Fire And Fury
by Michael Wolff · first published 2018
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5HN commenters
2018–2025first – last mentioned
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A 2018 book by Michael Wolff, detailing the behavior (and hatred) of U.S. President Donald Trump, the staff of his 2016 presidential campaign, and the White House staff.
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…Enlightenment Now (2018) by Steven Pinker is pretty good, even if he doesn't know that much about the actual enlightenment. Autonomy (2018) by Lawrence Burns about self-driving cars is well worth a read. Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff is good about the very strange world inside the Trump administration.
on “Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?” ↗Fire and Fury asserts in the first chapter that Trump and just about everyone else involved thought he wouldn’t win, and that Trump himself didn’t want to win. I’m not saying that book is reliable, but you can find…
on “Trump's Campaign Payments Totalling $130K” ↗…“He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.” ~ Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/america...
on “Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste” ↗Fire and Fury is also almost entirely fiction. The author had no access whatsoever, is known for just making shit up, and has admitted that he made shit up _in this particular book_. Yet some people continue to treat…
on “Trump's Campaign Payments Totalling $130K” ↗…The only problem area I can think of involves books published by commercial publishers which promise 'exclusive peek' into the life of some famous person (think biographies of celebrities or books like Fire and Fury). In that kind of case there is indeed original content, and revealing it in detail will arguably mean less sales for the authors/publishers.
on “More writers sue OpenAI for copyright infringement over AI training” ↗…to "tell me some jokes in the style of Louis CK". Would that make me less likely to stream a Louis CK comedy special? (By contrast, if I ask ChatGPT to summarize the key revelations from a book like Fire and Fury, that probably would make me less likely to buy the book, because if I buy the book it'd be for the novel information contained in it, but ChatGPT already divulged it to me.)
on “More writers sue OpenAI for copyright infringement over AI training” ↗