Do you recall your beloved school teachers? Did they awaken a passion for a once-unappealing subject or offer valuable guidance?

Mr Moriarty was the one. When he became a science teacher, 22-year-old Patrick Moriarty was hoping to make a difference in his students’ lives. After all, the natural world has so many fascinating secrets that he was willing to teach and he would devote long years to preparing his “kids” for adulthood. In 1978, he was teaching kids about the sky events and passed out worksheets, showing the paths of the upcoming eclipses (日食). Sadly, a lot of them would not be visible in New York. All but one on April 8, 2024.

“Circle that one,” Mr Moriarty told his students. “We’re going to get together on that one.”

The youngsters laughed — the eclipse wouldn’t occur for nearly five decades and everyone would’ve forgotten the promise by then. But they severely underestimated their teacher.

Years flew by and Mr Moriarty made the same promise to all of his classes about the plan in the distant future. As the popularity of printed press declined, he created a Facebook group in 2022, detailing the event and trying to find former students who would want to attend it.

Mr Moriarty never expected there would be such a massive turnout, but the word was spreading like wildfire among his former classmates. On Monday, the 8th of April, about 100 former students gathered in their teacher’s driveway. As the students started arriving at his house, he had trouble recognizing them. However, he remembered most of their names and some amusing stories that happened during his teaching years.

“It was so interesting to see them walking up with thinning or gray hair, and looking at me like, ‘You’re still my teacher,’” he laughed. “This has got to be the longest homework assignment in history.” Lastly, Mr Moriarty suggested marking the 22nd of August, 2044, the day when the next visible total solar eclipse will occur. Once again, everyone laughed, but this time with a little less doubt.

The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies. Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Another event listing site, Meetup, reported a 14% increase in the number of RSVPs to book clubs between January 2023 and January 2024, compared with a 4% increase in RSVPs for all UK-based events.

Victoria Okafor, who co-runs the book club Between2Books, said the heightened interest in reading may be partly the result of a general “shift in hobbies”, as GenZ (the generation around 00s) turned to other ways to spend their free time. Besides, during the global health crisis period, many people were forced to slow down and pick up or reignite hobbies, and online book clubs provided a platform to connect with others.

Social media may be helping with the visibility of book clubs, too, said Okafor. “People may come across your page accidentally, but from there people have the knowledge to attend should they wish. I think this makes a big difference compared to just hearing things from word of mouth.”

Many of the book clubs listed on Eventbrite carry specific themes — Sheffield Feminist Book Club, Bring Your Baby Book Club, and Modern Chinese Literature Online Book Club.

Okafor’s club, Between2Books, focuses on books by writers traditionally excluded (排除) from the classics. She thought she began seeking out such stories “embarrassingly late”. “Reading authors of color brought back a joy to my reading that came from not only seeing elements of myself and culture reflected in novels but also reading stories that could be funny or empowering as opposed to the accounts of struggle that can often surround stories of people of color,” she said. “The variety of books makes reading and discussion so rich and I think that’s what attenders are drawn to.”

A Hollywood-quality movie may soon be only a few text prompts away. OpenAI last week revealed its latest, world-shocking technology: a text-to-video app called Sora that can produce photorealistic short videos lasting up to a minute.

The company hasn’t released Sora to the public yet, but the artificially generated videos it created for its demonstration were stunning. In one, the detailed prompt involves people walking through Tokyo while cherry blossoms are flying through the wind. The resulting video was a mind-blowing exercise in world-building, showing a couple walking in a detailed streetscape that is unmistakably Tokyo. Perhaps even more awe-inspiring is that Sora does not merely produce videos that fulfill the demands of the prompts. It improvises (即兴创作) in a way that suggests a talent for storytelling.

“Good grief,” said Loz Blain in New Atlas. “We’d better try to deal with the speed at which this technology is advancing. The wheel, the steam engine, the airplane, the computer, the Internet... None of them ever sped up like this. If you look closely, you can’t tell that these very short videos aren’t real. But it’s impossible to say whether this technology is nearly as good as it’s going to get. Videos made a year ago, using the AI tool Midjourney, couldn’t even display the correct number of fingers on a hand. But Sora now creates a world as you describe. Get ready for the next wave of ‘AI disruption (颠覆)’ as Sora shakes the entertainment industry.”

Yet costs are increasing, too. Estimates of the cost of building out AI systems have varied from hundreds of billions to 7 trillion dollars over the coming years. Where’s the money going to come from? With OpenAI’s current valuation approaching $100 billion, traditional investors are largely priced out. Governments may be one possible solution, but many are likely to have national security concerns about backing this technology.

Such concerns are well founded. It’s simply impossible to know how these systems will be misused until they’re out in the wild. While OpenAI has the ability to prevent violent pictures, disinformation is much harder to police. Faked videos could so w confusion and chaos. At the very least, OpenAI should wait until after November to bring Sora to the public.