Florida abortion-rights backers ‘confident’ they have signatures to make 2024 ballot

• December 20, 2023

Backers of a proposed constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights say they are on track to hit a major milestone needed to get the issue before Florida voters in next year’s election.

Floridians Protecting Freedom reported Tuesday it will submit 1.4 million signatures to election supervisors by the end of the year, well above the nearly 900,000 needed to make the ballot. That topped the group’s initial goal of 1.25 million signatures.

“We’re confident we’re going to submit enough petitions to get on the ballot,” said Campaign Director Lauren Brenzel.

If it makes the ballot, the amendment must win at least 60% of the vote to secure passage.

The state has until Feb. 1 to verify the signatures to ensure they come from eligible voters and meet other requirements. As of Tuesday, the state reported that 753,762 of the required 891,523 signatures had been verified. Nothing is official until the state certifies that requirements have been met.

The signature benchmark equals 8% of the voters in the last presidential election. Florida also requires ballot initiatives get broad support across the state with a requirement that the same proportion of signatures be collected in at least half of the state’s congressional districts.

Work is still being done in targeted congressional districts across the state to qualify, Florida Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book said in a social media post.

“It’s clear our campaign to give power to the people is on track to win back our rights,” she said.

Abortion rights supporters are making a final push for outstanding petitions to be signed and submitted by Friday.

The ballot initiative’s summary states in part, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

If the amendment meets the signature requirement, it will need to clear another hurdle to get on the ballot.

Florida Supreme Court could deny voters a say on abortion rights

The Florida Supreme Court, which is dominated by conservative justices, must approve the ballot initiative’s language. The high court is tasked with evaluating proposed citizen ballot initiatives to determine if the language is clear, won’t mislead voters and deals with a single subject.

Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody has argued that the ballot summary will confuse voters because it doesn’t define the term “viability.” Supporters say the term has a “well-understood, commonly accepted meaning” as “the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb.”

Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. That law will take effect if the Supreme Court upholds a 15-week abortion ban passed last year.

​ Orange County Register 

Analysts say Ukraine’s forces are pivoting to defense

• December 20, 2023

By Volodymr Yurchuk | Associated Press

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s armed forces are taking up a more defensive posture, a military analysis said Wednesday, after their summer counteroffensive failed to achieve a major breakthrough against Russia’s army and as winter weather sets in after almost 22 months of the war.

“In recent weeks, Ukraine has mobilized a concerted effort to improve field fortifications as its forces pivot to a more defensive posture along much of the front line,” the U.K. Ministry of Defense said in an assessment.

The Kremlin’s deep defenses held firm against Ukraine’s monthslong assault, using Western-supplied weapons but without essential air cover, along the around 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line.

Most fighting in recent weeks has focused on artillery, missile and drone strikes as mud and snow hinder troop movements.

“Russia continues local offensive options in several sectors, but individual attacks are rarely above platoon size,” the U.K. analysis said. “A major Russian breakthrough is unlikely and overall, the front is characterized by stasis.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin is hopeful that Kyiv’s Western allies will grow weary of financing the costly Ukrainian war effort, allowing the Kremlin’s forces to make a new offensive push next year against a weaker foe. He has put the Russian economy on a war footing to prepare for that.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday that he’s certain the United States will make good on its promise to provide billions of dollars in further aid for Kyiv to continue its fight. The U.S. Congress has broken for vacation without a deal to send around $61 billion to Ukraine.

Zelenskyy also noted that next year Ukraine plans to produce 1 million drones, which have become a key battlefield weapon. The relatively cheap drones can be used to destroy expensive military hardware.

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Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s Minister of Strategic Industries, said the million new drones will be so-called first-person view, or FPV, drones, which have a real time video function.

In addition, he said in a Telegram post, Ukraine can manufacture next year more than 10,000 mid-range strike drones that can travel hundreds of kilometers (miles) as well as more than 1,000 drones with a range of more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles). They will allow Ukraine to hit targets well behind the front line and in Russia.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian air defenses intercepted 18 of 19 Russian Shahed-type drones overnight, the Ukraine air force claimed Wednesday.

Also, Russia fired two S-300 ballistic missiles at Kharkiv in the northeast of Ukraine, it said. No casualties were reported.

Yuras Karmanau contributed to this report from in Tallinn, Estonia.

​ Orange County Register 

Supervisor Andrew Do’s ridiculous smear of LAist reporter Nick Gerda

• December 20, 2023

Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do has come under much needed scrutiny for his involvement in approving millions of dollars of public funds to Viet America Society, a nonprofit organization in which his daughter has had a leadership role.

This editorial board, citing this and his clearly established record of cronyism and pay-to-play activity, has called for Supervisor Do to resign.

In response to this, Supervisor Do has offered little but deflection and word games to obfuscate his well-documented and unethical activities.

But now Supervisor Do has reached a new low.

In a press release published online today, Supervisor Do accuses LAist reporter Nick Gerda, who has done courageous reporting on this issue, of linking to a “falsified” IRS document belonging to the Viet America Society.

“The tax filing that Nick Gerda has cited about Rhiannon Do’s employment with the Viet America Society in 2021, which he argued required disclosure, was in fact forged. Viet America Society’s 2022 tax return was modified to say 2021 in order to create a false timeline,” said Supervisor Do, who also called for Gerda to be fired.

Strong words. But what’s the truth?

What obviously drew Supervisor Do’s ire was a recently published story by Gerda titled, “Nonprofit Led By OC Supervisor’s Daughter Failed To Submit Required Audits For Millions In Spending, Records Show.”

As part of a much larger piece, Gerda’s story links to two tax returns, one from the 2021 calendar year and one from the 2022 calendar year. The 2022 form lists Supervisor Do’s daughter, Rhiannon Do, as vice president of the organization. According to Gerda’s past reporting, Rhiannon Do’s LinkedIn profile indicated her title was “president” of the organization from July 2021 onward, though this was changed amid LAists ongoing reporting.

Here’s where Supervisor Do, or whoever did his research for him, appears to be confused. Stay with us, as this gets into the weeds.

The 2022 form linked by Gerda does, in fact, say “2021” in the upper right hand corner of the document. But it also says “For the 2021 calendar year, or tax year beginning 01-­01-­2022 , and ending 12­-31­-2022.”

This editorial board searched ourselves for Viet America Society’s tax returns.

Nonprofit ProPublica shows the 2022 tax returns for Viet America Society with “2022” clearly marked in the upper right hand corner. The only apparent discrepancy is the year in the top right corner. Otherwise, the figures and information contained in the tax return linked by Gerda and the one linked by ProPublica for the same year appear to be identical.

We next searched Guidestar.org, which also contains financial information on nonprofit organizations.

Sure enough, the 2022 return on Guidestar.org includes the same quirk as the document linked by Gerda: “2021” is included in the upper right corner of the document, while also saying, “For the 2021 calendar year, or tax year beginning 01­-01-­2022, and ending 12­-31­-2022.”

Supervisor Do, in other words, appears to at best be confused and worst seizing upon a minor glitch in a document available from a reliable clearinghouse on nonprofits in order to distract from all that Gerda has dug up.

Supervisor Do certainly knows that most people won’t have the time or will to dig into comparisons of Form 990s. And so, he has teed off on a reporter who has rightly brought to public awareness that he knowingly steered public funds to a nonprofit headed up by his daughter without disclosing that.

The one point of contention Supervisor Do actually has with Gerda’s reporting is over the legal status of the nonprofit.

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In 2023, the California Attorney General warned the nonprofit that it “is prohibited from engaging in conduct for which registration is required, including soliciting or disbursing charitable funds” due to a delinquency dating back to the 2020 fiscal year. Gerda also showed that in 2020 the county’s contract administrator told colleagues she had “serious concerns about issuing a contract to this organization that appears to be a home based business and can’t verify their non-profit status.”

In response, Do’s screed against Gerda meekly explains, “In fact, the Viet America Society was given 60 days to cure a paperwork filing deficiency with the California State Attorney General and has always been a legally registered non-profit organization.”

Throughout this entire scandal, Supervisor Andrew Do has shown that he will go to great lengths to excuse away and deflect from his unethical behavior. It raises legitimate questions about what else he’s done and what else he is hiding.

Once again, we call for Supervisor Andrew Do to stop misleading the public, to take responsibility for his unethical behavior and to resign from office immediately. He cannot be trusted with public funds or public office.

​ Orange County Register 

How young Rams have infused Aaron Donald with new energy and joy

• December 20, 2023

Last year, it got dark early around the Rams’ Thousand Oaks headquarters.

Not the way the nights come early in December. But for a team that had won the Super Bowl a year prior, the hangover could not have been worse. Injuries piled up in a startling fashion, and with them came losing like the Rams hadn’t seen since 2016, their first season in Los Angeles.

No one was immune from it, even the man built like a superhero. An ankle sprain and subsequent tightrope surgery ended Aaron Donald’s season in Week 12, the fifth of six straight Rams losses. The superstar defensive tackle did not play the final six games, four more than he had missed in the first eight seasons of his career combined.

“It was tough. It was tough but something that I had to go through, that we had to go through,” Donald said, “and we’re here now.”

“Here” is somewhere it wasn’t clear the Rams could reach so quickly after last season’s 5-12 disaster. At .500, 14 games into the season, in control of their own destiny for a playoff spot.

But most of all? The Rams are having fun, thanks to an influx of young energy in the locker room. And Aaron Donald, best known to the outside world for his glaring intensity on game day, is allowing himself to get swept up in it.

New beginnings

When Donald first met with the media at training camp in July, he declared he had “something to prove” in his 10th season. It was a comment that raised eyebrows among his teammates. What exactly did the three-time Defensive Player of the Yea and Super Bowl champion, already fitted for his Canton gold jacket, have to prove?

But defensive line coach Eric Henderson knew it had more to do with how the previous year had ended than anything to do with Donald’s résumé.

“I think anytime that you end the season, whether it be losing or not finishing the way you wanted to finish as an organization but also not having the opportunity to finish because of your health,” Henderson explained, “you want to get a second chance at it.”

When Donald arrived in Irvine in July, he was technically playing for the same team with which he has spent his entire career. But it was like everything had changed around him.

The Rams spent the offseason shedding expensive veteran contracts. The defense, and the defensive line room in particular, were struck hard. A’Shawn Robinson and Greg Gaines left as free agents. So did outside linebacker Leonard Floyd.

For a team that had entered so many camps with the Week 1 roster predetermined, 36 rookies were vying for spots.

“It felt like a whole new team even though it’s the same team. But it was pretty much, everybody was different,” Donald said. “You got Ernest [Jones], a couple guys that were out there that you played with, but for the most part it was a lot of new pieces that you never played with, didn’t know what to expect.”

If it was discombobulating for Donald, the situation was intimidating for the rookies who had grown up in reverence of Donald. Here they were, expected to share ideas and strategies with the man whose tape they had modeled their games after.

“You just never quite know how it’s going to go coming in and with him being as talented as he is and what kind of person he’s going to be,” rookie third-round pick Kobie Turner said. “But you could tell that he wasn’t like holding himself way above everybody else. It was pretty comforting.”

As the days and weeks went by, Donald did what he could to take his young linemates under his wing.

Donald has always been known more as a leader by example. He sets the standard when it comes to how to work out, how to take care of his body, how to practice, how to watch film. In other words, what it means to be a pro. If Aaron Donald takes it all so seriously, you have no excuse not to.

“I know these young guys have just gravitated towards him. Everything he does, they try to do,” Henderson said. “I think that’s helped our culture.”

But Donald has taken on a different kind of leadership role this season, too. He’ll invite the young defensive linemen to his house, or take them out to dinner, or organize the rookie dinners in which first-year players pay for veterans’ meals.

“Just creating a lot of atmospheres where you can get the guys together. I think those have been the things that he’s been excited about,” Henderson said. “That was one of the things that really stands out, just his attitude, his approach. He’s a little bit more sensitive to the guys being young. But I think the personalities of these young guys have really rejuvenated him to where he’s having so much fun just being around these cats.”

Poke the bear

The young Rams in the defensive line room call Donald a “big brother” figure. If that’s the case, though, the other guys have certainly embraced the “little brother” hallmark of trying to get under Donald’s skin.

Rookie Desjuan Johnson, “Mr. Irrelevant” in April’s draft, has been a prime instigator, often leaning across the laundry basket in front of Donald’s locker to see his reaction to the latest jab. Donald usually fights back a grin as he concentrates on tying his gold-trimmed New Balances.

“Everybody likes to laugh, everybody likes to smile,” Johnson reasons. “As a young player, you still want to talk junk and push him to be the best version of himself – even though that’s Aaron Donald, he don’t need nobody to push him – but just knowing that you got somebody that got your back.”

This button-pushing hasn’t been limited to Johnson. Practice squad member Cory Durden frequently talks about wanting to dunk on his veteran teammate at Donald’s home basketball court.

“[Durden] said, ‘We gotta play basketball. I bet you got AD on the court, huh, right on the middle?’ ” Turner recounts. “AD is like, ‘Yeah.’ He was like, ‘I’ll drop 30 from the AD logo.’ So everybody tries to get up under his skin a little bit, but it’s all love, man.”

Asked about this dynamic, and Donald – typically stoic at press conferences – drops his head with a quick snort of laughter before recovering.

“That’s what it’s about. You want to come to work, you want to have a group of guys that you enjoy being around, you have fun being around, that works, that want to be good,” Donald says. “I think we got a bunch of guys in our room that are like that and then obviously, having different personalities and everybody clicking together and having fun with each other, that helps everything.”

Skipping off

The Rams had just put the finishing touches on their third straight victory in a fashion befitting a team that has woven together generations of players. Donald and Turner had combined for a safety late against the Cleveland Browns, and their work for the day was done.

As they headed for the sideline, Donald wrapped his arm around Turner’s shoulder, and Turner returned the gesture. But then something strange happened: Donald began to skip.

“I didn’t understand that it was happening at first,” Turner said, eyes still wide days later as he recalled the moment. He then added with a belly laugh, “It was definitely a core memory.”

And one that resonated across the Rams’ locker room, too.

“It was definitely funny, I’m not going to lie,” third-year tackle Bobby Brown III said. “I definitely need that picture, that picture is hilarious.”

“I was laughing so hard about that. That made my day to see him enjoying the young exuberance of Kobie Turner,” defensive coordinator Raheem Morris said. “When you have veteran players and that stuff rubs off on those guys in that way, it’s pretty fun to see.”

But it wasn’t much of a surprise to Henderson and the rest of the defensive line room that have seen a new side to Donald this season.

“It was exactly what we’ve been seeing in the D-line room amongst the group. It was just something that the world had a chance to see,” Henderson said. “But I was already seeing that. It was a genuine love and appreciation for each other and for just the camaraderie that we have.”

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“Even though we won the Super Bowl and stuff my first year, I feel like he smiles more this year. He’s taking the memories in more this year than probably he has maybe in past years,” Brown added. “He is the vet. So now that he’s around a whole bunch of young guys, it’s like full of life.”

And a far cry from the dark days of 2022. But at this stage of Donald’s career, it’s the right vibes at the right time.

“Just enjoying it, never taking nothing for granted,” Donald said. “Obviously, around this time last year [I] wasn’t able to play so had the opportunity to be out there playing with them guys. Just never taking it for granted, just trying to have fun and enjoying it.”

​ Orange County Register 

Longtime Irvine football coach Terry Henigan dies

• December 20, 2023

Terry Henigan, who coached Irvine to four CIF Southern Section football championships, died Tuesday, his longtime assistant and co-head coach Rick Curtis confirmed Wednesday.

Henigan was the football head coach at Cypress from 1976-79. He took over at Irvine for the 1981 season and coached the Vaqueros for 29 seasons. He retired after the 2009 season at age 65 and moved to Indio.

He coached Irvine to CIF Southern Section championships three years in a row, 1991-93, and in 2000.

Curtis remembered Henigan as “tough but fair.”

“He was a commander,” said Curtis, who is now the football coach at Crean Lutheran.

Plans for services have not been determined.

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​ Orange County Register 

Irvine will start banning gas-powered lawn equipment next year

• December 20, 2023

In another move to transition away from fossil fuels, Irvine is banning the use of gas-powered lawn equipment, beginning next summer.

That includes gas-powered leaf blowers, lawnmowers, string trimmers, hedge trimmers, edgers and chainsaws.

Starting July 1, businesses working in Irvine that employ more than 50 people won’t be able to use gas-powered leaf blowers and lawnmowers while residents and all other businesses have until Jan. 1, 2025, to replace theirs.

The ban on using all other gas-powered equipment will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025, for businesses that employ more than 50 people, and July 1, 2026, for residents and all other businesses.

Any landscaping company working in Irvine — regardless of where that business is based — will be subject to these regulations, said city spokesperson Kristina Perrigoue.

While the state has already moved forward with phasing out gas-powered lawn equipment, the city’s ban expedites those efforts, said Joel Belding, deputy director of Irvine’s sustainability department. Under state law, which goes into effect Jan. 1, only the sale of new gas-powered lawn equipment is banned, not the use of existing equipment.

City leaders also voted last month to work with the South Coast Air Quality Management District to provide financial assistance to Irvine residents and Irvine-based landscaping businesses to purchase electric tools. The cost for electric leaf blowers is generally somewhere in the $1,500 to $3,000 range, up to three times the cost of a gas-powered one, Belding said.

South Coast AQMD has two general programs to help replace gas-powered residential lawn mowers and commercial lawn equipment: a rebate program that offers up to a $250 rebate for residents to purchase a cordless, electric lawn mower and a program for commercial landscapers and gardeners within its jurisdiction that covers up to 85% of the cost of commercial electric lawn equipment.

The Irvine-specific rebate program will essentially be an expansion of South Coast AQMD’s efforts to cover the full range of gas-powered equipment addressed in Irvine’s ban, Perrigoue said. The city will foot $150,000 to fund the program, but more could be added based on demand.

Irvine residents and Irvine-based businesses will be able to take advantage of both the general program and the Irvine-specific program. The partnership between South Coast AQMD and Irvine will be the first of its kind, said agency spokesperson Kim White.

“The financial incentive provided through the partnership will result in more equipment being replaced,” she said.

Funds will be disbursed on a first-come, first-serve basis, Belding said.

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The Orange County Power Authority also offers discounted equipment and rebates on electric tools available for purchase on its website.

Other Southern California cities — including Pasadena, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Los Angeles — have already banned the noisy lawn equipment. In Pasadena, where the use of gas-powered leaf blowers was banned in April, failure to comply with an initial 30-day warning notice will result in monetary citations. The first citation is $100, second is $200, third is $500 and the fourth is $1,000.

Irvine’s ban, however, won’t automatically come with punitive enforcement, Belding said. The city will delay traditional enforcement, like fines, until there is more general awareness of the ban and “market options become common.”

“We want to give the market a chance to respond to the state’s ban on sales and learn about how landscapers and commercial property owners are responding to the change and utilizing the rebate program,” Perrigoue said. “The city is taking an education-first approach and businesses’ good faith efforts should mean that no businesses are adversely impacted.”

​ Orange County Register 

Researchers find more than 1,000 child sexual abuse images inside AI image generation training data

• December 20, 2023

By Davey Alba and Rachel Metz

A massive public dataset used to build popular artificial intelligence image generators contains at least 1,008 instances of child sexual abuse material, a new report from the Stanford Internet Observatory found.

LAION-5B, which contains more than 5 billion images and related captions from the internet, may also include thousands of additional pieces of suspected child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, according to the report. The inclusion of CSAM in the dataset could enable AI products built on this data — including image generation tools like Stable Diffusion — to create new, and potentially realistic, child abuse content, the report warned.

The rise of increasingly powerful AI tools has raised alarms in part because these services are built with troves of online data — including public datasets such as LAION-5B — that can contain copyrighted or harmful content. AI image generators, in particular, rely on datasets that include pairs of images and text descriptions to determine a wide range of concepts and create pictures in response to prompts from users.

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In a statement, a spokesperson for LAION, the Germany-based nonprofit behind the dataset, said the group has a “zero tolerance policy” for illegal content and was temporarily removing LAION datasets from the internet “to ensure they are safe before republishing them.” Prior to releasing its datasets, LAION created and published filters for spotting and removing illegal content from them, the spokesperson said.Christoph Schuhmann, LAION’s founder, previously told Bloomberg News that he was unaware of any child nudity in the dataset, though he acknowledged he did not review the data in great depth. If notified about such content, he said, he would remove links to it immediately.

A spokesperson for Stability AI, the British AI startup that funded and popularized Stable Diffusion, said the company is committed to preventing the misuse of AI and prohibits the use of its image models for unlawful activity, including attempts to edit or create CSAM. “This report focuses on the LAION-5B dataset as a whole,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Stability AI models were trained on a filtered subset of that dataset. In addition, we fine-tuned these models to mitigate residual behaviors.”

LAION-5B, or subsets of it, have been used to build multiple versions of Stable Diffusion. A more recent version of the software, Stable Diffusion 2.0, was trained on data that substantially filtered out “unsafe” materials in the dataset, making it much more difficult for users to generate explicit images. But Stable Diffusion 1.5 does generate sexually explicit content and is still in use in some corners of the internet. The spokesperson said Stable Diffusion 1.5 was not released by Stability AI, but by Runway, an AI video startup that helped create the original version of Stable Diffusion. Runway said it was released in collaboration with Stability AI.

“We have implemented filters to intercept unsafe prompts or unsafe outputs when users interact with models on our platform,” the Stability AI spokesperson added. “We have also invested in content labeling features to help identify images generated on our platform. These layers of mitigation make it harder for bad actors to misuse AI.”

LAION-5B was released in 2022 and relies on raw HTML code collected by a California nonprofit to locate images around the web and associate them with descriptive text. For months, rumors that the dataset contained illegal images have circulated in discussion forums and on social media.“As far as we know, this is the first attempt to actually quantify and validate concerns,”  David Thiel, chief technologist of the Stanford Internet Observatory, said in an interview with Bloomberg News.

For their report, Stanford Internet Observatory researchers detected the CSAM material by looking for different kinds of hashes, or digital fingerprints, of such images. The researchers then validated them using APIs dedicated to finding and removing known images of child exploitation, as well as by searching for similar images in the dataset.

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Much of the suspected CSAM content that the Stanford Internet Observatory found was validated by third parties like Canadian Centre for Child Protection and through a tool called PhotoDNA, developed by Microsoft Corp., according to the report. Given that the Stanford Internet Observatory researchers could only work with a limited portion of high-risk content, additional abusive content likely exists in the dataset, the report said.

While the amount of CSAM present in the dataset doesn’t indicate that the illicit material “drastically” influences the images churned out by AI tools,  Thiel said it does likely still have an impact. “These models are really good at being able to learn concepts from a small number of images,” he said. “And we know that some of these images are repeated, potentially dozens of times in the dataset.”

Stanford Internet Observatory’s work previously found that generative AI image models can produce CSAM, but that work assumed the AI systems were able to do so by combining two “concepts,” such as children and sexual activity. Thiel said the new research suggests these models might generate such illicit images because of some of the underlying data on which they were built. The report recommends that models based on Stable Diffusion 1.5 “should be deprecated and distribution ceased wherever feasible.”

– With assistance from Marissa Newman and Aggi Cantrill.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

©2023 Bloomberg L.P.

​ Orange County Register 

20 highly anticipated books coming in 2024 we want to read

• December 20, 2023

Book lovers, rejoice: it’s winter, which means the best possible excuse to stay inside with a blanket and read the night away. We’re also approaching the New Year, so if you’re planning on making a resolution to read more books in 2024, you’ll be glad to hear that publishers have you covered.

The first few months of 2024 will bring readers much to choose from, whether you’re a fan of imaginative historical fiction, memoirs about cats and the people they tolerate, essays that touch on music and sports, or short stories that will transport you to places you’ve maybe never been.

See also: Sign up for our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more

Make sure your fireplace is in working order, and take a look at this list of 20 forthcoming books to keep you company over the next few chilly months. 

“You Dreamed of Empires”

Author: Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer

What It’s About: Enrigue is a bona fide literary star in his native Mexico. His latest novel to be translated into English is a defiantly modernist look at the early attempts at diplomacy between conquistador Hernán Cortés and the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II.

Publication Date: Jan. 9

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“The Fetishist”

Author: Katherine Min

What It’s About: Min’s novel tells the story of Kyoko, a 23-year-old punk-rock singer determined to exact revenge on Daniel, the violinist who dumped her mother before her death. Min, author of the critically acclaimed “Secondhand World,” died in 2019 at the age of 60.

Publication Date: Jan. 9

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“The Best That You Can Do: Stories”

Author: Amina Gautier

What It’s About: The author’s fourth short story collection focuses on the lives of families with Black and Puerto Rican heritage living in the Northeast. Gautier is a master of the form and won the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story in 2018.

Publication Date: Jan. 16

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“Martyr!”

Author: Kaveh Akbar

What It’s About: Poet Akbar’s debut novel is a darkly funny look at Cyrus, a young poet battling substance use disorder who is determined to get to the bottom of a secret that his mother, who was killed in an airplane shot down over the Persian Gulf, apparently kept.

Publication Date: Jan. 23

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“I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am”

Author: Zachary Pace

What It’s About: The essays in Pace’s collection detail their journey coming out as queer, influenced by their favorite women singers, including Whitney Houston, Cat Power, Madonna, and Rihanna.

Publication Date: Jan. 23

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“Black Women Taught Us”

Author: Jenn M. Jackson

What It’s About: The debut book from the political scientist and Teen Vogue columnist is an essay collection that looks at Black women authors and movement leaders, including Audre Lorde, Ida B. Wells, and Harriet Jacobs.

Publication Date: Jan. 23

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“Come and Get It”

Author: Kiley Reid

What It’s About: Fans of Reid’s popular debut novel, “Such a Fun Age,” have been waiting since 2019 for her next book. This one follows a University of Arkansas senior resident assistant whose life becomes entangled with that of a visiting professor.

Publication Date: Jan. 30

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“With Every Great Breath: New and Selected Essays, 1995-2023”

Author: Rick Bass

What It’s About: Montana-based author Bass is one of the country’s foremost nature writers, with dozens of books to his name, including influential titles like “Oil Notes” and “The Ninemile Wolves.” His latest book collects his essays about locations such as Alaska, Namibia, and the Galápagos Islands.

Publication Date: Feb. 6

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“Fourteen Days”

Editors: Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston

What It’s About: A project from the Authors Guild, this ambitious novel tells the story of a group of New Yorkers sheltering in place in a tenement during the first days of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Each of the characters is written (secretly) by a different author; the lineup includes Celeste Ng, John Grisham, Angie Cruz, Dave Eggers, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, and many more.

Publication Date: Feb. 6

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“Bugsy and Other Stories”

Author: Rafael Frumkin

What It’s About: Frumkin gained critical praise for his first two books, the novels “The Comedown” and “Confidence.” The characters in his new short story collection include an e-girl influencer and her unstable fan, a psychiatrist who hears a mysterious voice in his head, and a young adult who finds a home in a community of sex workers.

Publication Date: Feb. 13

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“Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades That Changed a Country and Its Sounds”

Author: Michael Broyles

What It’s About: Musicologist and veteran music critic Broyles explores the 1840s, the 1920s, and the 1950s in his book that tackles topics including rock ‘n’ roll, the transistor radio, and race.

Publication Date: Feb. 20

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“Ours”

Author: Phillip B. Williams

What It’s About: One of the most anticipated books of the year, this debut novel from poet Williams follows Saint, a 19th-century conjurer who rescues enslaved people and takes them to a secluded community north of St. Louis, where they can live as free people.

Publication Date: Feb. 20

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“Hard Girls”

Author: J. Robert Lennon

What It’s About: The latest from author Lennon, known for his imaginative fiction, is a crime novel about two estranged twin sisters who reunite in order to go in search of their long-lost, mysterious mother.

Publication Date: Feb. 20

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“Anita de Monte Laughs Last”

Author: Xochitl Gonzalez

What It’s About: Gonzalez had a bestseller in 2022 with “Olga Dies Dreaming,” her debut novel. Her follow-up follows Raquel, an upwardly mobile art history student, and the titular character, a promising young artist who died under mysterious circumstances more than a decade before.

Publication Date: March 5

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“Cat and Bird”

Author: Kyoko Mori

What It’s About: The latest from the novelist (“Shizuko’s Daughter”) and nonfiction author (“The Dream of Water”) is “a memoir in animals,” telling the story of her life as a writer through six cats that she’s lived with, and reflecting on the birds that she has helped rescue.

Publication Date: March 5

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“Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring”

Author: Brad Gooch

What It’s About: Gooch’s previous biographies have told the life stories of writers including Flannery O’Connor and Frank O’Hara. His latest tackles influential pop artist Haring, whose promising career was cut short when he died in 1990 at 31. 

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“Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling”

Author: Jason De León

What It’s About: UCLA anthropology professor De León embedded with a group of coyotes, or migrant guides, over the course of several years to study the people behind the industry of human smuggling. His book seeks to dispel stereotypes about those involved with moving migrants across Mexico.

Publication Date: March 19

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“James”

Author: Percival Everett

What It’s About: USC professor and author Everett is one of the most critically acclaimed novelists working today. His latest is a hilarious reimagining of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” told from the point of view of the enslaved character Jim.

Publication Date: March 19

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“There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension”

Author: Hanif Abdurraqib

What It’s About: The latest from the acclaimed author of “A Little Devil in America” combines memoir and cultural criticism to reflect on basketball (he’s a lifelong fan), celebrity, and the idea of role models.

Publication Date: March 26

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“Like Happiness”

Author: Ursula Villarreal-Moura

What It’s About: The buzzy debut novel from author Villarreal-Moura follows an art museum worker in Chile who is forced to confront her past relationship with an author who has been accused of assault.

Publication Date: March 26

​ Orange County Register