One of Willie Wilde’s favourite pastimes was making fun of his famous playwright brother Oscar, says Tom Crewe in the London Review of Books. After Oscar’s conviction for “gross indecency” in 1895, he would tell anyone who’d listen that his brother was “NOT a man of bad character: you could have trusted him with a woman anywhere”. When they were younger, their successes seemed intertwined: as a journalist at The World and Vanity Fair, Willie was partially responsible for cultivating Oscar’s reputation as the country’s leading aesthete, keeping his name constantly before the public and talking him up in London’s chicest cafes and bars. They took pains never to be seen together, partly because they looked so alike. It was said that Oscar paid Willie a stipend to wear a beard, so they would not be mistaken for one another.

“Perhaps Oscar was worried about being fingered for his brother’s debts.” After Willie first went bankrupt in 1881, his mother told Oscar his brother was “really trying to work” and had been advised to enter the stockbroking trade. Instead, aged 39, Willie solved his financial troubles by marrying a dynamic American publishing magnate and millionairess, and moving to New York where he “boozed and lounged and chatted” and never quite got round to doing any work. “I have opened every door for Mr Wilde to succeed in journalism or literature,” his wife told a newspaper. “So far he has not entered.” Within a year she had dumped him back in London, divorced and not a penny richer. The boozing and chatting and lack of work continued. He was caught stealing cigars from a friend, dodged bills, fell out with waiters, sold off his second wife’s jewellery and finally died, it was said, “of bohemianism”.

The critics have been lavish in their praise of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke describes seeing the 70-metre artwork back in Britain for the first time in 1,000 years as “the most moving moment of my career”. Time Out’s Andrzej Lukowskis says it lives up to “a millennium of hype”, while Laura Freeman in The Times calls it “shivers-down-the-spine, tell-the-grandchildren sort of stuff”. Perhaps trumping them all is Jonathan Jones, who writes in The Guardian that the embroidery is better than “almost everything else ever painted or carved”. Opens on 10 September; the next batch of tickets is released on the British Museum website on 21 October.

When they were boys, says Gal Beckerman in The Atlantic, today’s tech billionaires spent hours reading science fiction stories about killer robots and super-intelligent AIs. What they apparently didn’t get was that these were cautionary tales – stories that projected deep societal worries into deep space or the distant future. “These boys just thought the killer robots sounded cool.” The world we live in today is shaped by that misreading. In 2009, for example, Peter Thiel, by then a middle-aged man, directed his venture capital fund to focus on “science-fiction-type investing. So it’s basically: space, robots, AI.” Jeff Bezos grew up as a massive Star Trek fan. Far from absorbing the sophisticated moral messages about racism and the absurdity of the Cold War, he just liked the space stuff. In his high-school-valedictorian speech he spoke about building “space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting the earth”.

Elon Musk, when he was 10, read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, all about a mathematician who predicts a coming dark age and tries to minimise it by preserving human knowledge on a remote planet. When Musk is asked about the effect of this book on his thinking, he pulls out only the “simplest, most self-glorifying story, about individual genius and foresight”. Asimov’s 1955 story Franchise imagines a dark future in which a computer called the Multivac elects the US president, doing away with democracy as we know it. When OpenAI boss Sam Altman went on Joe Rogan’s podcast in March, he described something eerily similar – an AI that talks to everyone, figures out what they want then “optimises for the collective preferences of humanity” – as “awesome”. These misreadings would be funny, if they didn’t have such potentially dire consequences.