9.5 Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)

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In an essay about her recent book Searches, a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde to talk with Vauhini about the power and the danger of digital tech and discuss to what it means to co-create with AI. Vauhini tells Aarthi and host Sarah Wasserman that at the heart of all her work is a desire to communicate—that “language,” as she says, “is the main tool we have to bridge the divide.” She explains that the motivation in Searches as in her journalism is to test out tools that promise new forms of communication—or even tools that promise to be able to communicate themselves. Amidst all her interest in new tech, Vauhini is first and foremost a writer: she and Aarthi discuss what it means to put ChatGPT on the printed page, what genre means in today’s media ecosystem, and whether generative AI will steal writers’ paychecks. Considering generative AI models as tools that “don’t have a perspective,” makes for an episode that diagnoses the future of writing with much less doomsaying than authors and critics often bring to the topic. And if all of this writing with robots sounds too “out there,” stay tuned for Vauhini’s down-to-earth answer to our signature question.

Mentioned in this episode:

Vauhini Vara, Searches (2025), The Immortal King Rao (2022), “My Decade in Google Searches” (2019)
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580)
Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (2023)
Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (2024),  “According to Alice” (2023)
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools will never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979)

Listen and Read:

Audio: Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)

Transcript: 9.5 Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)

11.3 “Thank god for editors”: Imbolo Mbue and Sarah Dimick (RB) – Novel Dialogue

In this episode, novelist Imbolo Mbue and critic Sarah Dimick dive into the literary ecosystem from an author’s perspective. Imbolo recalls her formative experiences in public libraries when she first emigrated from Cameroon to the United States, and how her encounters with American literature, especially Oprah’s Book Club picks, shaped her sense of literary possibility. Imbolo’s first novel, Behold the Dreamers, was itself an Oprah’s Book Club selection. In a conversation that moves across Imbolo’s career, from Behold the Dreamers to How Beautiful We Were to the newly released Every Story Is a Love Story, Imbolo and Sarah probe multiple dimensions of the literary ecosystem. They take up networks of literary production: how Imbolo writes both with and against readers’ expectations and desires; how her reading shapes her writing, particularly the memoirs of forgiveness (or the lack thereof) that informed Every Story Is a Love Story; the editorial pressures against which she has been glad to stand her ground, and the ones that have shaped her work for (in her assessment) the better, including a critical intervention from Random House’s Andy Ward that moved Every Story is a Love Story away from punishment and toward the urgent if unsexy problem of forgiveness. They also address what Sarah suggests is another unity across Imbolo’s fiction, in addition to a formal and thematic interest in aftermath: namely, the energy infrastructures—oil, transit, cars—that allow characters to move forward through the world even as they enact extractive harm. Mentions:Oprah's Book ClubNgũgĩ wa Thiong'oChinua AchebeToni MorrisonJonathan FranzenJunot DíazSalman Rushdie's Knife: Meditations After an Attempted MurderMichelle Obama's BecomingYiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely GrowRoxane Gay, "Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof"Random House's Andy WardVerdi’s AidaArundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
  1. 11.3 “Thank god for editors”: Imbolo Mbue and Sarah Dimick (RB)
  2. 11.2 Taking Apart a Metaphor: Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette on the Literary Ecosystem
  3. 11.1 Indie Presses and the Literary Ecosystem: Meg Reid and Will Evans
  4. 10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT)
  5. 10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
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Huang, Linda and Andrew LeClair. Cover design. Searches, Vauhini Vara, Pantheon, 2025. Front cover.