Third Reich also wasn’t above exerting pressure on Hollywood, itself, as German consul Georg Gyssling was known for lobbying hard to keep Nazi references off the big screen.

Germany was also organizing support for its policies in Los Angeles, said Rosenzweig, who explored records maintained at the California State University Northridge library that contain thousands of documents relating to those efforts. “The archives have files on more than 400 right-wing groups in the Southern California area,” she said.

Los Angeles became a hot spot for German propaganda, pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish materials that were written in English in Germany and then shipped into the West Coast for distribution throughout the L.A. area, said Rosenzweig.

One of the records from the Northridge collection recalls a meeting at the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles in 1934 where top executives from the major studios convened to hear what attorney Leon Lewis had uncovered in his surveillance of pro-German groups in the L.A. area, she said. Lewis, who had been the first executive secretary of the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago before moving to California in the 1930s, employed a “spy network” made up mostly of U.S. veterans who, after infiltrating these organizations like Friends of the New Germany and the Silver Shirts reported back on what was going on and the torrent of hate that was being parceled out to U.S. citizens.

Roesnzweig said that Lewis hasn’t received the credit he deserves for uncovering a vast, well-financed plot to foster insurrection in California, a campaign that was run out of Berlin. She hopes to produce a piece on his singular efforts in the future.

If you want to find a relaxed approach to planning your finances, Carl Richards has it for you, complete with 101 simple sketches: Your Money.

It's an approach Richards employed as a financial writer for the New York Times for 10 years: using boxes, circles, and squiggly lines to illustrate basic messages about money.

Two circles, one marked "things that matter," the other, "things I can control." The part where they intersect is darkened in with the message: "what I try to focus on."

Richards said this is the first book on financial planning he's written in 11 years, and he wanted to keep it simple. So there are lots of pithy commentaries and plenty of white space to go along with the sketches that Richards is known for.

Want a sample of chapter titles? There's "The Power of Pause," "Goals Are Guesses," and "Boring Pays Off."

Richards' basic advice is to stay calm when it comes to handling money, a subject that no two people think about the same way, he notes.

Don't worry about other people's fortunes, either, and understand that there's something he categorizes as financial pornography, those brazen media calls to action that can throw you off your game.

He advocates budgeting simply so you know where you stand--not as some kind of punishment designed to force absolute accountability. 

Here's one more Richards ditty: the most powerful financial tool isn't math--it's your humanity.

The arrival of the nuclear age ushered in yet another chapter in America’s horror history. Jeremy Dauber, the Columbia University professor who previously wrote a history of comics in this country, now digs a little deeper for American Scary.

When John Hersey’s Hiroshima filled an entire issue of the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker, the public learned what it was like to be incinerated by an atomic bomb. Other horrors were to come. 

Dauber starts in the American Republic’s early days when the Devil might have been walking in the forests that flourished at the time. There was slavery—categorized by Dauber as “the American horror story”--an institution that led to a gruesome civil war and divisions that haven’t entirely healed to this day. There were the horrors faced by Native Americans. 

On the literary side, you have Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, and we’re off to the races. Ray Bradbury and Stephen King follow, but Dauber even finds horror in a copy of Good Housekeeping, where a 1944 story called “The Storm” proved to be disturbing.

The 20th century was loaded with horrors on the big screen, with Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man becoming Hollywood’s holy trinity of horror. 

But those mythical creatures didn’t seem so scary after World War II. Once mankind realizes that all life could be snuffed out across the entire planet by a single act of madness. 

Movies made the point. You have Them (irradiated ants) and, among the many cinematic giants stirred up in the atomic age, It Came From Beneath the Sea, a giant octopus disturbed by an A-bomb test. You had paranoia (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). You even had arbiters from outer space warning us to back off the bomb (The Day the Earth Stood Still), a film our president apparently needs to see.

The Thing From Another World took the UFO craze and turned it on its head in 1951, setting up John Carpenter’s 1982 shape-shifting remake. Dauber made the point that these films (and others like them) made you wonder just who your friends were.

You don’t need a horror history to recognize that Jaws and The Exorcist were creepy. But Dauber adds the Rocky Horror Picture Show to his list of 70s standout films.

As comprehensive as Dauber’s compilation is, I would like to have seen more radio horror (Arch Oboler et al) included and at least some reference to TV’s Outer Limits (the 1963 B&W version).

Perhaps inspired by American Scary, Dauber just produced Press One for Invasion, a novel for juvenile readers about an alien invasion through the eyes of a cell-phone-toting youngster. 

Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com.

His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the years with most of the great songwriters of our time: John Lee Hooker, Neil Sedaka, Gerry Goffin, Phil Ochs, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Frank Zappa, Jimmy Webb, Paul Simon, Jerry Garcia, Randy Newman, John Prine, Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. You get the idea.

You learn things in this book. The songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant wrote 24 songs for the Everly Brothers, among other things. Pollock ‘s interview with them sheds light on how a successful songwriting team broke into the business. They wrote letters to everybody they could think of. 

“My heart would crack with every rejection,” said Felice. “I thought, well maybe we’re not that good, because I was counting on the fact that the powers that be really knew, cause if they didn’t know they wouldn’t be there. I didn’t realize it’s all guesswork in their department, too.”

Boudleaux added: “Some of the (songs) that we ourselves have liked personally the least have been songs that other people have flipped out on, and some of them have been pretty good hits. And some songs that we absolutely just were crazy about and loved and thought were just the best we’d ever written didn’t do a thing, and we still have them sitting around.”

Pollock’s interviews span an era from the 1970s into the 21st century. So were there surprises? On Neal Peart of Rush: “Would you expect the drummer of a world-renowned arena-resounding rock band to be conversant with the subtleties of black humor?”

“He was an intellectual,” said Pollock, who, in a 1986 interview, recalled what Peart had to say about his favorite writer: “To me, Tom Robbins is the quintessential modern writer because he’s funny, he’s profound, he’s sexy, he’s irreverent, he’s dirty, he’s hip. He’s everything I would like modern writing to be.”

Frank Zappa, often the contrarian, proved quite polite, said Pollock. John Sebastian talked about “magic moments” in the studio that were responsible for the string of hits he composed for the Lovin' Spoonful in the 1960s.

Sometimes it’s Pollock’s endnotes following the article that stay with you: “The erratic, sporadic, and quintessentially chaotic career of Andy Partridge, in and out of XTC, with various spinoff groups and album reconfigurations, continued into the twenty-first century and as yet shows no signs of relenting.”

Pollock’s concise collection takes you across the board when it comes to insight regarding the music business.

Oh yes, Pollock is also the author of the Rock Song Index, 7,500 of the most important songs from 1944 to 2000. No, it’s not a countdown, although I’d love a radio station to take a shot at it sometime. What would it take? Maybe a month or more. Waiting for number-one would take a true fan.  

The Kokoro Clinic for the Soul is back in business. That's the mental health clinic that appears for those who need it. We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat is a follow-up to We'll Prescribe You a Cat, a bestselling Japanese novel. Both books have been translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda.

The clinic--with its unconventional doctor and forceful nurse--uses a prescribed cat to heal the emotional wounds of its patients. The sequel introduces a new cast of healing cats, from Kotetsu, a four-month-old Bengal who unleashes his boundless energy by demolishing bed linens and curtains, to tenacious and curious Shasha, who doesn’t let her small size stop her from anything, and the most lovable yet lazy cat Ms. Michiko.

Shimoda said translating the book presented a challenge due to the magic present in Ishida's work. "I find the story uplifting. I'm personally a fan of cats," she said.

The story fits into the fast-growing category of healing fiction, a subset of the cozy mystery, a genre that Shimoda said provides readers the opportunity to explore a little magic in everyday life.

Shimoda is at work on the translation of Ishida's third book in the series, due out in this country next year.

Based in New York, Shimoda is also considering translating select Japanese novels from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as preparing a manuscript of her own for publication.