Would Great Gatsby have passed muster by an algorithm??

So we’ve all read a shit ton about how the media industry has been affected/annihilated by algorithms, analytics and big data — but what about the publishing industry?

That’s what this mega-interesting article from Wired digs into, with just one of the most interesting tidbits being that two people have built an algorithm that can predict with 80 percent accuracy which novels will become bestsellers.

Which could be great because it removes editors & publishers’ baked-in subjectivity, but also, do we really want to only read things that a machine thinks we’ll like? [insert thoughtful emoji here]

At any rate, it’s wild stuff, especially if you think about whether any of the “classics” we were force-fed in high school would do with that kind of algorithm… I’m personally voting nah on Wuthering Heights bc: 600 pages of misery and moorland. What do you think?

Like Deez Links? Forward to Heathcliff.