Thankfully, we now have a second Alexandra Andrews suspense novel, The Fine Art of Lying , which I recently reviewed at the Chicago Tribune.

I was pleased to be able to ask Alexandra Andrews some questions about her writing process and future plans.

Alexandra Andrews has worked as a journalist, editor, and copywriter in New York and Paris. Her novel Who Is Maud Dixon? was published in 28 languages around the world, and was named a best book/mystery of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Time, the New York Post, and Entertainment Weekly. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

John Warner: One of the things I’ve appreciated about both of your books is how firmly and specifically you set them in a particular milieu. Who is Maud Dixon? Is rooted in publishing. The Fine Art of Lying takes on the worlds of art and finance among wealthy New Yorkers. You go deeper than just a generic “rich people” portrayal, and it also seems as though you like to have some fun with it. In The Fine Art of Lying a banquet table of sumptuous foods is described as an advertisement for gout which is both funny and true.

What’s the process for building these worlds so they’re sufficiently convincing, but also give you enough room to maneuver in terms of storytelling? And what drew you to publishing and then fine art?

Alexandra Andrews: I appreciate your saying that, because I started my career as a journalist, and I actually find it very difficult to muster up a fictional scene from nothing. I rely on little tricks, like picturing a real room I’ve actually been in. Otherwise I draw a total blank when I think, ok, what color are the curtains? In terms of building up an entire milieu—whether it’s the art industry, the publishing industry, or a wealthy Manhattan enclave—I love to use dialogue. I find it enormously fun to write dialogue for really over-the-top characters who don’t have the filter that most people do.

In terms of what drew me to publishing and fine art, it’s not the industries, per se, but instead I’m very interested in the idea of creativity and how it feeds women’s lives. Florence’s creative passion—writing—curdles into something dark and desperate in Who Is Maud Dixon? But for Clare, it’s only when her creative outlet—art—disappears from her life that she realizes what a gaping hole it’s left behind.

John Warner: Another hallmark of both books is that your characters do “unlikable” things. You don’t seem worried about keeping their actions or motives pure. In Maude Dixon, Florence has this internal sense of entitlement that gets her into trouble. No spoilers, but Clare is not without complicity in her own troubles. To me, this makes them interesting as protagonists, but there’s a lot of judgmental readers out there. Do you think about these things as you build the focal character of the novel?

Alexandra Andrews: I do want my characters to be likeable, but I don’t think that means they need to be saints. Is there anyone on earth who hasn’t made a bad decision? Or acted rashly in ways they later regret? Of course not. And most of Clare and Florence’s mistakes stem from the simple fact that they want more expansive lives than they currently have. They may not go about making those changes in the right ways, but I think that urge is familiar to a lot of us.

John Warner: This is a question out of personal curiosity, of me just not understanding how people can craft these kinds of stories, but how much of the plot do you have before you start the scene by scene writing, and how much develops as you go? The story mechanics of both novels when you read them are lock tight, but I can’t imagine just writing a story that works that way. Is this fixed when you start or is it more that you write a draft, see where the holes are and then go back and fill them as necessary? (Or some mix of the two?)

Alexandra Andrews: I’m a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of writer. I always try to stick to an outline, but it never works. I really do need to write out a draft to figure out the mechanics of the plot. This involves many, many discarded pages, but it’s the only way I know how to do it. And then I add or amend scenes at the beginning of the book to make sure everything fits.

John Warner: How and when did you discover you had a talent for this kind of storytelling? Are we talking gift, hard won expertise, or (again) some mix of the two?

Alexandra Andrews: I’m relatively new to fiction-writing — Who Is Maud Dixon? was my first attempt at it—but I’ve been an obsessive reader for my entire life, so I think I absorbed a pretty deep-seated understanding of narrative. Plus, my favorite thing in the world to do is make people laugh, and that hones your storytelling skills pretty well.

John Warner: No spoilers, but you can read the end of The Fine Art of Lying and see a trajectory for a sequel. Is this something you’re considering or are you looking for your next fresh milieu?

Alexandra Andrews: A little bit of both! I have two plots in mind for my third book. One is a sequel (of sorts) to The Fine Art of Lying, and the other is an entirely different story.

John Warner: And my usual closing question, what’s one book that you think a lot of people might not know but should seek out and read?

Alexandra Andrews: Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles got me through last winter. The five-book series follows an aristocratic British family during World War II and the years that follow.

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Previous recent author Q&A’s:

Talking Hockey with Ed Park

Taking on a Literary Legend with Jessica Francis Kane

Talking Donald Barthelme and Her New Novel with Hannah Pittard.

Murder Takes a Vacation with Laura Lippman.

On Stories and Portals with Debbie Urbanski.

What’s Happened to (Formerly) Leftists Media? with Eoin Higgins.

The Many Lives of Anne Frank with Ruth Franklin.

Understanding Colson Whitehead with Derek C. Maus.

Humans Relate to Each Other And Understand Themselves in the Process with Adam Haslett.

The Name of This Band is R.E.M. with Peter Ames Carlin.

Echo Chambers of Our Own Devising with Charles Baxter.

Crime Novel? Women’s Fiction? Literary Thriller? with Kelsey Rae Dimberg.

Everybody Is Secretly Grieving with Alison Espach.

Observations Within Landscape with Ben Shattuck.

Teddy Wayne on Writing and “The Winner.”

The Guardian has released a list of the “100 best novels published in English” (which makes room for translated literature such as One Hundred Years of Solitude [#18]) and how can I not talk about this?

First, I should note that this is a different project from the New York Times list of a couple of years ago some may recall, which was predicated on identifying “the 100 best books of the 21st century.”

The Guardian is going all-time and also novels only. These sorts of exercises are inherently ridiculous - Because, come on, what does “best” mean anyway? - but the Times combining non-fiction and fiction under one umbrella struck me as inherently kinda dumb particularly in something that is presented as a ranked list.

Trying to articulate a reason why Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (#68) is a superior book to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (#69) is not possible because it’s like trying to describe why an orange is better than a basketball.

At least the Guardian is sticking to a genre, though that “published in English” clause gives a pretty wide date range. I was taught in my grad school history of the novel class that Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson (1740) was the first “English novel,” though some prefer Robinson Crusoe (1719) as the starting point for novels originally written in English.

Neither of those books make the list, but Don Quixote, published in two parts (1605 and 1615) and translated into English shortly after, does at number 26.

I do not want to mark myself as a cretin, but having read Don Quixote, while it is definitively one of the most important novels of all-time, I have a difficult time ranking it as one of the best in terms of a novel that one would read with sustained interest beyond duty. There are many classic novels that deliver great pleasure to contemporary audiences as novels, but DQ is not one of them.

As best I can tell without obsessively double-checking nine books make both lists:

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante #1 NYT, #51 Guardian

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel #3 NYT, #34 Guardian

The Known World by Edward P. Jones #4 NYT, #94 Guardian

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald #8 NYT, #73 Guardian

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro #9 NYT, #59 Guardian

The Road by Cormac McCarthy #13 NYT, #98 Guardian

White Teeth by Zadie Smith #31 NYT, #63 Guardian

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst #32 NYT, #87 Guardian

The Vegetarian by Han Kang #49 NYT, #85 Guardian

Reflecting on this concurrence my first thought is that The Road is hugely overrated. Good book, but middle of the pack for McCarthy’s own oeuvre. At least the Guardian has Blood Meridian (#68) on its list while only The Road makes the list on the Times.

The Guardian polled 172 “authors, critics, and academics” and then calculated a score based on frequency of mention and place of ranking in the individual lists. As methodologies go, this is no better or worse than any other, which is to say it’s entirely unscientific and not even worth arguing about.

Also, some of these novels are not novels. The Metamorphosis is like 60 pages long, a novella by any possible definition, but there it is at #48.

At least its inclusion gives me an excuse to share this all-time howler from Richard Dawkins.

(More recently Dawkins was seduced by his chatbot to the point that he’s ready to consider large language models conscious. They aren’t.)

This is the Guardian’s top 5:

Which, okay…fine, hard to argue over five books that loom over the entire firmament of English (and not English) literature. At least I assume so because I’ve never read To the Lighthouse or Middlemarch.

I know, horrors. I should turn in my professional book person card, but as previously established, the books go back to 1605, so let’s cut ourselves some slack if we haven’t gotten to everything yet. The Guardian provides a handy widget to check your own reading (see it on the right side of the page here), and I clocked in at what I believe to be a respectable 41 completed.

The Guardian also gives you a chance to fill out your own list, which I’m not going to do for them, but I am going to do for you here. I also am going to resist the temptation that many must give in to, which is to shape one’s list while considering how others may judge you for that list to avoid judgment and shame.

I am beyond shame.

Really, there’s nothing to be ashamed about when it comes to the books you think are best. Your taste is yours. Some of the books on my list are, for sure, not consequential, but if you asked me, yeah, they’re the best.

I compiled my list by perusing the books in my house and reacting with my gut as to whether or not I thought what I was looking at was one of the “best” books I’d ever read. That gave me a list of about 60 that I’ve whittled to 10. I’m not going to rank these because I don’t have the time it would take to figure things out to that degree. All those titles are clickable links for Bookshop.org listings for each book if you want more details.

Oreo by Fran Ross

The only novel by Ross, Oreo has become something of a cult favorite since be re-issued by New Directions. It’s a postmodern picaresque, and actually has a lot in common with Don Quixote. I just think this book is so original and funny and I love how clear it is only one person in the world could ever have written it.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The Guardian list is extremely light on postmodern works, while mine is pretty heavy with them, which tells you something about my taste, and perhaps, how brief the heyday of the big postmodernists truly was. Gravity’s Rainbow delivered the best ratio of difficulty to satisfaction in my reading life. I deeply enjoyed the struggle. I rhapsodically waxed about GR in a previous newsletter.

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

This book chilled me to the bone with its fierce exploration of American religious fervor and I think of it any time I see Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon podium declaring that God is blessing America’s “warfighters.”

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s biggest masterpiece and another major work of postmodern fiction that can be read like a puzzle but has many pleasures beyond the games Nabokov is playing. The first of my choices that is also on the Guardian list (#29).

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Beloved (#2 on the Guardian list) is considered Morrison’s masterpiece, but this is my personal favorite, which makes it the “best.” A lot of my feeling is wrapped up in this being the first Toni Morrison novel I read and experiencing that sensation of - Ooh, I haven’t read this before. Is it like drugs? Sort of. (#75 on the Guardian list.)

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

Unless I’m overlooking something, Whitehead is not represented on the Guardian list, which is a bit of a surprise. The Underground Railroad is probably the consensus “best,” but The Intuitionist, Whitehead’s more consciously postmodern debut, rocked me when I first read it and that sticks with me today. Previously I talked with Whitehead scholar about what it means to “understand” Colson Whitehead.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Simply the greatest psychological suspense writer ever, and I’m including the indefinite future in that pronouncement. In theory, a book that relies on suspense for its plot shouldn’t be one you’ve re-read like five times, but that is how good Highsmith is. Also comes in at #84 on the Guardian list.

The Water Method Man by John Irving

The life story of Fred “Bogus” Trumper, a man born with a crooked urethra and a penchant for fucking up. There is a scene in this novel where Trumper tries to learn to ski that makes me cry with laughter. How can this not be one of my ten best? Another case where I’ve selected a novel other than the one considered the author’s most major work (The world According to Garp). Not sure what this says about me.

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

Told in a series of fragments moving through the life of wealthy, comfortable, Kansas City housewife India Bridge, this is just a perfectly rendered novel. It’s all in the details and has an end that manages to floor me every time, even though I know it’s coming. I’m actually a little surprised this didn’t show up on the Guardian list because it’s a favorite among writers, but maybe the UK skew had an effect.

The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury

Regular readers know that I recommend this book all the time. I recently called it one of the greatest midwestern novels of all time, but really, for me, it’s a a flat-out top 10 best. Another book where the details and atmosphere carry great weight while also being married to indelible, specifically drawn characters.

Would it be so horrible to share your own lists in the comments? I don’t think so.

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This week I review Alexandra Andrews’ follow up to Who Is Maud Dixon?, The Fine Art of Lying. I’ll have my own Q&A with Ms. Andrews up next week.

At we published a guide to digital security for academics who may find themselves under outside attack.

At the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom digs underneath the AI girlboss aesthetic (recently demonstrated by Reese Witherspoon and Mel Robbins). “One wonders if celebrity influencers hawking A.I. under the guise of feminism have even bothered to read the news.”

From a few weeks ago consider Roth and Wharton. An interesting juxtaposition.

is looking for the next batch of most promising young American novelists. is looking for new books about the South.

This one from my friends and by Andy Orin, “I Cannot Throw Away USB Cables and It’s Becoming a Problem” hits a little close to home.

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Recommendations

A very delayed Friday night flight back home after a very wonderful day with the good folks of Northern Virginia Community College has me several hours short of sleep and time, so no recommendations this week, I’m afraid, but if you’re looking for something to read, scroll back up. I am always open for recommendation requests, however.

Instructions to Make a Request Here!

Tell everyone else your list of ten best novels published English, if you dare.

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See you next week. Imma going to take a nap.

JW
The Biblioracle

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So for this week, I have a little experiment, a simultaneous publication of a dialog I did with , author of, most recently Metallic Realms, and the proprietor of the newsletter, which regular readers know I link to often.

We started chatting in Substack’s “notes” feature about something we’d noticed on social media and decided to take it offline and see what kind of shared insights we could generate. Some of this might be a little inside baseball for those who identify more as readers than writers, but it fits with a theme I’ve explored here periodically and address specifically in More Than Words, that if we truly value reading and writing we need systems and structures that support that work.

It’s long, but I found talking with Lincoln interesting and generative and my hope is you will as well. All the usual links and recommendations are still below.

Lincoln Michel’s most recent novel is Metallic Realms (Atria Books). He is also the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and the novel The Body Scout (Orbit). His fiction appears in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Baffler, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Lightspeed. He writes the weekly literary newsletter Counter Craft.

John Warner: So, we both took note of a particular Bluesky comment from writer/bookstore owner Lauren Groff:

I don’t think either of us have any beef with Lauren Groff. I recommend her books all the time and she put her money where her mouth is by opening a bookstore in her Florida hometown, but there’s something off about this right? Like is Substack to blame for this state of things?

Lincoln Michel: I’ll start off by saying I admire Lauren Groff as a writer and as a person. I think she’s a real “literary citizen” who cares about the state of literature and is probably speaking from that place. That said, her comments strike me as exactly backwards.

I do agree with Stratis that it’s quite bad we’ve lost great magazines with strong editorial guidance and real pay rates. But writers under, say, 45 (this includes me) missed out on a world where you could make real income freelancing for great magazines that would help you shape a career. That didn’t exist for any but a very small handful of us.

John Warner: I’m 56 and I would say that while the world still existed to some degree when I was coming up, it was well past its peak even then.

Lincoln Michel: Yeah, as my age cutoff implies, this has been true for at least a couple decades. From my vantage point, the growth of Substack is a response/symptom/whatever you want to call it to the constriction and, in many cases, decimation of career paths in writing. Mostly in journalism, but also in literary writing. All of the damage wrought by cheap online ad rates, “pivoting to video,” self-inflicted missteps, and above all the big tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X sucking up revenue—that all happened long before Substack even existed as a company. Certainly well before it took off in the last 3 years or so.

John Warner: It’s not entirely clear what Substack is being blamed for. As you say, all this stuff predates Substack by quite a lot. To the extent that Substack appears ascendent right now is mostly a matter of a kind of luck and timing. It’s not hugely different from the vision for Medium which failed to thrive in the same way MySpace tanked while Facebook became its own nation state.

Contra the language of the platform’s founders (who I honestly think are kind of dopey and routinely say shit that makes me cringe) Substack is not a revolution. It’s just next.

Lincoln Michel: I agree. Substack is a blogging platform with a functioning payment system. It’s basically Blogger meets Patreon. Smartly executed and designed with a good discovery system, but it is not something radically new. I don’t think it’s the “literary revolution!” that some on here like to say. But I don’t see how you could rank it high among threats to literature in 2026. I think there are a lot of problems with the state of media in general and the literary world more specifically. Plenty of problems with Substack too. But Substack seems like a little lifeboat in a tsunami. Not sufficient, but certainly not the problem.

For example, I can’t imagine blaming Substack for the death of newspaper book review sections, like when Bezos decided to gut the Washington Post‘s recently. But Substack has been the home to a lot of book reviewers, including now former WP critic Ron Charles. It’s provided a source of new book review coverage as other sources dry up. That’s a good thing, even if Substack can’t fully replace what was destroyed by others.

John Warner: I actually started my Substack in 2021 because the Chicago Tribune was purchased by a private equity firm and I thought it was only a matter of time before my column got 86’d. That hasn’t happened because I’m just that good!

No, more likely because my freelance rate hasn’t changed in a decade, I deliver my copy on time and the page where I appear every Sunday is already laid out. I’m grateful to still be there, but the audience has steadily eroded as the circulation drops. If I was 15 to 20 years older I could’ve had that sucker syndicated in 100’s of newspapers for a decade and I’d be corresponding with you from my yacht.

In this reality, I’ll keep doing it until they tell me to stop, but there’s no future in it, and if I were to hang it up on my own initiative, they wouldn’t replace me with books coverage.

Lincoln Michel: I also started mine in 2021, and it was for similar reasons. There just didn’t seem to be a future in freelance writing for me. A newsletter was more a fallback plan than a strategy. The economy of freelance writing–especially for anything literary–has been broken for a long time. There’s a million things we could blame here from smart phones to America’s anti-intellectualism to whatever, but it kind of doesn’t matter. We have to make a career somehow and pay rent somehow. What do you expect writers to do? Crank out 2,000 book reviews a year at $25 bucks a pop to be part of literary venues?

That’s barely hyperbole. Lit sites paid (and still pay!) like 25-75 bucks for a piece. Sometimes more if you’re lucky or the piece is long. I’m not saying they’re exploiting writers per se. Most sites and mags just don’t have the funds to pay well. The online arms of established magazines–GQ, Rolling Stone, big newspapers, etc.--pay several hundred but that is still hard to live on because it’s hard to get that many pitches accepted, much less find the time to write them all. The tradeoff was supposed to be that these institutions would, if not pay you much, at least get you readers, confer legitimacy, and help jump start a career by leading to book contracts or a staff job. That deal evaporated sometime in the 2010s. Publishing in those magazines and venues just doesn’t lead to as many other opportunities as they used to.

So the question is, again, what do you expect writers to do?

John Warner: Again, this is no shade against Lauren Groff, her success is deserved on every level - talent, work, hustle - but she has reached a level where she has a readership in what remains of the critical apparatus, among the regular book buying audience, and also - and this is underappreciated - among the independent bookstore crowd which generates things like the Indie Next list. If there is a larger erosion of reading/book buying it will affect her like it will every else, but she has a solid readership. Most of us don’t achieve that.

I’ve published 10 books over 26 years, but if you look at the list, it’s bizarre. The first one (My First Presidentiary co-authored with Kevin Guilfoile) was done in colored pencil. I now opine on how we should still teach young people to write. I sometimes think of myself as one of those land mammals who have to keep moving toward the remaining source of sustenance. The time when the abundance of the wild could nourish everyone is long gone. That’s why you might find me in your garbage cans, my grubby little paws latched onto the carcass of your rotisserie chicken.

Deep down, my personality and interests are ill-suited to a networked platform like Substack - I mostly want to be left alone with my thoughts as I write them down for later consumption - but if I want to write as a profession, it makes sense to be here.

Lincoln Michel: To pull back a second to the original tweets, I’m also not actually sure “small literary venues” specifically are dying. Has the number of lit mags on Submittable or Duotrope notably declined? The damage and missteps I’ve alluded to mostly seem to have destroyed for-profit businesses. Glossy magazines. Regional newspapers. Etc. Places that need ad revenue and subscriptions to survive. Most literary magazines are some combination of nonprofits, hobbies/labors-of-love, or funded by universities and staffed by undergrad or grad students. Have small lit venues disappeared? Lit mags are always dying and being replaced by new ones, oc course. But has the churn changed? And here we need to note Substack itself has helped create some interesting new magazines such as Strange Pilgrims, Zona Motel, and The Metropolitan Review.

What do you think? Are small literary venues dying out? And more importantly, where do you think Substack benefits or damages writers?

John Warner: Some literary venues have disappeared. Glimmertrain wrapped things up in 2019. The Gettysburg Review was casually erased by an indifferent college administration a few years back. Both these places were a tier below the elite, but they were significant credits.

Here’s what I know, essentially that for the entirety of my life studying writing and then working as a writer the ways writers made their livings have been disappearing. When I was in college (1988-92) the conventional wisdom was that you write a lot, publish stories in little magazines, and then see if you can’t break through to a bigger spot (New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Esquire, Playboy, Story Magazine, maybe) after which an agent would be in touch and you would get a two book deal (stories then novel) with a reputable press. Those early stories were enough for the tenure track job and then the books would be for tenure.

Badabing! Badaboom! The life of a writer. Some folks coasted, others continued to produce. Either way, not a bad gig. Did anyone, including publishers, make any money on these books? Sometimes, not always, but that wasn’t really the point.

But by the time I finished my MFA (1997) while this path still existed, it was rare and narrow. The academic industry of creative writing had expanded to unsustainable levels, and it’s only greater now. I think there were about 50 MFA programs when I applied. What are there now, 300?

You could still hope to be discovered, and I had a couple of nibbles in the late 90’s, early oughts when I was a finalist for an Esquire fiction award and published my first story in McSweeney’s and agents came looking for fresh prospects, but for a combination of reasons (I was good, but not like undeniably good) and increasingly scarce opportunities, that compact was not on offer. There were exceptions. I remember eating my heart out over Gabe Hudson and Arthur Bradford getting deals for story collections, (Then I read them and recognized they were better than I was.), but they were the exceptions.

A bunch of those heavy hitter publications I named don’t publish fiction anymore. The New Yorker essentially doesn’t publish unagented fiction. I wrote this (now embarrassing) cri de coeur against the new New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, who casually dissed the slush pile inhabitants as “unsavvy” near the start of tenure, in 2003! This would be the latest possible date for that old path, but as the piece shows, by then, that path was closed.

Lincoln Michel: Yeah, I graduated college in 2005 (and an MFA in 2009) so I heard a lot of the same advice you did from professors or visiting agents/editors. People who still remembered the old models. I was told how agents read lit mags–not just The Paris Review but second, third, and fourth tier magazines–to find new clients. How it was common to start your career with a two book deal from a big publisher with the short story collection first. How a good debut could land you a tenure track job. Etc.

None of that really happened to me or my peers. We didn’t find agents through mid-tier lit mag publications. We did not get two book deals or when we did it was a novel first and a story collection begrudgingly later (and even that feels like ancient history as big publishers almost never do story collections anymore). I do have some friends who landed teaching tenure-track jobs early on, although widespread adjunctification has made the number shrivel too.

John Warner: We’ve both spent our time in the non-tenure track teaching world and in a lot of ways higher ed parallels publishing in that some folks made it over the line to something sustainable while lots of other, equally qualified people doing the same labor found themselves in jobs that were not viable long term. I relied on writing/editing and a well-employed spouse always during my teaching career. I was more fortunate than many, but in a “just” world, those tenure track jobs would’ve still existed.

Lincoln Michel: I think this gets at something central to the conversation, which is that it feels like all the typical career paths for writers imploded at once. Staff magazine jobs evaporated at the same time newspapers were collapsing and adjunctification took over universities. In publishing, the midlist and thus advances have been shrinking (unless you’re writing to whatever the latest commercial fiction trend is). Plenty has been written about how even film and TV jobs pay less and are harder to find.

That said, I don’t want to sound like I’m spinning a big sob story. Most of my dedicated writer friends did find agents and did/do publish. But, we didn’t get there through the old model. I’ve published in tons of literary magazines, including big ones like Granta and The Paris Review. Yet, I’m pretty confident my other activities–like having a lot of Twitter followers, blogging at Electric Literature while I was an editor there, and yes having a popular Substack–that has helped me the most. To pick a specific example, I got my first adjunct MFA class because the program director had been following my tweets about genre fiction and asked if I wanted to teach a speculative fiction class.

The old model didn’t work for most to begin with. It just doesn’t seem to work for anyone now. The younger writers who are making it work are following other paths.

John Warner: The early days of the internet had some promise. I was getting $600 a pop from Modern Humorist for bits like writing a Britney Spears fan letter in the voice of Camille Paglia, but that was never going to last either. Any time a path has been identified, it’s probably already disappearing from in front of you.

More importantly, I think you’re illustrating one of the principles that has been constant essentially during the digital age, which is that opportunities require you to be, to some degree “present” online. My early breaks were publishing at the McSweeney’s website, and getting noticed there by the guys at Modern Humorist, which turned into the first book followed by just playing out the string until all that went away. My second book came from a parody of writing advice at McSweeney’s that my editor (Jane Friedman) saw and asked if I could do a book along those lines for Writer’s Digest Books. That project turned into a short-lived humor imprint with F+W Publications where we put out a handful of titles, including one by Wendy Molyneux who has gone on to big stuff in TV and film (Bob’s Burgers, The Great North) and Chris Monks who took over from me as editor of the McSweeney’s website.

Oh yeah, somewhere in there I started editing the McSweeney’s website because I knew Dave Eggers and he was looking for help. The Tournament of Books was started by my buddies at The Morning News and Kevin Guilfoile had this idea that it would be funny if he and I did color commentary on the judgements. That was almost 20 years ago. One day when we’d run out of stuff to say, on a lark I declared that I would give everyone who told me the last five books they’d read a personalized reading recommendation. I called myself “The Biblioracle” and doled out like 200 recommendations over a few hours. A year later I got a chance to do a sample column for the rebranded Chicago Tribune books section (Printers Row) and haven’t missed a week in over 15 years. If I hadn’t been doing all this different stuff, primarily online, I never would have come to anyone’s attention who had the power to put me proximate to an opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard and delivered as best I could on these projects and I “deserved” whatever success and opportunities came my way, but there’s also undeniable chance involved and tons of stuff failed! That humor imprint doesn’t exist anymore. By the end, I couldn’t give the books away for free, even though the books were great. My novel is out of print. A threatened lawsuit nixed another book. Printers Row is long gone. Etc…etc….

Lincoln Michel: Your point about needing to be online to get opportunities makes me think of another reason Substack is thriving. It’s not just the decline of magazines. It’s also the decline of other social media networks. This is most obvious with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Twitter used to be the ideal place to share work and get readers for your journalism, criticism, whatever. Now it’s all spammers and scammers paying for bluechecks and outgoing links are suppressed in the algorithm. It doesn’t help writers anymore. Facebook is a wall of ads and AI slop. BlueSky and others all lack the reach of old Twitter. Instagram and TikTok are image and video based. Substack is what’s left for writers. The opportunities I used to get from my tweets, I now get from my Substack articles.

John Warner: Totally agree. Twitter was a real help in terms of drawing attention to my work, particularly writing about higher education and now it’s been well over a year since I looked at it. It has no utility whatsoever in terms of writing and career-building.

Substack strikes me as the place people have gone when there’s nowhere else to go. For writers, it’s going to work great for some, okay for others, and not at all for most until it stops working entirely at some point in the indefinite future.

For readers, I think it’s clearly a worse proposition than a world of robust publications that collect different voices under an umbrella. I know there’s a lot of frustration with the gatekeepers of the world - check out my twenty-three-year-old rant about Deborah Triesman above - but they serve a purpose.

Lincoln Michel: Right, I would prefer to be edited by serious editors in high-quality magazines that paid decent rates and had a significant readership! That sounds great. Sign me up!

I feel like some people act as if writers here were debating A) a hard but rewarding career in magazine writing or B) self-publishing on Substack for more money. Like we gave up valuable literary community (or whatever) to be mere individual mercenaries. That’s maybe the case for a few big names in journalism and politics writing. For most of us though, especially in the literary space, A) was never an option. It’s like blaming authors who self-publish for not sticking it out and getting that six-figure Big 5 deal. That huge Big 5 deal was never coming, at least for 99.99%.

Not only was there no steady career for us to leave at all but even an unsteady one didn’t necessarily exist. Most of what I write at Counter Craft I could not have sold to magazines at all. I actually pitched a craft column with the name “Counter Craft,” to some lit sites that liked working with me. I was told columns didn’t work in the social media SEO age. They could only consider individual, occasional articles.

I don’t even think the success of Counter Craft proves they were wrong. Probably a craft column would not have driven a lot of traffic on a magazine’s website. Certain things do work on Substack (or individual newsletters on other platforms) that simply do not work in traditional magazines, online or off.

Do you feel that way? As a Substack writer and reader, are there things that Substack enables that simply don’t work elsewhere?

John Warner: I think there’s a lot of different approaches/genres that are kind of native to or suited to Substack like what calls an “effort post,” but I think the commonality among most of this stuff is that it feels like you’re having a sustained conversation with a specific readership and that pieces don’t need to be wholly figured out and polished, the thinking can be fresh and contingent.

At least that’s how I think of it because I almost always write my newsletter between 7:30 and 11am on Saturday morning. I spend the week gathering material in my head and browser tabs and then let loose. Because we both go back some, I think it’s really just blogging and tend to think the blogger’s mentality is still what works best. Counter Craft is pretty focused, but it seems to me that you’re often reacting to what’s in the writing world ether, right?

Lincoln Michel: It definitely feels like a return to blogging to me, with the same jumble of stuff that made blogging interesting. Longer essays mixed with very short reaction posts to news or digressions to unusual topics (I remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates blogged for The Atlantic, he’d have a long history post about say civil rights followed by a post on superhero comics). I love that mix, as well as the response / counterresponse discussion that can happen between bloggers.

I don’t systemetize my posts really, but it’s a mix for me. A long craft essay I work on for weeks followed by quick commentary on some lit world topic, plus interviews and other things. But yeah, it is the sort of thing you can only do in a blogging format. It wouldn’t work as a proper column in a print magazine. You’d want that to be more standardized. Which is just to say that again part of the appeal of Substack is that it allows you to do things you can’t really do elsewhere.

To switch gears, since we’ve critiqued Groff’s tweets, it’s probably fair to say what we think is correct. You’ve talked about how readers are better served by good magazines collecting a variety of voices. I agree. And I think Groff’s comments in context with Stratis’s do get at a big problem, which is that it is really hard for new voices to get a foothold anywhere including Substack. Good magazines, good mentors, and yes even good “gatekeepers”--a term I don’t think makes all that much sense in the internet age, but…–can really help emerging writers. (Bad ones, of course, can destroy them. Much has been written about how 2010s websites encouraged writers to write messy personal essays that got rageclick traffic for the magazine but left writers, often young women, out to dry.)

Substack leans pretty heavily to already famous voices. Perhaps it’s no worse than anywhere else online in that regard, but it doesn’t seem like a great venue for new voices.

John Warner: I think there was a first-mover advantage to some of the earlier arrivals that no longer holds for new, non-prominent writers. There will always be exceptions of unique and incandescent voices that gather attention, but my newsletter wouldn’t have been viable if not for arriving with a couple thousand subscribers who followed me from the Tribune. Ron Charles, formerly of the Washington Post, has been here a couple of months and well-eclipsed me already because he’s probably the biggest name in book reviewing for regular readers. An independent writer who does reviews could not achieve that here no matter how talented and prolific.

Lincoln Michel: The old magazine model was better at this, in part because new magazines could rise to the top and bring new voices and formats with them. You brought up McSweeney’s, and that is the perfect model of how I used to think these worlds worked. My understanding is McSweeney’s largely started to publish the kind of work that the older institutions turned their nose at. By the time I was in college, McSweeney’s was the cool and popular magazine. It had become the new institution. Other magazines cropped up to publish different styles in response. That’s the good and healthy way culture used to work. Old institutions got staid and either evolved or were replaced by new ones. Rinse and repeat. I’m not sure the current internet ecosystem, Substack included, can foster that healthy cultural churn in the same way. The algorithms flatten everything and encourage repetition over divergence.

John Warner: You noted some of the Substack publications that are an effort to establish a “scene” under editorial mastheads, and even as some of this writing is not for me I’m very encouraging of these efforts because I think experimentation is necessary and healthy. In More Than Words I have a chapter titled “On the Future of Writing for Money” that sorts through Substack, crowdsourcing, traditional venues, and other models in terms of how sustainable they are for individual writers and a larger reading culture, and my conclusion is that writer collectives like Defector and Flaming Hydra are the most promising way forward, so bringing people together under different umbrellas is a necessary thing.

I do wonder if the incentives of Substack being a social media platform are going to be distorting. There’s already a kind of rivalrousness/chumminess aspect to it, which is good for attention and short term drama, but ultimately you have to produce stuff that readers want to read. Spectacle only goes so far.

But honestly, it’s not all that different. In the early oughts a bunch of people who wrote for McSweeney’s used to hang out in the Salon Table Talk message boards and that shit could get weird and petty too.

None of it was probably healthy, but things keep on keepin’ on.

Lincoln Michel: I also admire the Defector model. Although I do think the most accurate criticism of Substack as a model applies to it as well. There’s just not enough subscriber money to go around and pay as many people as the magazine and newspapers did before the internet. The blunt economic reality is that the old model rested on high-paying print ad rates (or things like classifieds), which the internet has undermined, and subscriptions, which will always be harder to get in a world of ever proliferating entertainment options. (Media organizations that survived often have other revenue streams–e.g., the New York Times games department apparently is a huge driver of subscriptions–that can’t simply be recreated by everyone else.) Both factors seem like they can only get worse. LLMs/AI corporations are overtly working to decrease even the meager ad revenue websites get–e.g., Google showing AI summaries at the top of searches so users don’t click off of Google–and using Chatbots to generate things or date an AI bot or whatever is just another thing dividing people’s time.

John Warner: Indeed, the remaining sources of revenue for writing are always being cannibalized and it’s harder and harder for that money to make it to the writer. I don’t see a scenario where this improves at a systemic level. Yes, a Brandon Sanderson can make a bunch of bank through crowdsourcing, more than just working through traditional publishing, but he was a success in traditional publishing first and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get in the order fulfillment business. I want to write stuff.

You’re someone I would point to as a person who is figuring out how to build a “career” as a writer of books - I mostly make my money on non-book or book-related work like speaking - with each new project moving you forward on a trajectory. Do you think along these lines or is it just one foot in front of the other?

Lincoln Michel: While I’m glad it seems that way, I’m afraid I’m definitely not in the “can live on fiction writing” camp. The majority of my income comes from teaching. I teach composition fulltime and do various other teaching gigs too.

As far as a book career, I’ve always wanted to write the kind of weird books I loved to read growing up (and still love to read). The kind of stuff that few ever lived on. I don’t have interest in order fulfillment or made-to-order fiction chasing whatever trends and tropes editors are buzzing about at a given moment. Of course, I hope–like we all do–to be the rare exception who writes startlingly original work that is also somehow bestselling and award-winning at the same time. And why not, let’s throw in an acclaimed adaptation that leads to a sprawling multimedia franchise universe too while we’re dreaming. But back in reality, I’ve always planned to support myself on other things to allow me the freedom to write what I want to write. A career that lets you write books, rather than a career of book writing.

John Warner: I’m a subscriber to the newsletter (on which you recently appeared) and it’s clear that it’s very hard to make money only through writing. Lightning could strike, I suppose. If Reese or Jenna pick your book, you’re going to get a nice payday at the least and you have (by my rough estimate) a one-in-four shot at making a million bucks if your sales go nuclear, but even that kind of promotion isn’t a guarantee of a life-changing breakthrough. And maybe that breakthrough is also not a great thing if what you’re after is a life as a writer.

Maybe you saw the New York Times story about Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, who got dumped by her publisher when she couldn’t deliver the next book after being battered by late-arriving backlash to that first book. She clearly made a massive pile of dough from The Help, so cry me a river, but if writing is the thing you want to do, she wasn’t doing all that much of it over the last seventeen years.

At some point I started looking at my career through the lens of whether or not I was looking forward to what I had to do that day when I got up in the morning. I count myself lucky that, for the most part, I’ve achieved that.

But it still feels pretty precarious. I’m working on my next nonfiction book proposal now, and I think it’s a strong idea that will both appeal to the audience for my recent books and maybe expand the circle a bit, but despite recent successes, there’s zero guarantee it’ll be traditionally published.

Putting on your crystal ball, where do you think we’re going to be in say, five or ten years? When it comes to Substack, I worry about the people who are going all in on the platform as their vehicle for supporting themselves. I think the owners could unilaterally change the ecosystem in a way that makes the situations of writers much worse at any time and the more locked-in you are, the tougher it will be.

Lincoln Michel: It’s very precarious and the sands are always shifting. “Don’t quit your day job” remains, sadly, probably the best advice. I’m with you that writers should not put their chips all in on any given platform. Look at Twitter again. But I think if we broaden out from Substack and think of newsletters and blogging (like you I still think of this as a form of blogging), I bet they will remain very useful for writers. I think their importance will increase.

The “enshittification” of the internet will continue apace. It will probably accelerate with LLMs. Facebook and Google search and whatever else have no incentives to drive traffic and revenue to writers. They can replace us, for most of their users, with LLM slop. But, they aren’t the entirety of existence. Lots of people still care about art. Lots of people read. And I expect a lot of the population–maybe the majority, maybe not–will actively seek out human authors and individual voices with idiosyncratic interests as a counter to a beige slop world. Part of that will be people seeking out more real world experiences. Perhaps a new flourishing of reading series and salons or something. But online, as far as literary culture goes, I’d place my bets on newsletters and blogs. Though the form they take will probably change and mutate. (Back in the blogging heyday, many glossy mags and newspapers hosted blogs. Maybe that comes back and revives some literary ventures?)

John Warner: This is a source of some hope for me too. The digital revolution when I was coming up was exciting because it allowed us to connect with all these like-minded people we didn’t really know existed online. I think the next phase is more likely to be, cripes, let’s get off our fucking computers!

Lincoln Michel: Sorry to be a little corny at the end here, but I feel like we’ve talked about many true problems and maybe it is nice to include what’s good or interesting or hopeful about the present state of literature. Author income is in a dire state. OTOH, I think this is a very exciting time for authors who want to experiment in new forms, try out new models, and do whatever we want. (Maybe that’s the freedom of not expecting money?) One thing that sucked about the old models is authors got slotted into roles. If you started as a horror writer, you were a horror writer. If you started a small press author, you were probably staying on small presses. Etc. Now? There’s way more freedom to bounce around between imprints, genres, and forms. You can be self-publishing science fiction on Monday, putting out a big press literary novel on Tuesday, and doing a weird experimental work on a small press on Wednesday.

Correspondingly, this is a great time to be a reader. Really. Yes, discoverability is a problem, but there are so many interesting works being put out in so many different genres and such a greater access to world literature in translation than perhaps ever before.

Can I toss these questions back to you? If you were starting your career today, with an eye for the next 5-10 years, what would you do? And what about the state of literature excites you, despite whatever problems it has?

John Warner: I agree that there is an opportunity and atmosphere available for people who are willing to just try stuff. I keep referencing McSweeney’s because I was around for its origins, but it was born out of Dave Eggers being frustrated that the glossy magazines weren’t publishing stuff that seemed genuinely interesting and worth reading. There was no intention beyond doing one issue of a journal and then another and another. They’re up to 82 issues.

The website existed simply because the internet was new and you were supposed to have a website. Prior to me taking the reins as editor it wasn’t even primarily a humor website. I looked at what had been published and thought that this weird funny stuff seemed like it would play best online so we should focus on that. Thanks to the superior efforts of my successor, Chris Monks, It’s now a quasi-institution and because the whole enterprise is now non-profit, sustainable.

The key, that you hit on, is for people to do the work that compels them. Don’t try to chase someone else’s path because that looks like the way to have a hit. Success in this realm is always idiosyncratic. After the fact, we go looking for the next Gone Girl or whatever, but I’ve always viewed that as a dead end.

I also think and hope we’re going to see another era of successful small/independent publishers. The math of the business is punishing (as this piece from the Dalkey Archive’s Chad W. Post shows), but there is a desire for people to both write and read stuff that falls outside the main paths of publishing. I’ve been reading a bunch of books from a Canadian publisher, Biblioasis, lately (most recently Silver Lake by Alex Pugsley), that are fantastic. (They also published this year’s Tournament of Books runner-up, Passenger Seat.) Reese and Jenna are probably not going to latch on to these books, but there must be at least some audience for these things because they’re great.

I hope there’s a way for the work to make sense for everyone involved.

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This week at the Chicago Tribune I weighed in on Ben Lerner’s much discoursed about new novel, Transcription.

At Inside Higher Ed I interviewed Ben Williamson of the University of Edinburgh who has been tracking the proliferation of “Frankencitations,” AI-invented publications that start proliferating in works cited pages.

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week, including Angel Down by Daniel Kraus winning for fiction and Things in Nature Merely Grow, a devastating account of the experience of grief following the suicide of her younger son, by Yiyun Li winning for memoir/autobiography.

Two links this week for people who want to read along with others. One a project spearheaded by and of teachers reading Bleak House together. (It’s underway, but maybe it’s not too late to join. At least it’s a model for others.) The other is under the Defector banner, where David Roth will be leading a group read of Robert Coover’s sui generis novel, The Universal Baseball Association.

A very entertaining outtake from ’s book, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction about a great American scammer.

And via my very old friends from , “Excerpts from Chief Justice John Roberts’ High School English Essays” by Mark Paglia.

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Recommendations

1. Load Bearing by Jane Hartsock
2. I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney
3. Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
4. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
5. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Jane W. - Indianapolis, IN

This novel felt sort of prescient at the time it was published (2009) and now I wonder if we can read it as a warning for where we are now, Want Not by Jonathan Miles.

Request your reading recommendation.

Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate and even those who don’t because why not have a happy day?

I should probably remind people about More Than Words and that I’m happy to come speak to your school, college, or organization on why writing still matters in the age of AI, because that’s my primary source of income to make a living as a writer, so that’s what I’ve just done.

See you next week,

JW
The Biblioracle

How much does it matter if you understand what you’re reading?

As with all these questions, it depends on the context - what you’re reading, why you’re reading, etc… - but I’d like to suggest that not only is it okay to not understand what you’re reading it can even be deeply pleasurable and developing the skill to read without understanding is highly desirable.

There’s been some online chatter about “difficult” books that is as annoying as all online chatter - which is to say, very - but sometimes the chatter reveals some cultural attitudes that are worth examining.

(B.D. McClay) covers my sentiments about folks arguing over whether or not Toni Morrison’s Beloved is “difficult” and what it means to say so. Just to emphasize, yes, Morrison can be difficult and finding her books difficult is not a sign of defect in the reader or a general increase in cultural illiteracy. Morrison didn’t set out to make her books hard to read, but they are meant to be challenging and they may be challenging in different ways to different readers.

Too often, “understanding” is conflated with a fairly surface-level measure of “comprehension,” a belief that is reinforced by many of the patterns of schooling, which privilege this surface level understanding on standardized assessments, including in our supposedly advanced curriculums like AP exams.

But reading is not just a process of achieving comprehension - or at least it shouldn’t be. Reading (like writing) is an experience and confusion and disorientation can be both interesting and useful experiences to the reader for reasons that go well-beyond school.

I just filed a review of Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, and in the review I admit that much of the content of the book’s opening section, a conversation between the narrator and his 90-year-old academic mentor flies over my head. I assume it is rich with allusion and knowing Lerner as an autofictionist, there’s probably a real-life figure he interviewed that’s associated with the fictional version, but none of this not understanding got in the way of my emotional, aesthetic experience of the book, which was really quite profound.

It’s possible that knowing or understanding more would enhance my appreciation of the work. This avenue is obviously open to me, but not taking it does nothing to diminish the experience I had reading the novel.

We don’t need to understand something to engage with or enjoy it.

—

When I was sixteen-years-old I would have said my favorite writer was Tom Wolfe, and specifically identified his essay collections The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as the books which triggered my fandom.

More specifically it was a specific essay in Kandy-Kolored about NASCAR driver Junior Johnson that had me in love at first read. First published in Esquire, “The Last American Hero” tells the story of the (literally) legendary driver who started his professional motoring career as “the greatest, most fabled night-road driver in the history of Southern bootlegging.”

I read the first paragraph of the story and was, quite simply, smitten:

I was responding to the energy, the verve of Wolfe’s New Journalism style, and that energy had me reading less immediately accessible pieces than “The Last American Hero” about New York culture and politics and drugs that I had exactly zero connection to. I even read Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers a book collecting two essays, one of which is set entirely at a Manhattan dinner party hosted by Leonard Bernstein honoring the Black Panthers while knowing nothing about Leonard Bernstein or the Black Panthers, a condition that would not have been the case for Wolfe’s readership for the essays in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I ended up choosing Wolfe as the author for my de rigueur high school English term paper, and then un-de rigueured it by writing it in the style of Tom Wolfe, which led to a rather poor grade, even though I’d probably spent more time on it than anything else I’d ever done in school.

As a teenager in the 1980s I understood almost nothing about the cultural milieu in which Wolfe was working. All of this was foreign, and in the era where my go-to for quick information was the World Book Encyclopedia, I didn’t have a particularly easy way to get myself up to speed. But of course no amount of reading an encyclopedia (or now Wikipedia) entry would have truly, deeply, informed me. Over time, as I matured into a life of much greater overall knowledge and experience I can now see Wolfe’s political conservatism, the way he mocks the liberal pretensions in Radical Chic or (mostly) affectionately exoticizes the rural southerners - in contrast to Wolfe’s native gentried class - in “Last American Hero.”

Knowing more, I now tend to enjoy Wolfe less as his politics can genuinely irk me. If I was younger or less familiar with the world of higher education, I might’ve enjoyed Wolfe’s campus novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, as an uncomplicated lark, but at the time I read it, I could not help but think about all of the many things he was getting wrong.

Seeking or desiring understanding out of the gate can sometimes get in the way of the longer process of developing understanding which I’ll just go ahead and call “learning.” In a grad school course on the history of the novel we were assigned Ulysses and given three weeks to read it. Along with the novel we were assigned a critical companion, Stuart Gilbert’s nearly 400-page “interpretation” of the novel.

For the first chapter I read Joyce and then Gilbert and then Joyce again. I suppose this increased my understanding of the text, but it was incredibly time-consuming and my most significant impression was wondering how this Gilbert guy came up with this stuff.

For the second chapter I read Gilbert and then Joyce, which streamlined the process, but when reading Joyce I found myself trying to think in the fashion of Gilbert, to understand how one might make the connections collected in the interpretation. This didn’t go any better.

After those two chapters you might’ve found me in the “no one can understand this stuff” camp, wondering why English scholar types insist James Joyce is dressed in the greatest finery, when in reality, the dude is buck naked and smartypants like Stuart Gilbert can get stuffed.

With no real choice because I simply didn’t have the time to do it any other way, I started to just read the book to myself, softly sounding out the text as I went, something I never do, but which seemed necessary at the time.

And guess what? That was some interesting shit. I know that I didn’t understand huge swaths of it, and after finishing the entire text I selectively dug into Gilbert’s companion to work through some stuff I needed to pull together for a class presentation, but if you asked my at the end of the semester if Ulysses is worth reading, I would’ve said yes, just keep your expectations for “understanding” pretty low.

Last year, prior to a trip to Ireland I picked the book up and read the first and last chapters, and this time around all I could think was that this book is awesome. I was sad that my professional reading responsibilities kept (and will keep) me from re-reading it in its entirety.

One of the best things about reading is its glorious inefficiency. The story of a 500-page book which would take even a dedicated reader a week to get through can be told in a two-hour movie. The glory of this inefficiency is one of the reasons I cannot understand the enthusiasm of many for outsourcing “reading” to generative AI.

AI cannot read because it cannot think and it cannot experience. Relying on an AI summary of a text rather than reading it for yourself is to dodge the core responsibility of reading, to filter the text through your unique intelligence.

One of the reasons, maybe the chief reason so much of school has been shown to be so vulnerable to AI disruption is the multi-generation failure to maintain even small pockets of experiences that value the unique intelligences of young people. This was the chief lack I saw in my first-year writing students, and which led me to develop the curricular approach in The Writer’s Practice which privileges reading and writing as experiences. I needed students to first believe they had something worth saying.

The darker possibility is a mass embrace of the idea that these experiences of reading and writing are no longer worth doing now that we have these machines that simulate the process. The contempt that the powerbrokers of Silicon Valley have for the humanities as a field and even humans in general suggests we will need a rather passionate resistance to hold fast to things that matter.

And they do matter.

These people simply have no appreciation for what it means to engage one’s aesthetics and how this engagement is a vehicle for self-knowledge and personal growth, and also just plain pleasurable.

In More Than Words I recount an interview with disgraced criminal fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried in which he tells a journalist that he would “never” read a book. He went on: “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t ever want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you write about book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Sam Bankman-Fried’s most recent request for a new trial was rejected by a judge as a “waste of time.”

Bankman-Fried is going to have a lot of time on his hands during that 25-year prison term he earned for himself. I wonder if books might be an ease to the pain of incarceration.

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This week at the Chicago Tribune I cover Elizabeth Strout’s new novel The Things We Never Say, which got me pretty good.

At Inside Higher Ed I interviewed David M. Perry about his new book, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook.

explores why and what it means that book reviews are so overwhelmingly positive. Not a particularly new phenomenon, though the purely negative review may be increasingly rare. As for me, having total freedom about which books I discuss I’m simply unlikely to finish reading a book I think is bad and I won’t review a book that I haven’t read.

The employees of Hachette Book Group (which includes the Basic imprint that published More Than Words) are seeking unionization and I support their campaign.

has a short review and short conversation with Tom Perrotta, whose Ghost Town has just been released.

Maris Kreizman is inundated by book pitches. Me too.

In a short imagined monologue for my friends , Jimmy Chen channels a popular fictional character: “Miranda Priestly Roasts My Nirvana T-Shirt.” (Someday I should tell the story how I created the “short imagined monologues” category at the McSweeney’s website because I didn’t want to reject the humorous [but very short] piece from an all-time comedy legend.)

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Recommendations

1. A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, by Christopher Brown
2. The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald
3. A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit
4. Landmarks, by Robert MacFarlane
5. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes and The Amateur Emigrant, by Daniel Defoe

Jim R. - Williamstown, MA

A challenging list. I’m recommending a novel that manages to stitch together different elements into what I believe to be a very satisfying whole, Godwin by Joseph O’Neill.

Request a reading recommendation.

Neither a smooth nor particularly rough transition home after time away, but a reminder that the self-employed life means no one is doing anything while you’re away.

See you next week,

JW
The Biblioracle

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Yeah, a little cloudy I’m afraid, but beautiful nonetheless.

I’ve ben here as a speaker at the Alberta Teachers Association English Language Arts Council (ATA ELAC) biannual conference which draws together teachers from all over the province, and it has been a very nice time because it is a good thing to spend time in communion with others who do the same work as you and have the same struggles as you do and who are maybe feeling just a bit despairing about the broader world’s lack of support for your work.

You see a couple of hundred other people who are engaged in the same struggle and realize that no, you are not alone in feeling the way you feel, and it is heartening.

It strikes me that AI, at its heart, is anti-community. Sending students to a large language model for feedback on a piece of writing is telling them that the thoughts and feelings and experiences in their writing are immaterial to the act given that a large language model has no capacity for understanding thoughts, feelings, and experiences as it generates its response.

I literally cannot understand the allure of outsourcing my expression to generative AI. Anyone who is selling this anti-community ethos as the future is engaging in thinking that I can only describe as disordered.

I pulled this post off social media a couple of months ago because I was struck by the observation of a Silicon Valley culture where people are more fascinated with these automated AI task doers than other humans. My hunch and my hope is that these people are in the thick of the “AI Novelty Cycle,” but who knows how long this seduction will last?

Billions (maybe trillions) of dollars are being thrown at making those autonomous agents. Much less is going toward the community work of teaching and learning.

Which do you think is a better investment for humanity?

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This week at the Chicago Tribune I write how Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch is usually not the kind of novel I go for, but it completely won me over.

At Inside Higher Ed I shared a guest column from Iona professor Ivy Linton Stabell discussing a first-year writing assignment that uses large language models in the service of building community. It can be done!

My friends have published an excerpt from what looks to be a very funny book drawn from a very funny show, Documentary Now!, including a discount code for anyone who wants to buy the book.

I haven’t had time for perusing the internet for interesting thing to read, so if you have something that caught your eye this week, post it in the comments.

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Recommendations

As promised last week I’m trying to catch up with a bit of a backlog and get to everything that’s at least a month back. If I missed you, please feel free to send me a fresh request. I do try to accommodate everyone over time.

1. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
2. The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
3. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
4. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
5. Pony Confidential by Christina Lynch

Patricia N. - Neponset, IL

For Patricia, one of my favorite Midwestern novels, The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury.

1. More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner
2. Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
3. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
4. Trilogy Jon Fosse
5. The Trees by Percival Everett

Ned C. - Utica, NY

I’m going with Sally Rooney’s first novel, and still my favorite, Conversations with Friends.

1. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
2. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
3. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
4. Post Office by Charles Bukowski
5. More Than Words by John Warner

Ryan M. - Portland, ME

For Ryan I’m choosing Patrick deWitt’s strange and funny The Sisters Brothers.

1. The Humans by Matt Haig
2. The Vegetarian by Han Kang
3. The Rest is Memory by Lily Tuck
4. The Wager by David Grann
5. Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

Dan B. - Cleveland, OH

Severance by Ling Ma has nothing to do with the TV show it predates. It’s also a pandemic novel from before the most recent pandemic that anticipates some of the distortions of spirit caused by that particular event.

1. The Wildes by Louis Bayard
2. All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
3. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
4. A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown
5. Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe

Karen R. - Beverly Hills CA

Not an easy story to get through, but I think Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain Gang All-Stars will get Karen in its grips.

1. Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein,
2. Baldwin, A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs
3. Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino
4. Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust
5. Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago

Sarah D. - Albuquerque, NM

I think Sarah is a great candidate for the unconventional classic, Speedboat by Renata Adler.

Request a reading!

Mrs. Biblioracle and I are off to see Lake Louise. I’ll see you all here next week.

JW
The Biblioracle

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One of the favorite selling points of tech industry figures when it comes to the intersection of AI and education is the capacity for the creation of an on-demand tutor that is “infinitely patient.”

This is Sal Khan’s promise in Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing), where he takes inspiration from the novel Ender’s Game (a famously positive story about the fates of children) and describes a world where students have “a personalized tutor in every subject.”

In his manifesto, “Why AI Will Save the World”, tech investor Marc Andreessen puts it this way:

Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.

In my review of Khan’s book I called his views “unserious” because he does not seem to understand much of anything about teaching and learning, skipping several steps on his way to his AI-Aristotle future. This idea that somehow infinite patience is a positive quality in a teacher is perhaps the most telling sign that these people simply do not know how learning works.

Some of my most important formative educational experiences involved some teacher or authority figure losing patience with me. I will never forget the moment that my 8th grade language arts teacher Mrs. Thompson told me to “cut the shit” when I had quarter-assed a writing task. This is the same teacher who also read a short story of mine and declared that “she’d never read anything like it.” I think this was praise, or at least I took it that way, so when Mrs. Thompson said the obvious about my lackluster effort, I felt bad. I’d disappointed her.

Humans learn in communion with other humans. Maybe this was not true for Sal Khan who is quite obviously smarter and more driven than most other humans, but it is true for the vast majority of us.

In a recent article at Chalkbeat Sal Khan admits, with some mix of surprise and regret, that the very technology he said was going to revolutionize education was a “non-event” for most students. “They just didn’t use it much.”

No kidding. Back when Sal Khan was publishing Brave New Words, lots of people were saying this was going to be the case, me, , Audrey Watters, and many many others. As Watters say, “AI tutors" are not the future; they're the past.”

Please enjoy this mashup of a BBC report from 1965 on “learning machines changing education” and Khan’s demonstration of what it’s like to work with the Khanmigo chatbot.

In the Chalkbeat post mortem, Khan Academy’s chief learning officer Kristen DiCerbo suggests that the Khanmigo failure is a user problem, “Students aren’t great at asking questions well.”

My experience is that students are great at asking questions, which is not the same thing as asking questions of a tutor bot.

Back in 2024 I “debated” some dude from the American Enterprise Institute on the potential of chatbot tutors like Khanmigo. I took the skeptic’s side and argued that the number one reason this technology would not revolutionize education is because it did nothing in terms of the chief challenge of education: engagement.

I was right right, AEI dude was wrong. Sal Khan was wrong. Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, Arne Duncan, , Angela Duckworth, Tony Blair, and Francis Ford Coppola (seriously) - all of whom blurbed Brave New Words declaring it very serious indeed - were wrong.

They have always been wrong. They were wrong before they got started and yet hundreds of millions of dollars have gone towards a project that was doomed from the outset, dollars that could have - at least in theory - gone to, I don’t know, human beings who teach.

Over the years I have tried to practice good faith to these projects even as I was skeptical. I have spoken at length to people inside these projects and the granting organizations that fund them and it is clear they are well-meaning, not “grifters” out to profit at the expense of others.

But, like Mrs. Thompson telling me to cut the shit, I am out of patience. It’s time to move on from people like Sal Khan and projects like Khanmigo from sucking up so much money and oxygen when it comes to our systems of education.

Sadly, this is not happening. Not unless we make it happen.

We’re up against billionaires, world leaders, thought leaders, politicians, and one of the greatest film directors of all time, a tough set of opponents, but at least we have the benefit of being correct.

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What do you do when your AI-schools revolution fizzles? Slink off to lick your wounds and figure out something else to do with your life? Go back to the drawing board at a root level to better understand where you went wrong and return with something more deeply considered?

Not Sal Khan. You pivot to proposing a “disruption” of higher education.

Welcome to the Khan TED Institute, a joint project between Khan Academy, TED (as in talks) and ETS (Educational Testing Service). For $10,000 they are proposing to create a bachelor’s degree in “Applied AI” delivered online in two years.

I aired my doubts and grievances over this project at Inside Higher Ed in which I declare this project what it is: bullshit.

But it is bullshit backed not just by these three wealthy and powerful nonprofits, but also the institute’s “corporate thought partners” including Google, Microsoft, McKinsey, and Bain (among others).

Lest my feelings about this project be unclear, this is how I put them in the column:

These people are my enemies. I have only ill will for this project and wish them failure, because this vision for a future of postsecondary education is a recipe for mass immiseration and public disempowerment. Imagine a world where Microsoft, Google, McKinsey, et al … get to determine what and how you learn from cradle to retirement.

Anyone involved in higher education, particularly public higher education or private higher ed where your institution is not insulated by wealth and privilege, should also view this project as a direct assault on their continued existence. The higher education sector and those who have historically been responsible for it (government, voters, etc. …) should pause and reflect on how what’s happened to the sector has made it potentially vulnerable to this sort of program, but we also must set recriminations aside and deal with the threat directly.

Again, I don’t think Sal Khan is a bad person. He is not evil. I wish him nothing but health and happiness in his day-to-day existence. But we should wish him nothing but ill-will on this project because its success will mean that we have a society where individuals are essentially indentured to these corporate thought leaders. It means distorting education into a shape that pleases tech industry giants and consultants. To the extent our society already operates this way is not to our credit.

That a group of people think this is a positive direction for our collective future is mind boggling.

The good news is that Sal Khan has failed in every one of his revolutions. He gives good TED Talk, but he doesn’t seem to understand or care for anything about pedagogy. As says in his obituary for chatbot tutors, “Given that Sal Khan has tried unsuccessfully for nearly two decades to abstract humans away from human systems—first with human explanation, then with human evaluation, and most recently with human tutoring—it seems unlikely that he is the right person now to pivot edtech towards humanity.”

Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing the Khan TED Institute ethered from the get-go rather than having to engage in the same I-told-you-sos a couple of years from now.

Khan made it to 60 Minutes twice, 12 years apart, each time talking about a revolution. He was wrong both times.

How many times does someone get to be wrong before we stop listening to them?

Why do we have infinite patience for this man?

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At the Chicago Tribune, I tried the LitRPG genre and while I think I get what others get, I don’t get it.

At I contrasted the end of Hampshire College with the birth of the Khan TED Institute and what that says about the world today.

At the New York Times, Colson Whitehead entertainingly puts the boot to using AI to write for you. (Gift link)

A doctor who was an early adopter of AI scribes stopped using them when he realized how it was distorting his practice.

The 2026 Guggenheim Fellows were announced, including lots of writers. I always get a little envious of these things and then I remember that you actually have to apply, which in my case is never going to happen.

Via my friends , “In Our Glorious AI Future, There Will Be No Such Thing as Money (For You)” by Andrew Singleton.

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Recommendations

1. Fintech Dystopia by Hillary J. Allen
2. The Road: Stories, Journalism, Essays by Vasily Grossman
3. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin
4. The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
5. Carthage: A New History by Eve MacDonald

Sean H. - New York City

A bit of a tough one for me since I don’t know these books, so I’m falling back on my biblioracling gift and letting the spirits guide me: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell.

I’ve got a bit of a backlog, but I also have a combo work/pleasure trip next week so I may do an all recommendations newsletter to catch-up so don’t hesitate to ask.

Request a reading recommendation.

I’ll be at a conference of language arts teachers for the province of Alberta next week in Banff, which is very exciting on multiple fronts.

If anyone has Banff-related travel tips, please share them in the comments.

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See you, in some form, next week.

JW
The Biblioracle

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Two nonfiction books about marriage, one by a first-time author, the other by a previous best seller who had her previous work turned into a multi-season TV show.

One is selling like gangbusters. This one:

The other is not. This one:

Now, most of us would be over the moon over the reported 1800 copies West’s book moved according to the New York Magazine “Book Gossip” column citing the title’s Bookscan numbers, but for someone whose previous book likely sold in the six figures and spawned a TV show spinoff, it’s a disappointment.

West’s book has not lacked publicity, firing off an intense round of what we now call “discourse” about West’s tale of coming to grips with and ultimately embracing her husband’s desire for a polyamorous relationship. West and her book were subject to multiple profiles and media pieces about her career, her relationship with her husband, and her relationship with her audience as well. One of the themes that seems to emerge from the discourse is that West wants to convince everyone that she is okay, that the struggles in her marriage have left her in a better place, but the problem is that lots of people do not believe her.

It’s not clear how much of this has to do with West and how much it has to do with others projecting themselves on to her experience, but when you are a public symbol for other women, it is the price of business.

Strangers has received lots of attention without necessarily generating discourse. Oprah’s interview with Burden has more than three million views in 10 days.

Much of the discussion about Strangers is not about Burden per se, but about what happened to her, which is that at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 as she and her husband of 20 years decamped to their Martha’s Vineyard second home, she received a voicemail from a man saying her husband was cheating on her with his wife. Burden confronted him, he confessed, declared it meant nothing, and that he was committed to her and only her.

The next morning he had a change of heart. This is from a New York Times Modern Love podcast interview with Burden:

In theory, Burden shouldn’t be all that sympathetic. She comes from New York aristocracy and married a dynamic, handsome striver. Her marriage imploded at her Martha’s Vineyard second home. Gwyneth Paltrow is going to play her in the movie version. West, in contrast, is a self-made writer gaining prominence by starting off at a Seattle alt-weekly before moving online to Jezebel all while forging a style that blends comedy and pathos while being unapologetic as her sometimes messy, human self.

But it’s Burden’s story that has intrigued not just the public, but the most important constituency for any book…readers.

What has happened with these books is akin to what happened with Oliva Nuzzi’s American Canto, which attempted to move units on the back of spectacle, spectacle that wasn’t even discussed in the book.

But unlike Nuzzi, West is a talented, established writer, presumably with an existing audience. The attention for her story and situation could have - maybe even should have - drawn readers. It’s not happening.

There’s a lot of discourse about the discourse about Adult Braces, suggesting that maybe the book isn’t selling because of a cultural shift under Trump, or that West’s previous fans feel betrayed by someone who seemed to live her life without apology giving in to the desires of a man who wants to have sex with other people.

Apparently people wondering WTF isn’t enough to induce them to read West’s book.

I don’t mind discourse or discourse about discourse, but I’m going to suggest that there is a simpler explanation for why Strangers has caught fire: It’s a compelling story that makes people want to know what happened.

It is also, apparently, a relatable story. Oprah opens her conversation with Burden this way:

“I wanted to do this book because I’ve had so many friends who have gone through this and I feel like I’ve gone through it with them. You are every woman…It’s a memoir of marriage, but it’s also a memoir of every woman who has gone through divorce.”

This is obviously not true. Burden is highly educated, wealthy in a way that insulates her from any financial consequences of the divorce, and had not been subject to erratic or abusive behavior prior to her husband’s departure.

(The last bit is one of the things that makes the story compelling. The implosion is apparently without warning.)

It’s easy from my position to play armchair publisher, but it’s not clear to me why the first question when considering what or how to publish a book is: Who might be interested in reading this book?

To succeed, a book needs a core audience, a clear, identifiable target of people who will be interested in what the book has to offer. The core audience of Strangers is upper middle class (or better) ladies who have been betrayed by the men in their lives. \

This is a very large audience.

The core audience for Lindy West’s book as it’s positioned in the marketplace is people interested in what’s been happening with Lindy West over the decade since the publishing of her book Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman. This is a not inconsequential number of people, West is very successful, but it is a fraction of the people who, upon hearing Belle Burden’s story think, I want to read that.

Burden says to Oprah that “Women see themselves in it,” but we’re clearly talking about a particular category of women. This happens to be the women who buy and read books.

I could tell that Strangers broke out when Mrs. Biblioracle asked if I’d heard of this Strangers book about some rich lady with a crappy husband.

The book is well packaged with the elegant, restrained cover and straightforward title Strangers: A Memoir of a Marriage. It is not fair to judge a book by the cover, but Adult Braces suggests that the story is going to be about someone who is a bit of a mess. Belle Burden, on the other hand, has done everything “right” and has her life turned upside down anyway.

Reviews of Strangers suggest that there’s a dignity to the writing as Burden shares humiliating moments, reflecting on them in hindsight and refusing to buckle from the memories. The book itself seems to be an act of defiance without announcing itself as such. It's a story of someone who is done with being judged.

Adult Braces is perhaps the opposite, a preemptive attempt to defend against perceived disapproval.

I’ve not read either book, but by disposition, I would’ve gravitated towards Adult Braces first. I found Shrill very funny, part of an era of unapologetic comedic personal essays from “oversharing” women. My favorites of these are Samantha Irby’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life and Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half.

But the nature of the differing discourses has me more interested in Strangers, even though I’ve sat through multiple hour-long interviews with Burden, interviews which recycle the same stories - like Burden making a sandwich at her husband’s behest after them breaking the news of their divorce to their children, an unbelievably galling request that she fulfilled.

There is always some element of alchemy behind unexpected nonfiction bestsellers.

(The celebrity memoirs which dominate the nonfiction list are not unexpected, though we should also note that not all celebrity memoirs become best sellers.)

Hindsight attaches in a way that suggests a particular success was inevitable, but in books, nothing is inevitable and sales success for any given book by the non famous is exceedingly unlikely. Strangers, a book about a subject (divorce) on which there are already lots of books, is on track to sell millions of copies. There’s more here than it just being relatable.

I get dozens of pitches a day that say things like “for readers of…” but I often find these pitches misguided. I think of a book like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass which became a phenomenon years after its initial publication on the strength of a steady accumulation of readers. What is someone pitching me when they compare a new book to a book that took half a decade to break through to that level?

Tell me who is going to read a book and why. That’s all I need to know.

I don’t play in best seller land, but I was confident that Why They Can’t Write would find at least some audience because I knew there were a lot of people like me, writing teachers frustrated by the conditions under which they were working. I was going to unpack the story of our lives and try to offer at least a little light to lead the way somewhere better.

I don’t think saying that a book is for people who like funny books, or books about science, or history is sufficient. Books are more than their subject matter.

In some sense, every bestselling nonfiction book not written by a celebrity or an already known quantity (Michael Pollan, Malcolm Gladwell, Brene Brown etc…) should be viewed as a surprise. Lots and lots of books are published. Having one that sells the 5000 or so copies a week it takes to make the NYTimes list is a longshot, period. Having one that spends months on the list, like Strangers, or West’s first book, Shill is a lightning strike.

But looking at these two books in tandem, it isn’t entirely inexplicable. Identify an audience, and give them a story they want to tell someone else about once they’re done.

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This week at the Chicago Tribune I reviewed Maria Semple’s very fun new novel, Go Gentle.

At Inside Higher Ed I walked through a way I think about teaching around AI, by focusing on experiencing “inflection points. Your boy was busy this week, as I also offered some thoughts about those legislature-mandated, right wing-funded “centers” that have cropped up at state universities and started acting decidedly incivil.

Helen DeWitt declined a $175,000 literary prize because she could not complete the promotional responsibilities associated with its acceptance. Is this a great injustice or self-sabotage, or a mix of both?

At LitHub, Brittany Allen counts down the most plausible English professors from television.

I’ll be curious to see what kind of reception and sales Lena Dunham’s forthcoming memoir gets in light of what I explore above. My bet is on strong sales. Here’s an interview with Dunham.

Via my friends and the legendarily funny Ginny Hogan, “America’s Op-Ed Columnists Brainstorm Future Headlines About the Birth Rate.”

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Recommendations

1. White Shroud by Antanas Skema
2. The Fawn by Magda Szabo
3. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
4. 1001 Arabian Nights
5. Metroland by Julian Barnes

Kyle M. - Maastricht, the Netherlands

Okay, this is not a book I can recommend to lots of people, but for the right reader, it blows the doors off, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.

Request Your Recommendation

I’m obviously speculating here this week. What do you think attests to these unexpected successes for nonfiction books. It isn’t enough for them to get publicity. Something has to take hold. What’s the magic?

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I hope Spring has sprung for all of you wherever you are, unless it’s the Southern Hemisphere, because that would be weird. Mrs. Biblioracle and I are going for a hike.

See you next week,

JW
The Biblioracle

The past couple of weeks there have been so many social media posts and articles by writers and journalists (essentially) outing themselves as enthusiastic users of generative AI technology in their work that it almost starts to feel like a coordinated campaign to nudge the conventional wisdom around AI, though I’m certain it is entirely organic.

There was a Wall Street Journal article on a guy at Fortune magazine who uses AI throughout his process cranking out many more stories than would otherwise be possible.

Kevin Roose of the New York Times described the “team” of Claude agents he used to edit his book to a writer at Wired.

Megan McArdle of the Washington Post uses AI for all kinds of things, things - which as explains here - run afoul of the Washington Post policies unless they are disclosed to the reader, which they are not.

Jasmine Sun a newly minted staff writer at The Atlantic described her development and deployment of her own custom Claude editor.

First, I fed the chatbot Claude an archive of my past writing, along with notes about what worked and didn’t about each piece. I used this to create a custom editing rubric based on my voice. Some criteria are generic, and others are personalized: One reads, “Does this play to your insider-anthropologist position” in Silicon Valley? Another asks whether the thesis shows up in the first 500 words. I dumped this guidance into a Claude project along with a reminder of its role: “You are not a co-writer. You cannot perceive. Your role is to help Jasmine write like the best version of herself.” I don’t want to be de-skilled, I reminded the machine. Your only job is to make me smarter.

There are numerous other examples. They are all similar. I am glad they are out in the world because these are conversations we should be having. Some schmuck got busted using AI in a book review for the New York Times because the AI plagiarized from another review. Hachette cancelled a novel because of a revelation of AI use. More will likely happen between the time I draft this and most people read it.

Lots of other writers have chimed in already, more entertainingly and insightfully than I’m likely to achieve here.

These include:

Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs who susses out who will and who will not “go AI.”

Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket who “refuses to accept an AI-poisoned future of journalism.”

who gets at some of the structural issues for working writers that are important to consider.

who encourages others to use AI use because his refusal to do so will be his chief advantage as a writer.

To all of the pieces linked above I want to say, “ditto,” which should obviate the need for me to go on except that now is a time for counting, for declaring where one stands and having done so letting the chips fall where they may.

What McArdle, Roose, and even Sun with her elaborate instructions to Claude to not write for her, are doing is, in my opinion, not writing. Each of them is engaging in some form of what I call automation-assisted text production. (There is also wholly automated text production where there is zero human involvement.) Automation-assisted text production obviously resembles writing, but any time you decide to outsource or “augment” a human writing-related activity with generative AI, you are moving away from the act and experience of writing by substituting automation.

Here’s the thing I cannot get past with these people who use AI to edit in the ways that Roose and Sun describe. Large language models cannot read!

LLMs operate purely at the level of language, language which ultimately drills down to math, and writing ain’t math. Why would I put any stock in the language of something that cannot read? It makes no sense to me and never will.

I was on the road this week to participate in a forum discussing approaches to AI in education and, as one does, found myself stuck on a regional jet on the tarmac of Reagan National Airport in Washington D.C. because a combination of weather and volume of air traffic had halted all takeoffs.

The woman next to me thumbed through her flight tracker app, apparently finding some solace in seeing all the other stationary jets surrounding us. I was reading an advance copy of Elizabeth Strout’s forthcoming novel, The Things We Never Say, and came across a moment of prolepsis (flash forward) that so whipsawed my emotions, I felt flush through my chest and tears sprung to my eyes.

That’s reading. Reading is also allowing oneself to be persistently confused by something you don’t understand rather than asking Claude to explain it to you and then accepting that. Sun’s idea that editing - good editing - can be reduced to a rubric suggests to me she does not understand editing, and perhaps is missing something important about writing.

Kevin Roose is, I increasingly believe, simply a dolt. I don’t mean that he is literally dumb so much as he possesses a combination of incuriosity and credulity that it is hard to believe he has risen to one of the top perches in journalism.

Rusty Foster unlocked this conundrum for me:

Mr. R’s secret is that his work is not primarily artistic or informative—it is functional. He serves a purpose for the industry he covers. Mr. R’s job is to absorb the tech industry’s self-mythologizing, and then believe in it even harder than the industry itself does. He serves as a kind of plausibility ratchet. His byline and employer legitimize a level of credulousness that would otherwise be laughable, and thereby allow tech PR to seem relatively restrained. Mr. R has no problem going AI because he himself has been a small cog in a big ugly machine for a long time.

Kevin Roose is in the content business, a business which existed long before ChatGPT showed up, a business which is, by all accounts, better than attempting to be a writer because if you are in the content business you do not have to care about writing, you just have to gather together some words, and LLMs make this easier than ever before.

I have a chapter on Content vs. Writing in More Than Words:

The core theses of the chapter are that we have already been flooded by content because of the nature of the marketplace for writing on the internet (e.g., clickbait), AI is going to make it worse, and for AI content to truly get traction, it is going to need a human face in front of it. In the chapter I cite a couple of instances where publications had invented fake people to cover over AI slop. What I failed to fully anticipate is people at the top of the profession deciding that they may as well join the flood, using their previously established reputations to launder the automation-assisted text production.

The distinctions between automation-assisted text production and writing may not matter to you. If so, fair enough, but I also wonder what you’re doing here. Go wallow in the infinite universe of slop. If you don’t want an infinite universe of slop, maybe these distinctions matter more than you think.

For those who value writing, what should we do? My approach is to read and support writers. Click on my links above and subscribe to all of those others. Read novels by writers like Elizabeth Strout who you know is not outsourcing her work to an LLM.

Remember that you can read and Claude can’t, so when you let Claude read and interpret something for you, you’ve given your perceptions over to math. I mean I got into writing because I hate math!

Make choices consistent with your values as best you can, and when you can’t - which is inevitable - acknowledge the costs of this choice.

It is foolish to close what is meant to be a call-to-arms with an admission of likely defeat, but I’m not convinced writing and writers (as opposed to content and automation-assisted text production) are likely to survive because, well…capitalism.

and the rest of the books section at the Washington Post were the last reason I clung to my Post subscription after Jeff Bezos declared his allegiance to the tech oligarch/fascist joint takeover of American society. Charles is now here on this platform, writing independently, and this week he wrote about how now, taking a week off feels like a “risky act of faith.”

This whole contraption depends on convincing some sliver of free readers to become paying subscribers. Will any break in the rhythm of publication cause those potential converts to drift off toward some more prolific, more engaging scribbler?

Ron Charles entered this platform better positioned than 99% of other writers. He’s only been here a few weeks and has three times the number of subscribers as I do, having been here over five years, but even this positioning is not anywhere near enough to bring him the kind of security he enjoyed under the umbrella of a publication because he writes interestingly and perceptively about books rather than technology or politics or how to make money on Substack. Ron Charles and I are now competitors of a sort, both covering books here. (He more faithfully than me, TBH.) The subscriber dollar in this ecosystem is very much zero sum.

I deeply desire Ron Charles to have success because I am one of his readers. I am also a little irritated that the man can amass a significantly larger number of subscribers out of the gate because his success means there may be less oxygen for me.

Fortunately, I don’t rely on this newsletter for anywhere near the bulk of my income, but what if?

It’s not sustainable. The impossibility of writing as a sustainable enterprise is what tempts some towards “going AI” because it allows them to produce more. Personally, I’ll quit before I go AI because I’m a writer, and if there’s no way to be a writer anymore, I’ll go do something else.

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At the Chicago Tribune I reviewed Elisa Shua Dusapin’s This Old Fire.

At Inside Higher Ed I offer some cautions about what happens when Claude becomes your co-worker in professions other than writing.

I’m a paid subscriber to “How I Make Money Writing” and let me tell you, a lot of writers you imagine must be making a living on their writing because they are great and successful, simply aren’t. It makes me feel simultaneously fortunate and deeply afraid.

Via my friends and the legendary contributor Ross Murray, some holiday-themed humor: “Jesus Died for Our Sin, Just One Sin, and It’s Yours, Harold.”

Most of what I read this week is linked in the essay above. Tell me what I missed in the comments.

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Recommendations

1. The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovitz
2. The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff
3. A Far-Flung Life by Stedman
4. Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick
5. The Hunger Code by Jason Fung

Teresa C. - Cazenovia, NY.

For Teresa I’m recommending a novel from a few years back that maybe didn’t get as much attention as it deserved, The Boys by Katie Hafner.

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Look, I’m lucky. I work pretty hard to make a living as a writer, but it’s work I enjoy doing which is a real blessing. Still, the whole enterprise feels awfully precarious. I know exactly what Ron Charles is talking about. The thing is, I can’t control those things. All I can do is keep writing, which is why, barring unforeseen circumstances, you’ll hear from me again next week.

Happy Easter and Chag Pesach Sameach to all who observe as part of their faiths.

JW
The Biblioracle

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OpenAI demonstrated their Sora video generator on February 15th, 2024. People freaked out.

March 26th, 2026 from the New York Times.

Oops. The video revolution will apparently not be AI generated.

To illustrate what is happening here I want to talk about this 8-track from 1977, Dumb Ditties.

In 1977 I was seven years old, and for a period of time Dumb Ditties was my favorite album. Produced by the K-Tel corporation, Dumb Ditties is a collection of novelty songs like “Monster Mash,” or one of my favorite,s “On Top of Spaghetti,” a song that I’m pretty confident I could sing every lyric to:

On top of spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
I lost my poor meatball,
When somebody sneezed.

…and so on.

But my favorite song was the one song by a non-novelty artist, Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-ling” which is taken from a live performance with a sing-along/call-and-response section where the entire crowd shouts the chorus:

My ding-a-ling, my ding-a-ling
I want you to play with my ding-a-ling
My ding-a-ling, my ding-a-ling
I want you to play with my ding-a-ling

If I have to explain whey a seven-year-old boy would experience a little thrill over being able to march around the house singing a one-and-a-half entendre joke about his privates, you’ve never met a seven-year-old boy.

“My Ding-a-ling” is someone else’s song, and the recording on Dumb Ditties is from the early 70’s, well after Chuck Berry’s heyday as one of the chief progenitors of rock and roll and when he apparently had to resort to novelty song sing-alongs to get the audience going.

I don’t recall listening to “My Ding-a-ling” in the years between 1977 and today as I started writing this newsletter. Pretty quickly my taste in novelty songs moved on to AC/DC’s “Big Balls” from the album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, which has an opening verse and chorus that goes like this:

Well, I'm upper, upper-class, high-society
God's gift to ballroom notoriety
And I always fill my ballroom, the event is never small
The social pages say I've got the biggest balls of all

[Chorus]
I've got big balls, I've got big balls
They're such big balls, and they're dirty big balls
And he's got big balls and she's got big balls
But we've got the biggest balls of them all

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Classic! He’s talking about like, you know, dancing in a ballroom, but it’s really about his balls! You know…his balls! (His testicles.) What a legend!

In fifth grade, I thought this ruled, but it is not the part of the AC/DC catalog I return to today.

It is not hard to identify a novelty song in that the only reason you listen to them is for the novelty of the joke, and once you hear the joke a few times, the novelty wears off unless that song is “On Top of Spaghetti” and you sing it just to annoy the people around you, which come to think of it, wears off too. These songs are not good in any sense of the word. Within a few years of Dumb Ditties, “Weird Al” Yankovic would hit on a superior formula, by yoking the novelty to good pop songs you want to hear, but even then the enduring appeal is limited.

I think, pretty much since ChatGPT became widely available (November 30, 2022), we’ve been in repeated novelty cycle when it comes to generative AI applications where we are initially captured and intrigued, only to have some measure of the novelty wear off, leaving disillusionment in its wake.

The saga of Sora is a perfect example, an application that was going to upend all of filmmaking turning into a dead commercial enterprise in just over two years. But this is far from the only example. In fact, I think you can look at almost the entirety of the public discourse around the capacities of this technology as a repeating novelty cycle.

For something to be a novelty, it must simultaneously surprise, and either entertain or upset a status quo. “My Ding-a-ling” is compelling because it authorizes young children to express something nominally dirty without getting in trouble. (At least in my household. Kudos to Mom and Dad knowing what battles to fight, as banning '‘My Ding-a-ling” would have only prolonged my interest.)

Sora threatened to upend all of the television and movie industries, but in reality, making short videos from prompts is, at best, a novelty. OpenAI tried to squeeze some additional juice by striking a $1 billion deal to license Disney characters to the platform, but I think nails it when he likens Sora to “MadLibs,” a fun game to play with your friends like once a year at best.

What is going on that we so readily and serially mistake novelty for something that’s meaningful, transformative, and enduring?

This very famous early response to the appearance of ChatGPT falls into the novelty trap:

Personally, I was not all that astounded by what ChatGPT could produce (and said so), because the thing the author above is reacting to - near instantaneous surface-level competent five-paragraph essays on academic subjects - is something that I, personally, put no stock in. They did not have value when done by students and so they also don’t have value when they are done by large language models.

Sora appeared to have value when demonstrated in short clips because people were willing, perhaps even eager to extrapolate from 30 seconds of video to extended video narratives on TV and film. But, as it turns out, to make a satisfactory - never mind good - full-length narrative video you need all kinds of capacities that are beyond an AI video generator.

I cannot emphasize enough that all of this was known at the time of Sora’s arrival and yet the coverage was nonetheless breathless. That students should be doing work other cranking out formulaic five-paragraph essays was also a known-known, and yet there we were, hyperventilating over something that wasn’t worth a human’s time anyway.

Am I getting a little frustrated here? Maybe. Three and a half years later and we still can’t manage to hunker down and treat this technology seriously, rather than lurching after novelty. Ethan Mollick, one of our leading experts on generative AI, a guy who will cost your organization six-figures to come opine about this stuff, essentially tests these models with a deliberate novelty, asking them to create a video of “an otter using a laptop on an airplane.” You can see how much better models have gotten at rendering this stuff over the last couple of years, and it’s impressive.

But so what! Who gives a shit? For much less than six-figures I will gladly come to your organization to discuss how if we’re going to manage ourselves in a world with AI technology we cannot take these wild swings based on responses to novelty.

How many of these benchmarks are actually tied to something meaningful in the world? I don’t think the otter on a plane makes the cut.

I have started to collect examples of people falling out of fascination with the novelty and I’ve particularly enjoyed the journey of the writer John Ganz over the last six weeks or so. Ganz is the author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, and the newsletter. Ganz is a great example of the virtue of “unique intelligences” that I mulled over a couple weeks ago.

It is a pleasure to see Ganz’s mind at work because it is a mind that is undeniably alive and it is Ganz’s willingness to speak and write his mind that is (in my view) the chief source of his success. So, I was a little surprised when he used Claude Code to “vibe code” something he called “Polybius” an automated program meant to measure the “Authoritarian Consolidation Index” a measure of how close a particular society is to authoritarian rule.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised because Ganz is obviously a curious person who - like me - had been hearing a lot about Claude Code and autonomous agents, but unlike me had a potentially interesting idea about what he might code.

To be honest, I never bothered looking at Polybius because it had the whiff of novelty to me - as any vibe coded app should - so I was interested to hear Ganz’s remarks in his most recent weekly conversation with :

“I’m back to bearish on AI…I gotta tell you. I’ve been using Claude and I did build something out of it…I don’t think what I built, and maybe this says more about me than it, but I don’t think what I built it working anymore. It’s kind of a piece of garbage, to be honest with you.”

Ganz goes on to say how it requires a lot of work to make it work, time he hasn’t had and if you check out his tone from the conversation with Max Reed you can sense some understandable exasperation. This thing was supposed to be a kind of miracle, but it just isn’t.

Ganz literally says, “I honestly have gotten back to the point where I’d gotten from this is a miracle machine to this is stupid.”

Fortunately, Ganz has all the pre-existing capacities and knowledge (what I call a practice) to understand the limits of what he’s built and the technology in general. He knows the work he wants to do and that the tool is not necessarily well-suited to it. This is the kind of mind we should be inculcating in students, a mind that is resistant to novelty passing for meaning.

I have had people who are enthusiastic about these tools reach out to me and show me things they’ve done that seem amazing, but which, from my perspective, are clearly novelties. I previously linked to a neat piece by where he vibe coded a program to create a “power ranking” of writers since 1965.

It’s neat! But also, so what? What do we do with this? What, if anything, can be extended from this new knowledge? Perhaps something, but the discovery of that something requires us to move past novelty. Maybe Claude Code or autonomous agents are going to change the digital humanities forever, though I maintain that the chief skill of a good digital humanist will remain being able to formulate an interesting question from which an answer makes us want to ask and answer more questions.

I think the most significant, self-inflicted problem institutions and organizations are facing - particularly educational ones - is being seduced by novelty and mistaking novelty for something enduringly meaningful.

On BlueSky I worked through a bit of a thread responding to the announcement that the Canvas learning management system would incorporate AI as a “teaching agent.”

That screenshot gives you the nut of where I stand, but further down I note the use that Canvas envisions, using the AI to make grading rubrics for you. The problem is that student-facing rubrics are themselves a kind of novelty - a persistent one, but a novelty nonetheless - that is poorly aligned with the kinds of experiences and assessments that help students become competent and confident writers.

The agentic AI is adding novelty on top of novelty.

The challenge here is to know novelty when you see it. When it comes to a novelty song all you need is your inherent humanity which rather quickly grows bored of the merely novel. A lot of the music I listened to as a kid proved to be more novelty than enduring. I once could not get enough of Ted Nugent screaming “Anyone who wants to get mellow can get the fuck out of here!” before kicking into “Wang Tang Sweet Poontang” on his Double Live Gonzo album, though truth be told, I did not even understand the reference at the time I would’ve professed myself a fan of “the Nuge.” I don’t listen to Ted Nugent anymore because his music just kind of sucks.

There is other music from that 8-Track era that I do still listen to, such as Marvin Gaye Live at the London Palladium, an album my dad played relentlessly in the Oldsmobile Visa Cruiser Wagon, that I might’ve even complained about at the time, but which is for sure no novelty.

Chuck Berry is appropriately remembered for his contributions to rock and roll, not his novelty song. Ted Nugent is remembered as a guy who shoots things with crossbows and soon enough he will not be remembered at all. There are precisely zero Sora videos that have entered the public consciousness, making it less successful than Dumb Ditties, which at least has “On Top of Spaghetti.” I’m confident Polybius is the least interesting thing John Ganz will make.

Whenever the next amazing AI thing shows up, remember to ask yourself whether or not it’s a novelty and the answer is probably yes.

(Where do you see novelties in the AI world?)

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Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I offered my take on Tana French’s conclusion to the Ardnakelty trilogy, The Keeper.

At Inside Higher Ed I published a very excellent guest post from Julia Morgan McKenzie “In Defense of Long Writing.”

At I published a Q&A with Tim Cain about a new report that collects the specific language on academic freedom in collective bargaining agreements. A great resource for labor work in higher education.

cannot shut up about these books. Nor should she!

Nobody understands or utilizes this platform to better effect than who taught me a new genre of writing, “effort posting,” while also confirming that I will never effort post.

I notice that South Carolina indie publisher Hub City got a very nice shoutout in this profile of the writer Nancy Lemann who is having her earlier work republished in a big way.

Via my friends and in honor of baseball’s opening day, a classic from the archives, “Casey ‘At the Bat’ Responds to that Mean Poem about Him,” by Jeremiah Budin.

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Recommendations

1. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
2. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
3. A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
4. James by Percival Everett
5. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Lesley S. - Marina, CA

For Lesley I’m going with a book that’s a little shaggy in terms of structure and execution, but which I thought gets so much right in its close attention to its characters that it completely won me over, Wayward by Dana Spiotta.

Request a bespoke book recommendation

As I was working on this edition UPS delivered a custom package containing Marlon James’ forthcoming novel, The Disappearers featuring the cover image embossed into the cardboard.

It was so nice that I wanted to disassemble and frame the cardboard. I felt sort of excited that a press can still go an extra mile or two for a book like this. It doesn’t publish until September, so I won’t be reading it until this summer, but it looks great.

I’ll see you all again next week.

JW
The Biblioracle

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Publishers Weekly reported recently that more than 3.5 million books were published in the U.S. in 2025. This is a 32.5% increase over 2024.

While the number of traditionally published books rose somewhat year-to-year, the increase is primarily driven by self-published titles, and without a doubt is facilitated by AI technology which can aid in the drafting, design, and publicizing of a book.

All of this is happening as the number of people who read even a single book in a year continues to decline. The average American reads zero books. 3.5 million books is a staggering number. 2024’s 2.5 million books is also a staggering number in the context of the actual demand for books but now we have a million more books than that.

There’s north of 10,000 subscribers to this newsletter. To make sure every book published in 2025 gets one reader each of us would have to read 350 books. I don’t track my reading, but I read somewhere around 65-75 books to completion every year, and I am, essentially, a professional reader of books.

3.5 million is too many books. It’s not entirely clear how many of these books are books in the way I think of them, products which reflect the interests and capacities of a unique human intelligence working close to the limits of our intellectual capacity. Clearly some portion of these books are fully AI-generated. Many that aren’t AI-generated may as well be because they are simply human-generated slop. News broke on Friday of Hachette cancelling and recalling a horror novel called Shy Girl because it was exposed as having been written, to some extensive degree, by AI.

The New York Times has the background and has some insightful analysis and implications if you want to go deeper, but TBH, I do not.

I don’t care. I mean, I care, I think it’s wrong for someone to pass off AI-generated work as their own. Having signed a contract with Hachette myself I know that you must warrant that your book was written by you. Pulling the book is the right thing to do. (Though let’s not kid ourselves that there aren’t others lurking out there undetected…for now.)

When I say I don’t care I mean that the questions of whether or not AI can write a “good” book or if there is a market/audience for AI-generated stories are uninteresting to me. I assume the answer to both questions is “yes,” (depending on what we mean by “good”), but also the first question doesn’t matter in the light of the second. As long as someone is willing to pay for it, quality does not matter. It never has.

I get distressed at folks who do not seem to value the difference between an AI novelty and an interesting human-generated artifact. There are capacities of this technology that some people express wonder over that I find utterly dumbfounding. On some podcast a person was saying how fun it is to prompt ChatGPT to deliver a new bedtime story to their kids every night.

I mean, WTF? Do we not have enough excellent bedtime stories written and vetted by humans? Shit, you could read me Goodnight Moon every night and I’d be happy.

The obvious problem of 3.5 million books is that it makes it harder to find the ones truly worth our time. The slop-haystack is growing ever larger. The mechanisms for sorting are fewer (fewer review outlets, etc…), and what has replaced it - ratings, algorithmic recommendations - are limited and inferior. What we’re left with is impressions, vibes, signaling, guesswork, influencers, and other stuff that has nothing to do with the books themselves.

I guess I’m a little despairing on this front this week because I’ve been dumbfounded by some of the reader comments at my beloved Tournament of Books where it has become distressingly common for some (not all, but some) readers to determine the worth of a book based on its surface-level subject matter. The Passenger Seat and Flesh are two novels dealing with male alienation - powerfully and well, if you ask me - but some (not all, but some) readers seem to think these books must be bad because of their surface level subject matter.

Look, I get it. In a world where Pete Hegseth is frothing his way through the Trump administration’s global murder spree from the press podium, and the dead-eyed DOGE boys’ depositions reveal what kind of sociopathy it takes to cancel billions of dollars of grants because the money might go to help non-white people or women, I can understand being turned off by books that explore the intersection of men and violence. I wouldn’t gainsay the choice to not read a book because of these reasons for a second.

But this does not mean the book is bad or that people who do like it are morally deficient because they may find the book interesting or compelling. The Ten Year Affair and If You Love It, Let It Kill You were similarly derided as merely being about middle class white people problems and why would anyone possibly want to read that these days?

Because they’re good! At least I thought so, and I explained why here, and here. I would be ecstatic to have someone challenge these opinions in a way that advances a conversation about books, but ugh, white people…amirite? does not invite critical conversation. Again, it’s fine for people to not want to read a book. The number of books I don’t want to read is very high, but I do not mistake my not wanting to read a book as the same thing as a book being bad or unworthy of existing because of the larger state of the world. I would have to read the book to make that determination.

Apparently I’m also a little defensive this week. I promise that that I’m not bothered when people don’t like the same books I do. I got over that decades ago. I’m not even bothered when people don’t like my books. My self-esteem is simultaneously low enough that I suspect they might be right and high enough to not care.

What can I say? I contain multitudes. We all do, which is one of the reasons I am simply uninterested in the texts that AI can generate. I shall refer us all back to last week’s newsletter on unique intelligences.

Perhaps I’m a little despairing and defensive because I’ve started to honestly wonder if I’ll ever publish another book. More Than Words is both my best and most successful book, but have you heard that there are 3.5 million books published every year? Convincing a publisher that your effort is worth investing in when the pile is this high is a large task. I’m convinced the plan I have for my next book is great, and that it would be both good (in terms of quality), and a valuable contribution to the ongoing conversation about humans making their way through a world where there are 3.5 million books published every year because AI is being used to bury us in titles, but I don’t know if this is going to happen.

I wish the paperback revisions for More Than Words weren’t set because I’d be tempted to go back and further revise Ch. 15, “On the Future of Writing for Money.” I was skeptical about the structures we have in place to support the work of writing done by humans, but I may not have been skeptical enough.

I don’t know man…this is one of those weeks where I don’t have a lot of concrete ideas about how to move forward. I don’t know what we could ever do with 3.5 million books. It’s too many books, particularly when some of the books are not books, if you know what I’m saying. One of the things that irks me about those Tournament of Books comments is that all of the books in the tourney are real books. In each case, a writer had an itch inside their brain that they scratched into the form of an attempt at revealing something of interest, and those human efforts are being consigned to the same category as AI-slop, something not worth anyone’s time.

It would not surprise me if, in response, the traditional publishing industry retreats to what is known, verifiable, and proven. You cannot leave the gates open to new entrants when you cannot trust the provenance of their work.

I don’t know if that world still has space for a writer like me - a guy who routinely gets on base, but is unlikely to hit a home run. The slop can probably generate enough revenue to cover that stuff. You’ve got to be a superstar to justify the investment it takes to publish a real book.

Okay, self-generated pity party over. Maybe the books industry will collapse under its own weight, but I have to believe people like us will continue to find ways to read, and lord knows I’ve been doing this too long to stop writing.

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Links

This week for the Chicago Tribune I wrote about Andrew Martin’s Down Time, a novel very pointedly about privileged millennial white people that is worth reading.

At Inside Higher Ed I expressed skepticism about the idea of “humans in the loop” with AI, particularly when it comes to education and learning.

ICYMI, and I talked hockey, most particularly his red hot Buffalo Sabers, and also William Faulkner.

is a very interesting and engaging critic/reviewer who often alerts me to books I might not otherwise know. He shared what he’s up to in March.

’s forthcoming book looks interesting. I enjoyed his previous, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

Via my friends , “We’ve Officially Won the War We’re Currently and Indefinitely Fighting” by Eli Grober.

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Recommendations

1. Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash
2. The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
3. Endling by Maria Reva
4. On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle
5. The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid

Blaise N. - Canberra, Australia

Gonna go with a weird one, but it’ll haunt you if you let it in, Subdivision by J. Robert Lennon.

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So here’s a couple of bright spots from the week. First, there is a cover for the revised paperback version, and I’m proud to say that at my request, Basic agreed to identify the reviewer (and not just the publication) for the front cover review blurb.

And there is also a cover for the Italian version of the book which includes a preface by Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in the Digital World.

Back when More Than Words was first released I listed some people I hoped would read my book, and Maryanne Wolf was one of them. To have her not only read it, but shepherd it to publication in another language is a truly pinch myself moment in my career.

Alright, I feel better. Sorry to be a drag this week. I’d say I’ll be better next week, but no promises! Things are weird!

JW
The Biblioracle

Since this is my newsletter and it’s free and I can do what I want, and I wanted to talk about hockey with Ed Park, that’s what I did.

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams and Personal Days, and the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis. His memoir, Three Tenses, is out this summer.

—

John Warner: How ‘bout them Sabres? I don’t mean to jinx anything, but as of this typing the Sabres have a better than 98% chance of making the playoffs, which would end the longest playoff drought in NHL history. Even more immediately I just watched Alex Tuch power his way to a shorthanded five-hole goal to put the Sabres up 4-1 against the Lightning, against whom a victory would move the Sabres into first (though the Lightning have games at hand). Maybe don’t answer this if you’re the superstitious type, but it’s exciting, no?

Ed Park: I’m answering this an hour or so after the Sabres won that game—the most exciting Sabres game in recent memory; I’d argue it might stand as the best regular season game between any two teams this year. Things went loopy after that Tuch goal you mentioned. Tampa came right back and scored (in fact, the shot went off Tuch’s skate). Then they scored again. And again. And again. The second period closed, and then I was doing the dishes and missed two more Tampa goals at the top of the third. In other seasons, I’d say our goose was cooked, but as I reminded one of my sons, hockey games are 60 minutes long. The game was unbelievably exciting, full of fights—100 total penalty minutes were dispensed—and rich with reversals. Having scored the first three goals, the Sabres scored the last three as well, a sort of sandwich or palindrome, winning it 8-7. (Josh Doan scored the first and last goals of the game—another palindrome.) It reminded me that a great sports game is like a work of theater that only happens once. It can be rewatched but its full aesthetic import only occurs as it is happening in real time.

I’m superstitious when it comes to the Buffalo Bills—every game I’m like, Do I wear this T-shirt, this hat, these socks, to ensure the best result? It’s bonkers. But with the Sabres…I don’t know. I have no superstitions. I’m just enjoying this resurgence, which has been a long time coming.

John Warner: You grew up in Buffalo. Do you remember the genesis of your Sabres fandom?

Ed Park: Buffalo is snow country. I watched the Sabres on TV, and a couple times a season my dad would take me to a game. I just loved it. The great players were larger than life—in Buffalo there was the French Connection, spanning most of the ’70s. There were colorful players like Jim Schoenfeld and Jerry Korab. Lindy Ruff, now the coach, was a Sabre. I remember the 1980 Olympic game, and feeling proud that one of the players came to the Sabres. Mike Ramsey—we already had a player named Craig Ramsay. I guess even the names were interesting to me. Gerry Desjardins. My favorite caption, from a 3-1 loss in those bygone days, when only Don Luce scored for the Sabres, is still “Every which way but Luce.”

John Warner: I’m envious you got to watch the Sabres on TV as a kid. Blackhawks games were not broadcast in Chicago because the owners (Arthur and then Bill Wirtz) believed it devalued the in-person product, which is sort of insane, but the team stuck with it until 2007!

What was it like going to games at the “Aud”? My first Chicago Blackhawks games were at the Chicago Stadium which was cramped and kind of menacing and awesome. The corridors were incredibly tight, and the mezzanine felt like it loomed over the ice. Every game I went to as a kid I saw some St. Louis Blues or Minnesota North Stars fan get the shit kicked out of him before the Andy Frain ushers could come and break it up. The Aud famously had a Stanley Cup final game where the heat in the building generated fog on the ice. It had to be an interesting place.

Ed Park: I was slightly too young to have seen the game you mention (vs. the Flyers in 1975), though I slipped it into my novel [Same Bed Different Dreams]—it’s like something out of a dream or nightmare. Not only was there dense fog, but there was a bat flying around, which one of the players killed with his stick. (I also wrote a short story called “The Odd,” set after the demolition of the arena in 2009, in the collection Buffalo Noir.)

I loved going to games with my dad. Just a couple a season. We sat in the blue seats, fairly up there, below the orange section. A couple times, if it was a school night, I’d bring my homework, so I could study during the intermissions. I loved getting the NHL magazine at the Aud, called Goal. It was $2.

I do remember a game against the North Stars, a lopsided victory for the Sabres. It went up to 9-2, I think, and the crowd was going wild. At one point, in frustration, the Minnesota goalie crashed his stick onto the head of one of the Sabres who’d fallen in front of the net, and the crowd went even more nuts. (I put this in my novel, too.) Of course, decades later, when that franchise had moved and become the Dallas Stars, they would get their revenge—the infamous Stanley Cup game, wherein Brett Hull’s skate was in Dominik Hasek’s crease, but the goal was allowed. (I put this in my novel, too.)

I’m old enough that I actually saw a Buffalo Braves basketball game at the Aud, before the team was sold in 1976—that was fun, and I’m a little sad the city didn’t carry an NBA team for longer.

John Warner: Did you play hockey?

Ed Park: Yes. I learned to skate pretty young, and played hockey as a kid through the eighth grade, and then a little just for fun in college, intramurally. I can still envision the rinks that I played in, still remember the names of stick manufacturers: Titan and Sherwood, Koho and Victoriaville. I think about the “Armadillo thumb” on old hockey gloves, with the picture of an armadillo.

Both of my kids played hockey here in New York for a while, and both still love to watch it—they root for the Sabres, of course. (We’ve gone to some Rangers games.) They’re actually far more on top of the data and the trades and all that stuff than I am.

John Warner: I feel like the availability of information/content has made fandom more taxing in a way. We had to make do with a newspaper box score or a few minutes of highlights on the local news. I remember getting in trouble for spending too much time on the sportsline phone service where you could call to get real-time scores for like 99-cents a minute. I listened to a lot of hockey on the radio and would have to conjure the images in my mind based on what I’d seen at live games. Like when Doug Wilson ripped a slapshot, I went to some past image of a Doug Wilson slapshot and inserted it.

I don’t have a ton of nostalgia for those days. The accessibility is awesome - I was split-screening the Hawks/Stars with that Sabres/Lightning game because of how crazy the latter got - but there was something about investing my imagination into my fandom that’s very different from today where everything is available or we’re even expected to start betting on every outcome in real time.

Ed Park: Ha, I love that—I still enjoy listening to a game on the radio if I’m driving or walking somewhere. Speaking of the radio, there’s a great anecdote in the biography of Scotty Bowman (written by none other than Ken Dryden) that I like—this is from my review in Bookforum:

As a six-year-old, Bowman’s favorite hockey team, curiously, was the Bruins, whose exploits he caught via Boston’s WHDH on the family radio. Young Scotty would follow the first-period action, then dutifully go to bed; his father would listen to the rest, writing out playmakers’ names for him to study in the morning. (Dryden notes that the announcer would call home games live, and “recreated road games from accounts he was sent via telegraph.”)

There’s something to be said about not knowing everything all the time, and all the betting stuff isn’t great. The genie might be too far out of the bottle at this point.

John Warner: You’re public with your hockey fandom. It’s in your books, and truthfully you’ve been writing a series of hockey observations at your newsletter that betray more than fandom, you’re a true connoisseur. What is it that draws you to the sport?

Ed Park: I recently re-read an essay that Faulkner wrote for Sports Illustrated in 1955—they sent him to a Rangers-Habs game, and it’s a tremendous piece, actually. When I first read it years ago, it seemed to verge on self parody. But now I love how he’s assembling his thoughts as they occur, as he’s watching the smoke from a thousand cigars accumulate above him. And he has this interesting paragraph where he notes women watching breathlessly, and thinks this speaks to the erotic brawling nature of the game, the “rapid, hard, close physical contact,” with sticks that can break bones, knife-blade skates, the possibility that “actual male blood could flow.” Then he reverses himself—it’s not about the violence at all, he writes, but “the excitement of speed and grace, with the puck for catalyst, to give it reason, meaning.”

It’s deliciously overwrought but I think he captures both the danger and the pure frictionless finesse of the game. I love those goals where a player flies down the ice and then, at the last moment, doesn’t even really have to shoot—he just places the puck on the right path. And it’s all done in two, three seconds.

John Warner: The rap on hockey has always been that it’s “hard to watch” if you don’t understand the game, but once you do, it is for me, by far the most amazing sport because of that tension between chaos and inevitability. My favorite moments are when you’re watching and you just know that a goal is coming, that the arrangement of players on the ice and the specific capabilities of those players add up to what feels like a foregone conclusion. Quinn Hughes’ goal against Sweden in the Olympic semis is one of those moments. I was watching it at my desk while pretending to work, and as Hughes took the puck on the left boards and curled to the middle I said out loud, “That’s a goal,” three or four beats before he even shot the puck. I don’t know that there’s any other sport that works like this. Soccer, I guess, relies on similar patterns of coordinated activity, but it doesn’t have hockey’s speed. With hockey, on just about every goal you could rewind the 30 seconds before and find half a dozen moments where even a tiny change in activity would have derailed the outcome.

Like that Brett Hull goal in triple OT, right before Hull corralls the puck, a Sabres player skates between him and Hasek, kicking Hasek’s glove as he’s reaching it towards Hull. Without that player’s specific action, Hasek might have extended his arm far enough to smother the shot.

Or maybe not.

Ed Park: I’m not going to even look at that. [Laughter.] I know what you mean—at times, goals really do feel fated. Of course, you can say that with other team sports, but hockey feels different than football (where there’s so much time between plays) and basketball (where many baskets are going to be scored) because of the speed. Even as the Sabres were at 4-1 last night, I wasn’t entirely comfortable. Each of those subsequent Tampa goals, you could see what triggered it—I’m thinking especially of a missed opportunity by Noah Ostlund of getting the puck out of the zone. He was just a split second too slow, and I thought: oh no. The Lightning picked his pocket and scored. And for the Sabres, Tuch’s aforementioned short-handed goal had that feeling of inevitability—he was perfectly positioned along the boards as the Sabres were prying it out of their zone, and when the time came, it wasn’t so much of a shot as a gesture. The puck just continued along with the energy he had built up behind it.

I too have heard people complain that hockey is hard to watch, but the contrast of the dark puck against the bright ice feels perfectly viewable to me, and the rules aren’t overly complex.

John Warner: I’m wondering how much your pleasure in the U.S. Men’s hockey gold medal was diminished by Kash Patel whooping it up in the locker room and the seizing of the moment by Trump and the willingness of the players to go along with it all. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of the political orientations of pro hockey players or even casual players - I had guys in my men’s league who heard I taught college ask if I was a communist - but I don’t know, it was a bummer. Does this stuff matter for you?

Ed Park: It does—but like you, I wasn’t really surprised. I actually didn’t see the video for a while, so I had a sliver of time to enjoy the victory without politics crashing down on it, though of course everything in the Olympics has political resonance. (I flashed back to the Four Nations tournament from last year, the fights right at the beginning of the U.S.-Canada game.) I mulled about it a bit here.

John Warner: I thought those fights were cringe. Like why do I care about Matthew Tkachuk and Brandon Hagel swinging at each other? It makes me a bit hesitant to confess my fandom. Once while on a panel I outed myself as a hockey fan and one of my co-panelists reacted like I’d confessed to a crime, they couldn’t reconcile someone at a literary event also being a hockey fan. Have you ever experienced that kind of judgment?

Ed Park: I don’t think so—but I don’t care! Hockey is the best sport—for me, the mausoleum of all hope and desire. (As for Hagel, he got fined for some alarming violence against Rasmus Dahlin in the Sabres-Lightning game.) Anyway, John, next time someone does that to you, hit them with some Faulkner:

Then it was filled with motion, speed. To the innocent, who had never seen it before, it seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. Then it would break, coalesce through a kind of kaleidoscopic whirl like a child’s toy, into a pattern, a design almost beautiful, as if an inspired choreographer had drilled a willing and patient and hard-working troupe of dancers—a pattern, design which was trying to tell him something, say something to him urgent and important and true in that second before, already bulging with the motion and the speed, it began to disintegrate and dissolve.

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Previous recent author Q&A’s:

Taking on a Literary Legend with Jessica Francis Kane

Talking Donald Barthelme and Her New Novel with Hannah Pittard.

Murder Takes a Vacation with Laura Lippman.

On Stories and Portals with Debbie Urbanski.

What’s Happened to (Formerly) Leftists Media? with Eoin Higgins.

The Many Lives of Anne Frank with Ruth Franklin.

Understanding Colson Whitehead with Derek C. Maus.

Humans Relate to Each Other And Understand Themselves in the Process with Adam Haslett.

The Name of This Band is R.E.M. with Peter Ames Carlin.

Echo Chambers of Our Own Devising with Charles Baxter.

Crime Novel? Women’s Fiction? Literary Thriller? with Kelsey Rae Dimberg.

Everybody Is Secretly Grieving with Alison Espach.

Observations Within Landscape with Ben Shattuck.

Teddy Wayne on Writing and “The Winner.”

One of the complaints among the AI users of the world against the resisters is that the resister crowd refuses to admit that generative AI is sometimes, even often, useful.

I am not quite a full-on AI resister compared to others (though I certainly lean that way philosophically, and make very little use of the technology in my own work), but I’m close enough for rock and roll, so let me stipulate that generative AI can absolutely be useful.

At the same time, “useful” is not a synonym for “necessary” and definitely not the same as “big picture beneficial.” ChatGPT is useful at completing your homework, but it is not beneficial to your long term learning. The challenges for schools/colleges/universities is to convince students that this is true enough to induced students to do the work they should be doing. This is the only way to disrupt the deeply ingrained transactional model of schooling.

So yes, this technology can be useful, but here’s something I think those of us who care about things other than the speed and efficiency with which we can produce things like text, code, video, et al… should keep front of mind right now: The people who are at helm of developing and deploying this technology want to destroy humanity.

Or at the very least they aim to alter humanity and society in such a way that makes humans subservient to not just the technology, but the people who control it.

John, you’re thinking, get a grip. Don’t be a conspiracy theorist.

Sometimes I wish I was in the throws of a delusion. It would make what’s happening in today’s world far more explicable. Unfortunately, having a grip on reality means recognizing we’re surrounded by insanity at the highest levels of government and among the wealthiest, most powerful people and companies in the world.

I mean, there are grown men in Donald Trump’s cabinet who are wearing shoes that do not fit because they do not want to anger their erratic, idiotic, increasingly demented boss.

Anyway.

At an investor conference this past week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said this:

We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for. The demand that we see for that seems like it’s going to continue to just go like this (pointing straight up) and if we don’t have enough, we either can’t sell it, or the price gets really high, and it kind of goes to rich people, or society makes a bunch of sort of central planning decisions which I think always go badly.

I want to make sure I’m being very careful here, very reasonable and considered, not irrational or rash, so here goes: this shit is unbelievably insane.

What Altman is talking about is not a utility, which is governed (rather imperfectly we must admit) by regulations that must take the public interest into account, but a monopoly where we must go to OpenAI (or the other handful of competitors) for our sufficient supply of “intelligence,” otherwise, the existing inequality (which he seems to acknowledge) will get even worse because the only the rich people will have access to this intelligence.

I cannot even with this shit. It is so fundamentally stupid and also anti-human that it is hard to believe, and yet a room full of finance people apparently sat there and nodded sagely thinking, “Yes that makes sense. We should think about things this way.”

What I’m about to say is ironic given the apparent idiocy of the people in that room stroking their chins to Sam Altman’s B.S., but here is the truth: We (the collective) are definitely more intelligent than generative AI. At their core, these tools don’t actually know anything. The language they assemble is untethered from the kind of understanding with which humans communicate and make sense of the world. Unlike LLMs, we can possess and deploy knowledge through judgment, taste, discernment, and other human capacities.

Human intelligence is also inherently more interesting because each of us is a unique intelligence, shaped not just by what we know, but what we’ve experienced. Humans have a spiky intelligence, and when you hit on someone’s spike, they definitely know stuff a large language model does not.

I’m going to try to prove it to you for your own satisfaction and enjoyment of your unique human intelligences.

I haven’t done this exercise in a while, but it’s something I like to do, provided we have enough time, when leading a faculty workshop on adapting teaching and institutions to the existence of AI.

I ask everyone to think of some subject not related to their professional areas of expertise on which they believe themselves to be expert. There is an old social media meme where people ask about a subject you could talk about unrelated to your day-to-day work for thirty minutes off the top of your head. This is a good frame for finding that unique expertise.

Here’s mine: The 1984 Chicago Cubs.

The 1984 Chicago Cubs were the team closest to making the World Series since their most recent appearance in 1945, prior to the 2016 team which finally, blessedly broke through to the title.

(Prior to 2016, the last time the Cubs won the World Series was 1908.)

The Cubs started the season decently, but it was once they acquired a staff ace in Rick Sutcliffe during the season, after which he went 16-1 the rest of the way, that they took off, winning the division by 5 or 6 games. Ryne Sandberg won the NL MVP. I could, but won’t bother, name the entire starting lineup. In the divisional series, the Cubs faced off against the NL West champion Sand Diego Padres, led by former LA Dodger, Steve Garvey. The Cubs had the better record and were supposed to host three of the five games of the series, but lights would not be installed in Wrigley Field for several years yet, and Major League Baseball could not abide three day games because of the harm to the television ratings, so games three through five were moved to Sand Diego.

All of that is off the top of my head, and I could go on, which I guess I will. I could tell you the class I was in during Game 1 (Spanish), listening to the game with an old transistor radio and single ear phone when Bobby Dernier and Gary Matthews hit first inning home runs one batter apart, kicking off a 13-0 rout. I could tell you all kinds of other things about the series including the tragic cascade of events that led to the Cubs’ eventual defeats in both Games 4 and 5 when victory seemed at hand, but remembering them remains painful.

I can tell you that one of the Cubs’ starting pitchers, Scott Sanderson, went to my high school. I can tell you that in backyard wiffle ball games I used to imitate Gary Matthews’ (nickname: “The Sarge”) batting stance and swing, a pronounced C-curve in the upper body followed by a vicious slash of the bat through the zone with a minimal step toward the pitcher.

Anyway, I know all that stuff. But guess what doesn’t?

Here’s what ChatGPT version 5.3 told me when I asked a very simple question about the starting lineup for the 1983 Chicago Cubs:

The 1984 Chicago Cubs won the National League East and reached the NLCS. Their lineup shifted somewhat during the season—especially after the June trade that brought in Ryne Sandberg’s longtime double-play partner Davey Lopes—but the everyday lineup that defined the team by late season looked roughly like this…

As any fool knows, Davy Lopes was not Ryne Sandberg’s “longtime double-play partner.” Lopes was a late-season addition who primarily pinch hit and played a little outfield. Sandberg’s double’s play partner that year was Larry Bowa at shortstop, the player he had been traded with as a throw-in part of the deal that brought Bowa to Chicago and sent Ivan DeJesus to Philadelphia.

I called out ChatGPT on its error, prompting: “WTF are talking about with Davy Lopes as Ryne Sandberg’s longtime double-play partner? You dope. You absolute idiot.”

ChatGPT:

You’re right to call that out. Davey Lopes was not Ryne Sandberg’s longtime double-play partner, and that phrasing was simply wrong. Lopes was a second baseman, so when the Cubs acquired him from Oakland on June 15, 1984, he actually moved Sandberg from 2B to 3B for the rest of that season. Sandberg returned to second base in later years, where his long-term partner became Shawon Dunston (and earlier Larry Bowa briefly before Bowa left after 1985).

Nonsense. Sandberg played a season of third when he first joined the Cubs, but after that, including in 1984 was almost exclusively a second baseman, a Hall of Fame second baseman. A Hall of Fame second baseman who literally has a specific game named after him in which he hit two game-tying home runs off of Bruce Sutter, a former Cub who was traded away to the despised St. Louis Cardinals because he was making too much money for the tight-fisted Wrigley family. Sutter, master of the split-fingered fastball, was considered to be the greatest closer of all time up to that point, but Sandberg rocked him two at-bats in a row before a barely used utility infielder named Dave Owens won the game in (I think) the 11th inning. (Still working off the top of my head.)

(Is it embarrassing to admit that I can get a little misty-eyed at this video about Sandberg and “the game”? So be it.)

The purpose of doing this exercise with teachers and professors is not merely to point out that large language models get things wrong or “hallucinate.” The point is that this technology has no application when it comes to human beings deciding what is of interest to them, what they care about, what they choose to remember - or in the case of the Cubs’ playoff collapse against the Padres that season - cannot manage to forget.

Humans live in the world of experiences. Altman’s vision discounts experience as something potentially meaningful, experience to be replaced by literally disembodied “intelligence.”

It’s grotesque, but we’re also led to believe it’s a kind of inevitable future. Meanwhile, AI companies are using humans to cover for the absence of humanity from their products. Grammarly released (and then withdrew under the weight of heavy criticism and at least one lawsuit) a feature where users could choose to have their writing critiqued according to the tastes and approaches of specific writers/editors (including dead ones). The problem, as experienced, is that the advice is generic, and decidedly inexpert.

Of course, a digital John Warner LLM could never give feedback like mine because I read, I think, I consider who the writer is and the audience they’re writing for. When I was working with students I would understand their writing over the course of time. I would understand their attitudes about writing, and the origins and journey of the piece they were working on. I remain amazed why anyone is impressed with LLM evaluation of text next to what humans are capable of.

Most weeks here I get both notes of thanks and unsubscribes. Which of these audiences is correct about the quality and worth of by writing?

Trick question: It’s both! Though, let’s be clear, the unsubscribers are making a terrible mistake.

Grammarly needs to brand its generic advice with human analogues because they know it makes its potential use more attractive. Here, whatever “genius” their program possesses must be branded as human. But there is no genius in the Grammarly product. The most appropriate reader for your work in progress is your teacher or colleague or friend or any other human you can find who may actually understand what you’re trying to achieve.

Not that we should have to continually prove to ourselves that we have more to offer to the world than being subservient to AI models, but if you’re so inclined, try the exercise of finding your version of the 1984 Chicago Cubs for yourself, and don’t just focus on what you know that the LLM doesn’t, think about how you know what you know, and how what you’ve come to know makes you feel.

That’s our intelligence.

(And if you do this, please feel free to share in the comments.)

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At the Chicago Tribune, I rounded up some of my favorite contemporary Irish writers in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

At Inside Higher Ed I talked to Douglas Haynes author of a very timely new book on higher education, Teaching Toward Slow Hope: Place Based Learning in College and Beyond.

Earlier in the week I thought I might have to spend some time unpacking why a New York Times piece on comparing AI text to human writing doesn’t mean all that much, but thankfully, got there first and likely better because I would’ve spent too many words calling Kevin Roose a dip.

looks at “the Substack book” and finds some signs that the platform may be influencing what winds up between covers, and not necessarily in a good way. Many of the subjects/topics/ideas that have wound up in my recent books have been ones I’ve blogged or newslettered about first, but I always thought of those posts as forms of pre-writing, not actual text that would wind up in a book.

The Tournament of Books is 5/8ths of the way through the opening round and some of the decisions have been very surprising.

By DC Pierson and via my friends a charming piece that speaks to one of the greatest books of all time: “The Little Bunny from Goodnight Moon Accepts an Award.”

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Recommendations

1. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanisław Lem (translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose)

2. The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai (translated by Georges Szirtes)

3. The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

4. The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

5. Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro (translated by Eve Hill-Agnus)

William T. - Stuttgart, Germany

A challenging list. Alright, here’s a swing: Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.

Request a recommendation for yourself.

Because of a minor dog-related semi-emergency, I did not make it to SXSW.edu, but the workshop in which I was supposed to participate went off without a hitch. Quincy is also now mostly recovered.

As always, thanks for reading and I’ll see you all next week, same time, same place.

JW
The Biblioracle

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A few weeks ago I got a marketing pitch from a PR firm on behalf of Libby, the ebooks and audiobooks app most often used by libraries for free access to books. The subject line was “How to get books for free if you are bookmaxxing.”

Because of my work writing about books at the Chicago Tribune I get, conservatively, twenty pitches a day. Some days I look at all of them. Other days I delete every last single one without even opening them. I reply to maybe three-percent when there is a book that I’m interested in.

But this pitch tweaked me and I could not help but reply immediately, negatively particularly after reading the opening line of the pitch: “As cold weather keeps much of the country indoors, the broader ‘maxxing’ trend is gaining traction — and bookmaxxing is right there with it, as readers prioritize reading as many books as they can while stuck inside.”

It is hard to decide which part of the pitch most irritated me.

My visceral hate was triggered by the invoking of a “broader maxxing trend.”

First, there is no such thing. There is no genuine trend beyond performances on social media designed solely to garner short term attention in the influencer economy. For those not aware - who should count themselves lucky, and to whom I’m apologizing for piercing their lack of awareness - the term “maxxing” is rooted in the so-called “looksmaxxing” movement among young, terminally online men who are in the grips of a variety of different delusions and disordered thinking.

The highest profile looksmaxxer, known as Clavicular (real name Braden Peters), was recently profiled in the New York Times.

The looksmaxxers are driven by the pursuit of achieving a kind of masculine ideal as determined by particular ratios like pupil width, distance from pupils to mouth or the span of one’s clavicles, which is where Clavicular gets his moniker. The ideal male physiognomy according to Clavicular is the actor Matt Bomer.

The looksmaxxers are an extension of the manosphere/incel movement with the evolution that unlike incels, they profess to be uninterested in actual sex, and instead perform their purely aesthetic dominance in online videos by “mogging” others, a term I think I get, but am not going to look up because I’ve already spent more time reading and thinking about this than I ever would have wished.

has a short, but incisive enthnographic look at these young men who are trying to increase their “sexual market value” if you want to know more.

Over the years I have tended towards non-alarm about the potential damage of immersion in online culture. Adults are always bent out of shape about something. I grew up with panics about video games and swear words in rap music and we wound up okay. Intellectually, I understand the risks, and even fall prey to them on occasion (e.g., too much scrolling), but as someone who made it well into adulthood before we were all online, I think my analog-age period of development gave me some dose of immunity to deeper harms, something that might not be true for younger folks.

It seems clear that many people view the performance of something online for the consumption of an audience as a higher calling than doing the actual thing itself. For looksmaxxers, increasing your perceived sexual market value is more desirable than actual sex.

Never mind companionship or love, in their minds that’s for suckers and doesn’t exist anyway. At the root of all of this is a rather apparent self-loathing which would be heartbreaking if so many of these figures weren’t also publicly loathsome or even dangerous. They attempt to meme themselves to status and happiness. Good luck to them.

Disturbingly, living via meme has clearly penetrated the highest levels of our current government. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth goes on TV to crow about “lethality” and “warfighters,” a total absence of moral seriousness combined with a cartoonish performance of masculinity. Maybe he will start measuring the clavicle width of new recruits as he tries to operationalize the military for social media. This isn’t merely theoretical, the U.S. Navy sunk an unarmed Iranian frigate thousands of miles from the main conflict zone seemingly to be able to post the video.

Another video of combat operations intermixed with footage from the Call of Duty video game was released by the government to social media. The concerted push to blur the line between what is real and what is fake is deeply disturbing, a way to desensitize us to dehumanization. Naturally, the Pentagon has dubbed their approach, “lethalitymaxxing.”

Of course, part of what they lethalitymaxxed was an Iranian primary school for girls, killing hundreds of children in the process.

Anyway, invoking a term that’s rooted in literal white supremacist culture on behalf of a reading app primarily tied to libraries is gross and I said as much to the PR firm that pitched me.

You know what I miss? Deliberation. I would like to know the process that led this PR company to decide to launch their “maxxing” pitch, how it was conceived, vetted, client-approved, and then executed. I would like to know how at no point did some human being raise a red flag about the possible downsides of linking their product to incel white supremacists. Have we truly lost the ability to communicate to the point where even a reading app must spread its message via meme?

And what is this business about reading more books being some kind of objectively desirable goal? I wonder if this is just the latest example of the presence of AI having broken some brains, that it has somehow become our job to compete with them when it comes to speed or capacity.

I previously delivered my rant “against optimization,” so maybe I am just repeating myself here.

But there is something more specifically wrong about equating volume with meaning or pleasure. This is simply not how humans experience the world. I greatly enjoy eating, but I am not envious of Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote from The Meaning of Life.

The humor of that sketch is in the professionalism and nonchalance of John Cleese’s waiter juxtaposed against Terry Jones’ exploding man. Maybe less nonchalance is called for in the face of the obviously destructive. I tend toward the libertarian when it comes to the choices other individuals make with their own lives - provided they aren’t harming others - but maybe we need to step up our collective judgment against obvious indignities against humanity.

The young gentleman Clavicular appears to be in the grips of some kind of mental and/or emotional disorder, possibly exacerbated by addiction. The suffering human deserves our sympathy. The movement he represents deserves our scorn.

From the very arrival of ChatGPT I have championed using this technology as a lens through which we can determine what most matters when it comes to being human. To me this is obviously the most important promise of AI.

To that end, you can read a recent piece by Notre Dame professor Alexander Kustov in which he declares that “AI can already do social science better than most professors,” by which he means it can generate a potentially publishable journal article, two ways. One way is to suggest that we should deploy AI to do much more social science research, as it is superior to humans.

Another way, as articulated by at his newsletter, is to question the system the privileges journal articles that can be churned out by AI in order to tick a box on a credential.

Perhaps I am one of the humans who is going to get steamrolled by the AI revolution, but I will continue to insist that one of our best, most proactive responses to the technology, particularly in contexts where speed and optimizing productivity are not de facto values, is to “do less that matters more.”

Part of what we must continue to do for ourselves is to use our human capacities for deliberation, discernment, and judgement.

I had a nearly identical reaction as to part of a recent Ezra Klein interview of Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark in which Clark confessed to turning to his company’s Claude product for advice on workplace conflict. Rothfeld:

At some point in the interview, Klein asks him [Clark] about the pitfalls of engaging with relentlessly affirmative and ingratiating chatbots—Klein, by the way, does a very good job of holding Clark to account throughout—and Clark replies that AI needn’t be used for self-affirmation. In fact, he explains, he uses it to help him occupy other people’s perspectives: “I’ve used these A.I. systems to basically say: Hey, I’m in conflict with someone at Anthropic. I’m really annoyed. Could you ask me some questions about that person and how they’re feeling to try to help me better think about the world from their perspective?”

He didn’t even pause before confessing that he’d used AI in this way and didn’t appear to think it was a cause for shame or contrition. aaaaggghhhHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?? I don’t know what’s worse, using AI in this fashion, or thinking that using AI in this fashion is such a normal, acceptable, and forgivable thing to do that you should admit to having done so on a podcast in a national newspaper.

Throughout the entire interview Clark seems thoughtful and reasonable, but in the spirit of my newfound desire to be more judgmental, frequently what he posits about a healthy and productive relationship with AI technology is simply grotesque. As Becca Rothfeld asks “What brings a person to the point where it seems natural to consult an AI for help with the most basic functioning of the moral apparatus?”

I’ve long ago tuned out the “AI is inevitable” hype because I know that this is not true for me, but maybe I need to pay more attention to what’s going wrong for the people who accept and embrace this idea because they appear to be increasingly impossible to avoid.

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This week at the Chicago Tribune I wrote about a novel I remain confused (but also intrigued) by, Haven by Ani Katz.

At I explored a classroom debate from years back that could potentially land me in trouble if I taught in today’s University of Texas system.

Academic Freedom on the Line

The UT System Creates a Catchall Policy to Preemptively Silence Faculty

Subscribe to Academic Freedom on the Line for more news, resources, and analysis on the battle for academic freedom and protecting democracy…

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3 months ago · 15 likes · 2 comments · John Warner

Here’s some notes from a bookstore event from last year celebrating the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest featuring DFW’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, and editor, Michael Pietsch.

At Defector, Pete Segall writes about Don DeLillo’s funniest novel, a book that I have as signed, hardcover first edition copy.

I’ve now clicked on this from The New York Times app three times, so maybe it’s of interest to others as well, “32 Novels We’re Excited About This Spring.”

Via my friends some “looksmaxxing” related humor, “To Get Hot, Break Your Jaw, and then Everything Else,” by Madeline Goetze and Will Lampe.

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Recommendations

1. This is Happiness by Niall Williams
2. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
3. The All of It by Jeannette Haien
4. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
5. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

Adrian N. - Aurora, CO

This book ain’t all happiness and light, but neither are the books on this list so I think Adrian (who writes his newsletter on teaching here) will be able to handle it, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Rec-o-mend-ations right here!

Hello Austin Texas, I’ll be in you next week as part of SXSW.edu presenting with my friends at Frankenstories.

Thursday, 2pm, be there for some good fun and make sure to say hi if you see me.

I don’t have a ton of unscheduled free time, but please feel free to give me your best Austin recommendations in the comments.

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I’ll see you next week, quite probably with a report from conference which both excites and terrifies me.

JW
The Biblioracle

This past week I made one of my campus visits to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

Lots of interesting things happened there, interesting things happen on all my visits because these are genuinely interesting places filled with interesting people, but there is one moment that’s particularly sticking with me, a moment that makes me hopeful we’ll be able to navigate the thicket of uncertainty that currently pervades higher education.

It was a few minutes before I was scheduled to do a talk in the Hamilton “Events Barn,” four or five rows of folding chairs arrayed in front of me, a screen with my title slide behind me.

It’d titled the talk “Only Humans Write: Why You Shouldn’t Outsource Your Humanity to ChatGPT.” It would be an evening of preaching to the choir, but where’s the harm in that? Sometimes the choir needs reminding that they are indeed righteous. Hamilton is a high agency, high touch place, famous for its open curriculum that allows undergraduates to range freely through subjects. It was the locus investigation for what I consider to be one of the most important books examining the potential and impact of post-secondary education, How College Works by Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs.

Based on years of observation and interviews with Hamilton students, the book was published in 2014 and when I reviewed it at Inside Higher Ed it was like everything I’d been experiencing as an instructor for the previous decade-plus had been validated.

I underlined so much of the book, that more sentences were marked than not. These were just some of them:

“Good colleges have always been fundamentally human institutions.”

“The fundamental problem of higher education is no longer the availability of content, but rather the availability of motivation.”

“Human contact, especially face to face, seems to have an unusual influence on what students choose to do, on the directions their careers take, and on their experience of college. It has leverage, producing positive results far beyond the effort put into it.”

So I was discretely pacing at the front of the events barn and I see a young gentleman, one of the students, reading and underlining passages in a book with a cover I recognize, David Foster Wallace’s final story collection, Oblivion.

I ask if he’s enjoying it and he says “yes” and I ask if he’s reading it for class and he says “yes,” that it’s for a philosophy of David Foster Wallace course and I ask another kid sitting next to the first kid if he’s in the class too and he says no, but he took it last year, and I said that it’s cool that they offer a course like that every year, and the first kid says that he’d gone to the professor and asked if they could offer it again because he wanted to take it before he graduated and the professor said, “yes.”

All hail the open curriculum where the course sequence and distribution requirements are not set by administrators years in advance and a professor can just decide to teach a course because there are students who want to take it. I cannot overstate how rare this is.

So I’m talking to this first kid, and the other kid, and of course I realize these are not kids, they are college seniors, but give me a break, when you have gotten as old as I am they are “kids,” and I told them about how my freshman year of college at the University of Illinois, my mom, who owned a bookstore, sent me an advance copy of David Foster Wallace’s first story collection, Girl With Curious Hair, because the publisher’s sales rep said it was what the young people were reading these days.

I read it alone in my dorm room over Labor Day weekend when everyone else went home. No one told me that you were supposed to go home Labor Day weekend when school had just started like a week earlier.

That was more than thirty-five years before I was chatting with these two Wallace readers. I read Girl With Curious Hair alone, but these guys had done it as part of a group, the guy reading the book drawn to it by his buddy who said something like, I’m taking this cool class etc…

Another quote from How College Works for no particular reason:

“Isolated from the people who carry them out, programs, practices and pedagogies seem to have little impact. What matters instead is who meets whom and when. Programs succeed only when they bring the right people together. If the right people are involved, a variety of curricula can serve colleges well. If they aren’t, no curriculum will work.”

I delivered my talk, extolling the virtues of human exchange as a defense against self-obviation through automation. The choir sang their hallelujahs, I took some questions, and the young Wallace reader came to talk more as I packed up my materials. He told me his name (which I’ve obviously, sadly forgotten), and we shook hands and chatted for a bit more and before we parted, he recommended a book to me, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry by Albert Borgmann, first published 2009.

I am now going to quote the book’s description at length:

Blending social analysis and philosophy, Albert Borgmann maintains that technology creates a controlling pattern in our lives. This pattern, discernible even in such an inconspicuous action as switching on a stereo, has global effects: it sharply divides life into labor and leisure, it sustains the industrial democracies, and it fosters the view that the earth itself is a technological device. He argues that technology has served us as well in conquering hunger and disease, but that when we turn to it for richer experiences, it leads instead to a life dominated by effortless and thoughtless consumption. Borgmann does not reject technology but calls for public conversation about the nature of the good life. He counsels us to make room in a technological age for matters of ultimate concern—things and practices that engage us in their own right.

To paraphrase a different sort of philosopher, it had me “public conversation about the nature of the good life.”

So, I’m thinking that yeah, the kids are alright, as are the adults at Hamilton because what we have is a place oriented around being human with resources not unlimited, generally sufficient to supporting humanity. There is a writing lab with 60-some student tutors available to provide help. There are common areas where students can gather and work together. There is an events barn. Whatever challenges AI technology offers, this is the sort of place where people have a fighting challenge to sort through them as best we can.

But before I can get too cozy in these thoughts I recall the opening of my own talk where I shared the landing page of a new genAI-enabled app that had suddenly appeared earlier in the week.

Einstein is the work of Advait Paliwal, a 23-year-old Brown grad school dropout. He claimed in an interview with 404 Media that his goal was to challenge the transactional nature of school, “I think we really need to question what learning even is and whether traditional educational institutions are actually helping or harming us. We're seeing a rise in unemployment across degree holders because of AI, and that makes me question whether this is really what humans are born to do. We've been brainwashed as a society into valuing ourselves by the output of our productive work, and I think humanity is a lot more beautiful than that. Is it really education if we're just memorizing things to perform a task well?”

This sentiment is not so far from what I had to say in my talk, so maybe Advait Paliwal and I are aligned, philosophically, but only one of us was positioning himself to reap investment dollars from venture capitalists for an app that would obviate digitally-mediated education. It’s impossible to say how real Paliwal’s project is, but it has already imploded perhaps because it is vaporware, but also because you can’t just name stuff after Einstein and use his image without running afoul of someone who owns licensing rights.

Is Paliwal morę like the David Foster Wallace reader at Hamilton or Chungin “Roy” Lee, the app developer who engineered his dismissal from Columbia University as a way to launch Cluely, the program that allows you to cheat at everything? wrote a feature on Lee and a small handful of other Silicon Valley figures for Harpers (“Child’s Play: Tech’s New Generation and the End of Thinking”) that must be read in full to wholly appreciate, but the portrait of Lee as a young person who has amassed millions, but cannot understand why someone would want to read a book is sort of heartbreaking and made me feel ashamed for despising him because his life is self-evidently a misery.

Kriss notes the extreme irony of Lee’s desire for a fully agentic life combined with producing an app that is explicitly designed to make all your decisions for you:

Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I believed him. He wanted not to be alone, the way he’d been alone for a year after having his offer of admission rescinded by Harvard. For people to pay attention to him. To exist for other people. But instead of making friends the normal way, he’d walked up to strangers and asked whether they wanted to start a company with him, and then he built the most despised startup in San Francisco. He was probably right: he could count on making a few million dollars every year for the rest of his life, even after Cluely inevitably crashes and burns. He would never want for capital, but this did not seem like the most efficient way to achieve his goals.

It is clear that serially, systemically, Roy Lee did not have the kind of human contact necessary to shape lives that Chambliss and Takac describe in How College Works.

As Kriss says, Roy Lee will “never want for capital” but he seems poorly positioned to become, I don’t know…happy?

I asked the Wallace reader what he was up to at Hamilton. Studying philosophy, with an eye on graduate school someday, but not right away, which I said was sound. He had a knowing look on his face when he said it, like I know everyone says this is a bad idea, but whatever. Au contraire, I think a philosophy grad degree is actually a great defense at whatever indignities the future may have for us. Roy Lee may have the kind of wealth that allows for a certain material security, but his mind appears to be going to waste and it may be our minds are the only things we’re truly allowed to own someday.

This plan makes the Hamilton student a bit of an outlier among his cohort. I was told a significant portion of the Hamilton students will make their way into finance, which is perhaps sensible if you are worried about money or the risk of downward mobility, but also strikes me as a tremendous waste of human potential.

Not quite a Roy Lee-level waste of human potential, but a bit depressing nonetheless, a sign of the very real narrowing of the perceived pathways to continued security in an increasingly hostile world.

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At the Chicago Tribune I paid very brief tribute to the passing of Michael Silverblatt, host of Bookworm, an idiosyncratic and great interviewer of authors.

At Inside Higher Ed I wrote some bullet point thoughts on the Einstein app and what it says about where we should be putting our energies in education. At his newsletter, has a more considered take, dubbing Einstein “nuisance technology,” which is spot-on.

One of the things I occasionally lament about my Tribune column is that I only get 600 words, so I was pleased to read ’s much longer, in-depth, reported/reflective piece on Michael Silverblatt.

, author of an imminently forthcoming biography of Judy Blume was victimized by Kitty Kelly (of all people) with what appears to be an obviously AI-generated review of his book.

offers a defense of reading (and writing) fiction as a defense against anti-humanism.

Via reader Sean W. an article on “Books and Screens,” “Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time.”

Via my friends , “Welcome to Books, For Men™” by Tom Ellison.

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Recommendations

1. Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan
2. Annie Bot by Sierra Greer
3. Oxford Soju Club by Jinwoo Park
4. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
5. The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade

Lisa G. - Utica NY

A fascinating list from Lisa who is, not entirely coincidentally, with Hamilton College. I don’t know why this particular book is calling to me base on the list other than it’s one I like to recommend to people who read widely because they usually haven’t read it, A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley.

Request your book recommendation.

Somehow I woke up the morning I write this newsletter and the maniac in the Oval Office has started a war. It seems clear nothing is real to him that maybe he shares with Roy Lee an insatiable need to exert his agency, only on a vastly more destructive scale. What to do? I really have no idea beyond trying to pay attention to what makes the most sense to me.

See you next week.

JW
The Biblioracle

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She retired from speed skating at 16 as the current world record holder in the 500 meters, and a few years later had a summer job trying to teach this poor creature how to swim.

As you can see by the combo platter of floatation vest and ring, I did not take to the water with great enthusiasm. Who knows why? Maybe it was because I had an older brother who was a competitive swimmer and I’d already decided that part of my personality was going to be looking at whatever he was good at (swimming, school, etc…) and saying to myself, “not that.”

I would’ve been too young to know for sure, but it seems like no one made a tremendous fuss about Anne Henning’s choice to retire from speed skating at the top of the game. Today, a 16-year-old gold medalist is looking at making lots of dough in endorsements and would be, at least for a period of time, world famous, but back then when these sports were truly amateur competitions. This was just a young person of talent and drive who was ready to do something else.

This is not intended as a lament about a changed world. I mean, if you asked a teenage gold medalist today if they’d rather keep skating in order to reap the rewards of their hard work and success or if they’d like to retire and go teach little dorks who wear a vest and floatation ring in the pool how to swim, you wouldn’t get the question out before everyone started laughing, but you have to wonder if it might not still be the right choice for some people who find themselves in a similar circumstance.

Alysa Liu, the gold medal winning figure skater, was retired from her sport from 2022 to 2024, announcing in 2022 that she’d accomplished all she’d set out to do and she’d had enough.

Very Anne Henning of her.

She went to college and did regular college student stuff and says she didn’t skate at all for a couple of years until she recognized that she could go back to the sport with the attitude and agency necessary to succeed - success not being a gold medal - but to genuinely enjoy the process.

The margins in these competitions are wafer thin, so a single bobble could have sent Liu off the podium entirely, but it seems clear that seizing her internal agency is the predicate to her external success and, long term, that internal agency is going to serve her better in more important ways than that gold medal.

Prior to the Olympics I had been led to believe that Ilia Malinin (The Quad God) was an inevitable gold medalist for men’s figure skating. At Slate, writing in advance of the free skate, Chris Schleicher declared Malinin “unbeatable.” Recognizing the fate-tempting nature of this statement Schleicher doubled-down:

As a figure skating expert, I feel it is my responsibility to tell you that Malinin is unbeatable. On the other hand, I feel a bit like I’m a shipbuilder calling the Titanic unsinkable. We make proclamations, and the gods laugh at us. Yes, yes, and I say this rolling my eyes, “anything is possible.” So, sure, a meteorite from Ilia’s home planet could strike him down and knock him out of the competition. But if he skates like he’s been skating all season, he has room to make mistakes and still win gold. But apart from the Quad God, there were a lot of other spectacular skates in Milan on Tuesday.

I watched Malinin skate the long program live and it was truly sick-making to witness a human being falling apart in real time, particularly because of the weight of the narrative that preceded the skate. Malinin was inevitable, until he wasn’t.

Watching these Olympics I have struggled with the effect of the narrative on my enjoyment in experiencing the athletic performances. I wonder also if the weight of the pre-competition narrative isn’t harming the athletes subject to the narrative.

Mikaela Shiffrin is the greatest skier in the history of her sport, period. And yet, I was led to believe that if she failed to win a gold this year, somehow her life would be incomplete. The narrative of her victory is a kind of redemption, but in what world does the greatest ever at her sport need redeeming?

I was listening to a podcast in advance of the women’s hockey final between the United States and Canada and the hosts were explicitly framing the contest around competing narratives of whether the Americans could get over the Olympic hump, or if Canadian captain Marie-Philip Poulin would cement her status as the greatest women’s player of all-time by returning from an earlier injury at the Games and leading the Canadians to another gold.

The Americans won the game with a thrilling play in overtime, a three-quarter rink pass from Taylor Heise followed by an amazing couple of dekes around the defender and then to beat the goalie by Megan Keller. But if you watched the game, you will realize that both of those pre-game narratives are true, regardless of the outcome.

For sure there’s an “old-man yelling at clouds” aspect to what I’m saying. It’s not like narratives attached to sports, particularly the Olympics, are new, but I do think in the past we let the events determine the narrative, rather than pre-writing them for the sake of goosing attention across the media.

The 1980 Miracle on Ice story was not framed as a potential “miracle” prior to the game between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Even the whole capitalists vs. communists narrative was spun up in hindsight. In the 1970s and 1980s it was pretty clear that if outstanding hockey was your goal, Soviet-style communism was superior to the West’s freedom. The Canadian pros would’ve been exposed in the 1972 Summit Series, an 8-game exhibition between the best Canadian NHL’ers and the Soviet national squad if Bobby Clarke didn’t fracture the ankle of the Soviet star, Valeri Kharlamov, with a blatant slash. Prior to the series the Canadians were expected to embarrass the Soviets, but they squeaked through winning four, losing three and tying one, winning the last three games following Kharlamov’s injury.

Clarke is still viewed as a hero by many for his deliberate injuring of Kharlamov, a narrative of democracy winning over communism, but without that frame it would just be one of the biggest cheap shots in the history of sports.

In that 1980 miracle, the U.S. team’s success was significantly predicated on coach Herb Brooks stealing the U.S.S.R.’s style of play and adopting it for North America.

But whatever. You show me the footage of Al Michaels shouting “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” and I’m as red white and blue as anyone. I am ignoring the Trump-friendly nature of a number of the American players on the Olympic team, most notably the Tkachuk brothers who were described by someone on social media as “what would helped if hog neck meat almost gained sentience,” which…yeah, that tracks.2

I don’t want to think about how some people will believe that a U.S. victory somehow validates Trump and Trumpism, one, because it will ruin any pleasure I may take in the occurrence, and two, because it’s ridiculous. If the U.S. wins it’s because 20 years ago some U.S. hockey people decided that if we put some resources towards identifying the best young hockey players in the nation and gave them the competition to develop we might achieve par with Canada, and it’s essentially happened.

Anyway. Consider this a deep hockey history newsletter now.

Unlike hockey, which I will watch, regardless of quality or stakes, I do not care about figure skating at all, but it is impossible to watch Liu’s performance and be unmoved. Tara Lipinski remarked that it seemed like Liu was “playing” on the ice. As she skated off the ice Liu exclaimed into the camera, “That’s what I’m fucking talking about!” For her, this was something beyond narrative.

Liu did not win by an overwhelming margin. She could have “lost,” despite having performed to her maximum capacity. It’s a shame that the narrative would’ve tainted that moment.

Being able to exist beyond or outside of narrative is one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed the performance of Norwegian cross country skier Johannes Høsflot Klæbo who won every race he competed in. His dominance erases narrative so you can only pay attention to the amazing physical feat. The footage of him charging up a hill at over 11mph as he leaves other elite athletes in the dust is as thrilling as Liu’s performance. It reminds me of my enjoyment of the John Wick movies, which also downplays narrative in the surface of delivering a kind of pure experience of choreographed close-combat violence. It doesn’t mean anything, except I’m glad to have experienced it.

My mind is going here because as I wrote last week, the next book I’m hoping to write intends to explore the intersection of experience and expertise and how these things translate to meaningful work and lives. Ilia Malinin was undone by the narrative and you hope that his next step is to figure out how to get beyond the narrative as Alysa Liu did. He has exhibited amazing self-awareness on this in the days post competition, so his chances seem good whatever he goes on to do.

One of the chief sources of power in a narrative is the way it sets expectations and anticipation. This is why NBC’s coverage spends so much time on these aspects of the athlete’s stories.

Wikipedia tells me Anne Henning has gone on to a life as a teacher and a mom and grandmother. It sounds like a good life.

I’m not going to flatter myself and say that trying to teach me not to drown is what inspired her to go on to her future profession, but one of the things I tell my students about learning to write is that everything matters and nothing matters simultaneously. There are no stakes that matter more than the attempt at learning something. Failure is inevitable, not fatal and the precursor to trying again. Success can be whatever they decide for themselves.

Most of what we do, most of what we try will ultimately be inconsequential, but we don’t know what that is ahead of time, so your best bet is to be as alert as possible to the moments of meaning, which may not be what you were expecting.

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This week at the Chicago Tribune I wrote about Brian Platzer’s new novel, The Optimists.

At I introduced a truly disturbing Q&A between and a Florida International University sociologist about how state officials are now dictating what can be taught in the college classroom.

has an interview with on the current state of book publicity.

explains why those author scam emails feel so bad. I didn’t have time to email “Reese W.” this week, but regular readers will recall my antidote to the bad feelings these scams engender from a couple weeks ago.

Via my friends “Is it a Red Flag, Wuthering Heights Edition” by Amy Greenlee.”

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Recommendations

1. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V E Schwab
2. The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne
3. Where the Deer and the Antelope Play by Nick Offerman
4. The Heart Shaped Tin by Bee Wilson
5. The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer

Jill G. - Florham Park NJ

Mostly non-fiction of the personal narrative style. In that vein, I’m going with Hannah Pittard’s We Are Too Many.

Reading Recommendations Here!

How have others found the Olympics this time around? Every four years, like a lot of folks I got into curling. Amazing how dramatic that sport can be.

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I took the forthcoming novel from Maria Semple with me on the road and I’m looking forward to getting back on a plane for another trip Tuesday so I can get back into it. I’d be reading it now, but there’s too much to do between now and the trip to immerse myself in the book the way I want, so I’m going to wait until I have that nice multi-hour chunk of unbidden time in the air.

See you next week.

JW
The Biblioracle

The breaking point was this headline on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s podcast conversation with The New York Times’ Ross Douthat.

I can dispel Dario Amodei’s doubt. We know that large language models like his company’s Claude are not conscious because the underlying architecture which drives them does not allow for it.

I am aware of and have dipped my toes into the larger debates about consciousness and whether or not we can definitively say whether or not anything is conscious - I’ve read my Daniel Dennett - but these debates, as interesting as they may be in theory are not applicable to the work of large language models. These things do not think, feel, reason or communicate with intention. This is simply a fact of how they work. I shall return to one of my favorite short explainers of this from Eryk Salvaggio and his essay, “A Critique of Pure LLM Reason”:

Could there be an embodied AI someday that has the kinds of capabilities that should give us pause before dismissing them as a mere machine? I don’t know, maybe? I’ve read I, Robot, I’ve watched Ex Machina.

But LLMs are not that, never will be, and yet here is the CEO of a company which just raised another $30 billion dollars, pushing Anthropic’s valuation to $380 billion, making a truly absurd claim.

Amodei has not been the only Anthropic figure on the woo-woo weaving PR tour. Company “philosopher” Amanda Askell has been everywhere, including a recent episode of the Hard Fork podcast in which she talks about her view that shaping Claude is akin to the work of raising a child.

Golly! If the people who are closest to the development of this technology are actively wondering about whether or not the models might be conscious and trying to offer guidance in the role of a parent in shaping its “character,” we’ve got some really powerful stuff here!

Unfortunately, the woo-woo isn’t limited to the direct statements from Anthropic insiders. In a company profile published at the New Yorker, which has much to recommend it as a work of ethnography, but is also infused with woo-woo, Gideon Lewis-Kraus gives in to the impulse to describe a large language model as a “black box,” a description that is simply not true, or is only true if you stretch the definition of “black box” to mean some stuff happens that’s surprising.

In truth, large language models operate as they were theorized in a paper prior to their development. There is no genie that has been released from the bottle (or black box) and floating around the room. There is a piece of technology. This woo-woo is spun in the service of creating a myth (more good stuff from Salvaggio here), a myth which signals to regular folks that we should see ourselves as disempowered in the face of such a thing. Even the people in charge of this stuff can’t really get a hold of it. What hope do the rest of us have?

This disempowerment makes us vulnerable to outsized and unevidenced claims like those in a viral Twitter essay that claimed we’re on the precipice of a disruption in the labor force unlike anything that’s occurred previously, beyond even what we can conceive of. ( fisks the vial essay here.)

It’s all woo-woo. Even this from the ostensibly sober-minded Derek Thompson is its own form of woo-woo.

We must ask, why is Dario Amodei saying he’s not sure if his LLM is conscious? Three possibilities:

1. He’s genuinely not very bright or well informed on this stuff.

2. He’s bullshitting us.

3. He’s bullshitting himself.

Let’s dismiss number one. When I posted a screen shot of that headline from the Douthat/Amodei podcast conversation on BlueSky, lots of people showed up to just say that Amodei is an idiot, which he is not. It is important not to grant people like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman (OpenAI), or Demis Hassabis (Google) any kind of special oracle status because of their proximity to the technology, but at the same time we must recognize their agency in these discussions. When they say things they are done with knowledge and intent.

In my view, the answer is some combination of 2 and 3. If you have to ask why Dario Amodei might be bullshitting us, here is your answer:

But we also cannot dismiss the notion that he is bullshitting himself. The Lewis-Kraus New Yorker piece paints a picture of a group of people in thrall to their own world views, views which are steeped in Effective Altruism, a movement which tasks themselves with being responsible for saving not just humanity, but the uncountable number of future people. While Anthropic plays down these associations, as true-blue EA’s are deeply concerned about AI killing us all, these delusions of importance appear to be part of the overall DNA.

In his book, More Everything Forever, Adam Becker pokes through the EA movement and finds something strange, cultish, and ultimately contradictory. These are people who intend to preserve humanity by potentially destroying the Earth.

In the past, Amodei has put his (p)doom score - the belief that AI could unleash catastrophic events - at 25%. Consider the tension here. Imagine you are both an Effective Altruist and you are working on technology that you believe could have a one-in-four chance of essentially exterminating humanity. Amodei says he has oriented his company’s priorities around AI safety. But a sincere belief in the danger of AI should lead you to pull the plug on your own project and then advocate forcefully for doing the same to others.

His views are irreconcilable, which is how we know it’s all woo-woo.

We gotta ignore the woo-woo because that’s all it is.

As to why people like Derek Thompson are making massive claims about the future of labor based essentially on personal, anecdotal experience, I think there’s a couple things going on:

1. More people are finding genuine, interesting, and surprising uses for the technology.

This appears particularly true of Claude Code, which is what Thompson is referring to here. For the uninitiated, Claude Code (and a similar product, Claude Cowork) are self-directing agents that can execute a task after being prompted in plain language instructions. They are, no doubt, amazing applications of this technology and people are finding them useful.

Here’s declaring that after trying Claude Code “everything has changed.” Dan’s work with data visualization in publishing was previously hampered by the challenges of coding for the data sets available to him. Claude Code has removed those frictions. Sinykin sees a revolution in digital humanities.

, who sorts through some of the current vibes in Silicon Valley where lots of people apparently think their jobs are about to be obviated, also found Claude Code useful:

The Claudes Code and Cowork are extremely cool and impressive tools, especially to people like me with no real prior coding ability. I had it make me a widget to fetch assets and build posts for Read Max’s regular weekly roundups, a task it completed with astonishingly little friction. Admittedly, the widget will only save me 10 or so minutes of busy work every week, but suddenly, a whole host of accumulated but untouched wouldn’t-that-be-nice-to-have ideas for widgets and apps and pages and features has opened itself up to me.

I wish I could find this reference I came across a few weeks back, but someone I read remarked that Claude Code is a great advance for people who can’t code, but who have a “software shaped hole” in their lives.

That’s what Read has experienced.

2. We’re still in the stage of being stunned by the novelty of what Claude Code can do.

This has happened every time some leap in the capabilities of LLMs is demonstrated. When ChatGPT arrived, both high school and college English were supposedly ended. When OpenAI trotted out its Sora video generator, Hollywood was some short number of years away from elimination. When AI-generated music started coming, etc, etc…

I find Sinykin’s work very interesting and do not doubt his amazement, and the potential for advancement in the digital humanities is very exciting for people working in the digital humanities, but this is not an epoch shaking change. Max Read’s reaction would be my own, a small jolt of pleasure at making something that saves me a little digital scutwork every week, but this is not transformative at the core of what either of these people do.

As more people explore these applications, they too will find the software shaped holes in their lives, but we have to wonder, how numerous, and how big are those holes? What is the true value of filling them?

Like, I could imagine a Claude Code application that does something I’ve vaguely desired for this newsletter - finding Bookshop.org links for any book mentioned in this column, including in the recommendation request lists of readers. This would be both a minor service to readers, by allowing them to click on the link for more information, and a potential financial benefit to the charities I donate the Bookshop.org referral income to.

Claude Code could fill this hole for me, but it is a very small hole. Only somewhere between 10-15% of the people who access this newsletter ever click on any links period. The additional revenue would be negligible, maybe $50 a year.

We have to get beyond the novelty to fully understand how useful this stuff is going to be, and my bet is that it’s going to be much less transformative in the short term - and Derek Thompson’s two year window is short term - than many seem to believe.

Part of my belief is because I am team . Transformations in the labor force simply take a long time, no matter how powerful or disruptive the technology seems.

I also think that there are fewer “software shaped holes” than many people seem to think, and the software shaped holes that some perceive are not real to those who are in touch with and invested in their work.

This principle was nicely illustrated by an email exchange I had this week with someone who had read More Than Words (or said they had) and was not impressed.

This person wanted to convince me that I really was missing the boat by not using large language models for my writing. Their main argument was “They (LLMs) know more than you ever could.”

I replied that this was not true because LLMs do not have access to the material that goes into my writing, my mind, my experiences, my thoughts, my feelings. It’s not clear to me how someone who had claimed to have read my book had missed these important distinctions, but they were not convinced. This person wanted me to appreciate that I could write “hundreds” of books if I tapped into the power of generative AI. I replied, asking who was going to read these hundreds of books. I haven’t heard back yet.

As it happens, this email arrived just after I’d finished a draft of a proposal for what I’m hoping becomes my next book. I shouldn’t even be talking about it because my agent hasn’t even read it yet, but what the hell, just completing the proposal is meaningful because it was an exercise in proving to myself first that there is a book inside of me, ready to come out.

The introduction to the proposal is a kind of mini-essay ruminating on how, over the course of thirty-plus years I went from a rank incompetent as a writing teacher to someone who now gets paid real US greenbacks to go to places and talk to others about how we should approach teaching writing. One of the roots of how I have become this entirely different person is “experience.”

Here’s what I had to say about that:

“Experience is the best teacher” is one of the cliches that people offer up after you’ve had a lousy experience, an acknowledgement of your pain and suffering and a minor sop towards looking on the bright side because at least you won’t do that stupid thing again, at least not in the exact same way. The reason we don’t immediately punch out the person telling us this is because we know it to be true.

One of the important shifts in my own experience of teaching was when my failures went from humiliations brought about by (literal) inexperience, to failures following good faith, but ultimately ill-conceived or ill-executed attempts at better reaching my students.

I’d crossed the line of agency where I had some measure of intention over my work and my experiences now consistently took the form of intentional experiments. Those experiments often included some element of failure, but these were failures I could work from.

Having sufficient expertise to work from this kind of intention is somewhere down the line of growth, though. At first, you’re going to simply get cuffed around by life, your lack of knowledge, and your inexperience. This can be deeply unpleasant, for example if you forget to completely rinse down a surface that has previously been scrubbed with muriatic acid before applying a soapy cleanser with the nearly opposite pH, resulting in a toxic gas, as happened to me during a brief period of employment as a pool maintenance technician.

In the case of my near poisoning, I’d even been told by Reggie, the crew chief, to make sure to “rinse the shit” out of pool before giving it the wash, but I did not fully appreciate what rinsing the shit out of something meant until I almost killed myself. (Reggie, positioned down wind, laughed and said, “told ya, college” as I scrambled out of the pool and we watched our very minor airborne toxic event waft through north suburban Chicago.)

Similarly, I spent years warning my students about various pitfalls to avoid in the writing of their stories, essays, reports, etc…and yet they would relentlessly commit these sins nonetheless, sometimes minutes after they had been instructed otherwise. I would pull my hair, gnash my teeth, rend my garments and plead with them to pay better attention to my instruction next time, but it never worked.

Why? Because we learn through experience. Not incidentally, the capacity to learn from real world experiences is a hard and permanent difference between human beings and AI. (This generation of AI, at least.)

There is one small part here that particularly tickles me, and is a reminder to myself why writing requires me to just do the work of writing. I’m talking about the parenthetical about Reggie and I watching our “very minor airborne toxic event.”

It tickles me is that I retain these specific memories of Reggie, a guy I worked with for all of six weeks and never talked to again, but who was a genuine character, and that this memory combined in the moment of drafting with a reference to Don DeLillo’s White Noise, a book I would read for the first time in a postmodern literature course the semester after the summer I worked with Reggie.

How amazing is that, that my mind can reach back 35 years and combine these things into a piece of writing that I produced in February of 2026? I could quite easily have prompted an LLM to write a book proposal, to conjure possible chapters, comparative titles, and audience analysis, and it all would’ve been plausible, but it wouldn’t have been mine.

I think Derek Thompson is undervaluing two things. One is the importance of prior experiences to being able to use this technology in genuinely, enduringly useful ways that move beyond novelty. To use these applications productively, we must understand the deep context of our work. It is seductive to believe we can do everything faster, but I think this is a false hope when it comes to both the efficiency and quality of our work.

Interestingly, at least some coders are recognizing similar limitations in outsourcing work to Claude Code, the fact that the outsourcing removes important context that allows them to understand the full picture of what they’re creating. This post from Reddit is deeply thoughtful on this challenge.

One of the byproducts of any automating technology is the erasure of context. GPS erases the work of navigation. Using writing for LLMs erases the experience and unique intelligence behind a text. My work as a writer no doubt biases my thinking, but it’s my view that these contexts are far more important than some would like to believe and that the siren call of increased speed and efficiency may send lots of folks down a false path. I think we’re going to see a lot of visions of transformation that are later to be revealed as mirages as we lurch toward novelty and then have to retreat in order to ground the work in context.

It also has the potential for both labor deskilling and self-alienation. One reason to write my own book proposal is because having done so makes me excited and eager to work on the book. This makes me feel good. It will also help me make a better book. A shortcut to a faster proposal would, in the long run, be a detriment to the final product. I would’ve liked to have this done months ago, and using an LLM to make a simulation of it, I probably could have done so, maybe could have even sold it, but now I’d be sitting here wondering how I’m going to write a book that’s not mine.

Looked at through the lens of life and experience, rather than transaction and output, nothing is immaterial, including those six weeks where you were part of Reggie’s pool cleaning crew.

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Update on my career-making correspondence with Reese W.

Last week I shared a series of emails with Reese W., who is offering me an opportunity to promote my work.

I didn’t have a lot of time to correspond with Reese W. this past week, but I did want to update her on my efforts to secure the $100 necessary to take advantage of the incredible promotional opportunity.

Reese remains very understanding.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I had the pleasure of describing my pleasure at reading ’s short story collection, Hey You Assholes.

At Inside Higher Ed I rounded up some recent events in higher education that are absolutely, positively, nuts.

After drafting the main text of this newsletter I came across ’s post offering a bet to Scott Alexander that AI technology will be much less disruptive than many think. I’m not smart enough to work through the specific criteria of the bet, but directionally, on this issue, I’m team deBoer.

Another piece I wish I’d read before I drafted the main text, also assessing how big a change that agents like Claude Code may be by looking back at a different software revolution that wasn’t.

Via my friends “Give Us Access to Your Ring Camera and Maybe We’ll Find Your Dog” by Madeline Goetz an Will Lampe

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Recommendations

1. Dreaming the Beatles by Rob Sheffield
2. Burn Book by Kara Swisher
3. I Want to Burn this Place Down by Maris Kreizman
4. Lorne by Susan Morrison
5. There’s Always this Year by Hanif Abdurraqib

Michael G. - Royse City, TX

What we got here is a fan of the personal/cultural/memoir-ish essay. I’m having a hard time choosing between two that came to mind so I’m going to break a rule and recommend them both. One is Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander and the other is Devil in the Details by Jennifer Traig.

Request your own recommendation.

Back on the road next week to spread the gospel of treating learning to write as an experience, but I should hopefully have time to maintain my correspondence with Reese W. Let me know in the comments if you any suggestions for what misfortunate may befall me.

Also, what software shaped holes do you have in your lives? I’m curious if my intuition that these gaps are smaller than some think is true.

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Thanks, as always for reading, spare a good thought for my book proposal and I’ll see you next week.

JW
The Biblioracle

I mean, at first I was skeptical, but look at that email address. I zoomed in on the photo, and yep, that’s definitely who I think it is.

What does Reese W. want? To talk about my book!

I’m beyond excited, but then I remembered I’ve published nine books and she didn’t say which one she was interested in. She got back to me pretty much right away!

Am I open to it? Reese W. wants to talk about my book about how to reform higher education? I mean, I guess it is still a hot topic these days, but the book is more than 5 years old. Heck yeah I’m open to it! Also, close readers will note that her regards have increased from “Best” to “Warm.” Could things be going better?

I’m a little concerned that she has dropped her regards and is only feeling warmly toward me now, but perhaps we have moved to more familiar territory. I do not want this opportunity to slip out of my hands.

Okay, so Reese W. isn’t making me an offer to be featured on her book club, but maybe this is still a great opportunity, and it’s only going to cost me $100. What kind of fool would let their gravy train roll by without jumping aboard for a mere C-note?

Thing is, I’ve got some problems.

Thankfully, Reese W. is absolutely as warm and approachable as she seems in her many roles on TV and film and she’s willing to dish on her co-stars!

I’m no fool, so I have another question as part of my due diligence. And since we’re hitting it off so well, I figure I can ask her for some advice based on her own past experience.

Can you even imagine a more world class human than this? Super busy, super wealthy, but also willing to write perfectly structured emails with bold headings on each major section so I don’t miss anything and doesn’t say anything about my embarrassing typo “copy” instead of “cop.” So gracious.

So, I didn’t want to screw the pooch, but this whole time I’ve been thinking that it might be smarter to promote my most recent book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, rather than my five-year-old book about higher education. I’m worried that I’m taking up too much of Reese W.’s time, but I can’t resist one more burning question.

It’s disappointing that she can’t front me the fee, but you have to admire the integrity of treating every author equally. No matter, I’ve figured out some workarounds on the money issue.

I was about to say that Reese hasn’t gotten back to me yet as I sat down to write Saturday morning, but look who just showed up in my inbox:

Clearly this is now much more than a chance to promote a book. I think I’ve got a friend!

To be continued…

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Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I review Ben Markovits’ Booker nominated novel, The Rest of Our Lives, which I wasn’t going to read, but am glad I did.

At Inside Higher Ed I reflected on how C. Thi Nguyen’s interesting new book The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game explains why I had to quit playing Wordle, and also why we need to do some good hard thinking about what matters in higher education research and teaching/learning.

The big news in media this week is Jeff Bezos gutting the once proud Washington Post, including axing all of the books coverage, one of the last remaining stand alone books sections in the country. Before the exciting encounter with Reese W. I was going to offer my thoughts on where we are, but that will have to wait for another day. I can tide you over with my friend , who nails what this says about Bezos and news media going forward. Reflecting on the decline in outlets for book criticism and the contraction of the publishing industry, unleashes a call for literature to adopt a punk rock mindset.

It’s probably foolish for me to draw attention to the arrival of to this platform given that there’s only so many subscription dollars to go around for book commentary/reviews with a lightly humorous touch and Charles is a considerably bigger fish than your humble Biblioracle, but I’ve enjoyed his work for a couple of decades and he came here to say “he’s not done.”

And for any new arrivals to the platform, I'm reposting a piece from a couple of weeks ago on the promise and perils of Substack. TLDR: Don’t get too comfortable.

Via my friends at , Carlos Greaves writing on this weekend’s big event: “FAQs for This Weekend’s Bad Bunny Concert Featuring Football.”

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Recommendations

1. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
2. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
3. Independent People by Halldor Laxness
4. Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
5. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

A. Blair - New York, NY

A great list for me to recommend the criminally under read Tom Drury and his beautiful novel, The End of Vandalism.

Request a book recommendation. Now!

If things develop further with Reese W., I’ll let you guys know in future posts. I’m going to send her this one once it goes live, so we’ll se how that goes.

JW
The Biblioracle

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He will also be doing a podcast at The Atlantic underwritten by Yale University, which will likely suck.

Ten, fifteen years ago I had an acquaintance who generally shared my politics, but not my ire for Brooks ask, “How come you think David Brooks sucks so bad?” and my reply was, “How can you not think David Brooks sucks?”

Not coincidentally I am in my 22nd year of publicly pronouncing that David Brooks sucks, a history that I catalogued here previously and do not wish to repeat in total, but let’s stipulate that my previous work is entered into the record of David Brooks’ intense suckitude.

The previous post outlines how Brooks sucks. Today, I want to first spend some time exploring the deeper origins of the suckiness, what it says about society that someone who sucks so hard can get a five-year appointment at an elite university to do a podcast, and then - to everyone’s gratitude, I’m sure - suggest some possible replacements who don’t suck.

One reason David Brooks sucks: He has no influence or real impact.

It’s hard to imagine someone writing from the most prestigious real estate in journalism for 22 years having less of an impact. Don’t believe me. No less than an authority than David Brooks, writing in his farewell column agrees:

When I came to The Times, I set out to promote a moderate conservative political philosophy informed by thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton. I have been so fantastically successful in bringing people to my point of view that moderate Republicans are now the dominant force in American politics, holding power everywhere from the White House to Gracie Mansion. I figure my work here is done.

I’m kidding.

Full credit for self-effacement, but seriously, how sad is this? Not only has Brooks failed to leave a mark on the culture, his preferred world view has been utterly routed, and even as this has unfolded he’s continually failed to adjust his understanding of the world.

A reason David Brooks sucks related to the first reason: He’s a coward.

Bill Kristol, someone who would have been well to the right of Brooks, now sounds like the leader of the Trump resistance, decrying elite failure to confront an authoritarian. Meanwhile, consider Brooks’ response in the aftermath of the murder of Renee Good in his weekly confab with Jonathan Capehart on the PBS NewsHour. After Capehart lays out the reality of ICE’s occupation of the Twin Cities and the murder of Good, host Geoff Bennet pivots to Brooks to get his take.

Brooks immediately invokes a classic sociological study in which students at Princeton and Dartmouth were shown film of a football game between the two schools and the students were more likely to record penalty infractions against their rival than their own side. This is a way for Brooks to distance himself from having to make a judgment and instead making a banal observation about bias towards our own side.

His own opinion?

As to the events of what actually happened, I'm not going to render a judgment on what happened, because we're going to have an investigation. I will leave it to them. And I hope Minnesota has full information to do the investigation.

The man sees footage of a murder and can’t mange to say so. It’s almost pathological.

To my knowledge and after much searching I cannot find any public comment from David Brooks about the murder of Alex Pretti.

Another reason David Brooks sucks: He makes shit up.

From the beginning, David Brooks has been full of shit, allowed to repeatedly Malcolm Gladwell stray bits of academic research into grand theories of society that get turned into conventional political wisdom.

All the way back in 2004, Sasha Issenberg walked through Brooks’ claims in an Atlantic article “One Nation, Slightly Divisible” and found them to be largely inventions not grounded in reality.

When confronted by Issenberg, Brooks accused Issenberg of approaching his critique as a dishonest reporter and that Brooks’ work holds up because it “rings true.” This is perhaps the ur-text of both Brooks’ appeal and why he sucks. He puts a sheen of scholarship over garden-variety stereotyping and prejudice that flatters the sensibilities of his audience. Issenberg captures the crux of the problem: “By holding himself to a rings-true standard, Brooks acknowledges that all he does is present his readers with the familiar and ask them to recognize it. Why, then, has his particular brand of stereotype-peddling met with such success? In recent years, American journalism has reacted to the excesses of New Journalism — narcissism, impressionism, preening subjectivity — by adopting the trappings of scholarship.”

Essentially, Brooks set out to be Tom Wolfe, but having neither Wolfe’s panache nor his eye, nor the courage to present his work as “this is what I saw and believe” as Wolfe did, Brooks instead substitutes “this is what my research and reporting say is true.” He’s a bastardized version of the New Journalists he idolized.

In 2015, David Zweig tried to track down a Brooks reference to a Gallup survey from The Road to Character:

“In 1950, the Gallup Organization asked high school seniors if they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2005, and this time it wasn’t 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent.”

When Zweig went down the Brooks bullshit rabbit hole he found him quoting a different year to Bill Maher (1998) and a third reference in Brooks’ The Social Animal to the 2nd survey being in the late 1980s. An email to Brooks’ publicist said that despite the study being not by Gallup and not saying what Brooks’ said it said, “the sociological trend is accurate.”

Making stuff up and then covering with vague references to research and data is the consistent hallmark of his work.

A related additional reason to the reason just above that David Brooks sucks: He’s a wishcaster, not an analyst.

The Zweig example is a small illustration of Brooks’ general M.O., to say things that sound plausibly true and that fit with what people believe and back them up with authoritative sounding evidence in order to advance the narrative you wish to make true.

You could almost pick a Brooks column at random and see him working in this mode.

What the heck, I’ve gone ahead and done this with an effort from October 28, 2016 titled “The Conservative Intellectual Crisis.”

In the column he walks through the decline of conservatives from Buckley to Trump, checking of a list that runs through Limbaugh, Coulter, et al, telling a story where “politics” has triumphed over values, substituting “rage” for analysis. Republican failure to “address the central social problems of our time” opened the door for a demagogue like Trump.

Everything is both uninteresting and unobjectionable. We’re expected to nod along to this understanding the author as a kind of sage with both experience and wisdom.

But here is his conclusion where he offers his vision of a hopeful future, nine months into Trump’s first term:

This is a sad story. But I confess I’m insanely optimistic about a conservative rebound. That’s because of an observation the writer Yuval Levin once made: That while most of the crazy progressives are young, most of the crazy conservatives are old. Conservatism is now being led astray by its seniors, but its young people are pretty great. It’s hard to find a young evangelical who likes Donald Trump. Most young conservatives are comfortable with ethnic diversity and are weary of the Fox News media-politico complex. Conservatism’s best ideas are coming from youngish reformicons who have crafted an ambitious governing agenda (completely ignored by Trump).

A Trump defeat could cleanse a lot of bad structures and open ground for new growth. It was good to be a young conservative back in my day. It’s great to be one right now.

What was actually happening was what calls the “groyperfication” of the Republican Party where legions of young people - mostly men - were exposed to a steady diet of white nationalist, anti-feminist, authoritarian media resulting in a center of gravity for the conservative movement that has Tucker Carlson (once seen as a Buckley heir) cozying up to an overt white supremacist fascist like Nick Fuentes and the president of the Heritage Foundation suggesting that they should make room in the tent for people like Fuentes.

It’s the movement that editors at The Harvard Salient, a conservative independent student publication at Harvard University, casually throwing around racial slurs and publishing overt Nazi/Hitler references in an edition of the publication.

Those students were in grade school when Brooks wrote his column about the future of the conservative movement being in the youth. This is a bigger miss than supporting the Iraq War (which of course Brooks did as well).

This is a man who has spilled thousands of words of political advice, a man who can’t see the putrid little Nazi’s rising out of his own political faction and who treated random progressive undergrads as the equivalent of Pol Pot.

A final observation of why Brooks sucks: He’s a brand, not a writer.

I’ve already gone on longer than I intended and have three points left in my outline, but I’ll close with what I think has gone wrong for the man: he wedded himself to an image that was useful for achieving things like a column at The New York Times, and invites to the Aspen Institute, and PBS commentaries, and even some of Jeffrey Epstein’s gatherings.

But that image ultimately became a straightjacket, and if he ever had the capacity to truly write from a place of observation and discovery, it disappeared long ago.

It is the Brooks brand that makes him attractive to Yale, not his ideas, which are barely existent and also, as we’ve seen, wrong. The fellowship Brooks is assuming is part of a broader program to “restore trust in public universities” which means putting someone like Brooks who is critical of places like Yale in the right way - insisting on their importance and also that they’re too liberal - forward as a face of attempts at reform.

I don’t know the man. He could be a great guy, good tipper, kind to animals, always willing to lend an ear to someone who needs it. I don’t even feel any antipathy towards him as a person, but what he’s done, what he represents, and the influence he’s had on our public politics..sucks.

Some suggestions to replace David Brooks

My guess is that David Brooks will not be replaced as a regular columnist and whatever content hole opens up will be filled by outside pieces solicited and shaped by the editorial staff.

I’m also going to ignore any theoretical requirement that Brooks be replaced by a writer in his image. The Times already has a cruder, dumber version of him in Bret Stephens, and a weirder, more religiously devout version of him in Ross Douthat. They have that beat covered. I’m also not going to consider someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates who I think has ascended beyond the bi-weekly column and is really a great example of how a writer reaching prominence can escape becoming a brand so they can continue to do their work.

My candidates:

Heather McGhee (author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs and How We Can prosper Together.)

Former head of a think tank and author of a book that has as clear a diagnosis and approach to remedy to the structural problems in American society as I’m aware of.

John Ganz (Author of When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the 1990s and proprietor of newsletter.)

Ganz is, in many ways, the inverse of Brooks, impassioned rather than measured, caustic (when provoked), and also, not for nothing, correct about his analysis of the forces that have been gathering for decades. Also co-host with current Times columnist Jamelle Bouie of the very fun and illuminating Unclear and Present Danger podcast looking at the politics of the popular movies of the 1990s.

Lyz Lenz (Author of The American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life and proprietor of Men Yell at Me newsletter.)

Formerly housed at Substack, now at Patreon, maybe Lenz could bring her delightful “Dingus of the Week” feature to The New York Times. Unlikely, because, as David Brooks might say, calling people “dinguses” is a “coarsening of the culture,” but I’ll take plain, accurate talk over milquetoast mewling any day of the week.

Perry Bacon Jr. (Current New Republic and former Washington Post and 538 columnist/reporter).

Full disclosure, Perry is a friend, but if the Times is looking for someone willing to criticize the Democratic Party, the’s the right guy, as seen in his most recent piece, “Senate Democrats’ ICE Proposals Are a Huge and Inexcusable Whiff.”

Hamilton Nolan (Author of The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor and proprietor of the How Things Work newsletter.

Could you imagine a columnist at The New York Times who writes from the perspective of labor? Me neither, but dare to dream.

Me:

In the immortal words of Katniss Everdeen, “I volunteer as tribute!” Honestly, I don’t like my odds given my history of declaring that the last guy to have the job “sucks,” but for the record, I would crush it.

Who would you like to see opining regularly at the paper of record? Share your nominees in the comments.

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Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I attempt to get to the core of the appeal of Heated Rivalry. TLDR, it’s a romance and people love romance.

At Inside Higher Ed I state what should be obvious, big-time college sports are too big and we can’t sustain organizations where the same person is in charge of the football team and the academic mission.

Writing about David Brooks obligates me to share my imagined fiction drawn from his life that, swear to god, seems to nail the guy, even though I honestly made it all up.

republished an essay of his from a previous collection about David Foster Wallace and related stuff that’s worth your time.

has a truly long, but totally worthwhile read breaking down her investigations of and perambulations through the fiction of The New Yorker. This is a writer using her medium to its highest purpose.

Via my friends , “Tinder Hasn’t Worked So I’m Putting Myself on Zillow” by Hannah Roberts.

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Recommendations

1. Book Of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margret Atwood
2. A Bitter Wind: A Billy Boyle WWII Mystery by James R Benn
3. Best American Short Stories 2025 ed. Celeste Ng
4. Year Of the Monkey by Patti Smith
5. The Award by Matthew Pearl

Joe F. - Channahon, IL

For Joe I’m recommending one of my favorite recent twisty little stories that also has some publishing-related intrigue, Who Is Maude Dixon by Alexandra Andrews.

Bespoke Recommendations Here

This coming Wednesday is the one-year anniversary of the release of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. The whole time I was working on the book I was worried that the world would scoop me by recognizing the value of being human through our reading, writing, and communicating, but if anything, the issues the book works through strike me as more relevant than at the time of publication.

At the moment of this typing I am seeing honest-to-goodness snow outside my window in Charleston, South Carolina. Mrs. Biblioracle tells me we have red wine and chocolate chip cookies downstairs, so that’s where I’m going.

JW
The Biblioracle

1. Don’t write about Substack qua Substack, Substack as a platform. While there is a lot of attention to be gained in doing so, this is not what I want to spend my time on here.

2. Don’t write, primarily, from a place of exasperation and anger.

But there are limits to all rules and over the last couple of days I’ve reached my limit.

(Perhaps some of this ire is also rooted in being heartsick about the federal government murdering another person in Minneapolis and having nothing meaningful beyond expressions of heartsickness, but feeling the urge to express something, anything as a reminder to myself of my own humanity.)

In Substack Notes, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie announced the launch of a beta version of Substack TV, an app download available on Apple TV and Google TV.

This is part of a larger don’t-call-it-a-pivot to video that Substack has been pursuing over the last year or so through supporting video podcasts and Substack live chats. McKenzie still regularly proselytizes for the unique virtues of the written word, but Substack TV is clearly designed as a vehicle for the “creators” of the world, not the writers.

Whenever McKenzie announces one of these initiatives, or really says anything at all, there is a class of contributor here the arrives to treat him as some mix of oracle and benevolent uncle who brought you that new action figure you’ve always wanted but didn’t think you’d get. This next sentence is the anger talking, but I find these prostrations embarrassing, even pathetic. I do not understand how in the year 2026 adults can walk around with anything other than suspicion for the owners of these media platforms.

I don’t mean to suggest that we owe Hamish McKenzie our hostility - though this is the path I’ve chosen - but this kind of simpering praise should be beneath anyone’s dignity. You would not do this when Verizon announces a discounted additional line on your account.

Shifting from ire to analysis I’d like to unpack some of McKenzie’s claims about Substack in the wake of this latest announcement. In my chapter “On the Future of Writing for Money” in More Than Words I look in general at the potential for subscription-based aggregator platforms as vehicles for sustainable incomes for writers and declare a decidedly mixed-bag. Yes, there is some money to be earned - for now - but we know that the long term prospects for writers are not positive.

Hamish McKenzie sees things differently, or at least says he does. We’re looking at a revolution:

It is impossible to tell if McKenzie believes this or not, if it is a sales pitch for the masses or the kind of self-delusion required of someone in his pursuit, but all of this is total nonsense.

Speaking of nonsense, here’s the book McKenzie published prior to launching Substack when he was an “independent journalist” who just happened to write PR for tech companies.

Anyway. Let’s break down McKenzie’s claims.

“Substack is a writing app. And way, way more.”

True. It’s also a podcast, video, and social media app.

“The media revolution that this platform represents is not a format revolution, nor a technological revolution—it’s a business model revolution.”

Umm…what? At Substack people pay money for access to content. This money is shared between the creators of the content and the distributors of the content. This same cutting edge technology dates back to something known as a “newsstand.”

I know that people like to believe they’re on the inside track of something special, but let’s be frank with ourselves. Substack has done well at establishing a beachhead for users and attention that its predecessors like Medium could not, but there is nothing revolutionary going on here.

“Business models matter more because they shape behavior. They sway culture.”

I have no idea what this might mean, probably because it doesn’t mean anything. What behavior is Substack shaping? How is the culture itself being swayed? This is pitch meeting speak that for some reason some of the participants here lap up. Again, embarrassing.

“Substack is a new business model for media. And it works.

It works for writing, it works for podcasting, it works for video, and it works for communities. And thank God, because look at the alternatives.”

If by “works” he means that the site correctly displays and distributes the content (most of the time), I agree. But I think he means something beyond that. The fact that a small handful of people make a lot of money, some other people make a decent amount of money and the vast majority make very little money is not a revolutionary business model. Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More has its 20th anniversary this year.

Bandcamp, which is Substack for music, and by far the closest analogue, was founded in 2008 and had a long run of being genuinely supportive for independent musical artists - operating without venture capital - until it was sold to Epic and things got a bit squishy.

Substack has been beholden to Marc Andreessen from the outset. Substack wants you to believe that it is infrastructure for writers to do what they wish. It is not.

“This is an ecosystem that offers a better deal for writers, artists, and creators. And a better deal for their audiences.”

Substack being a better deal for the content purveyors of the world is very much dependent on circumstances. A handful of people are pulling down seven-figures. Some people who had very little potential to earn anything might now be getting a few thousand a year for their efforts. Personally, as an old and a professional writer, I preferred the time where you could write for a publication and receive payment or even a salary and extra perks like insurance and vacation. I understand that this old system is gone, but I don’t think McKenzie is simply saying it’s better than bad present alternatives. This is a “revolution” after all.

On the audience side, it definitely is not a better deal. I will not disclose how much I spend annually on paid Substack subscriptions to individual newsletters, but it is a lot and as much as I enjoy and want to support those writers the cost of a single subscription used to buy me weekly access to the revolutionary technology known as the “magazine” where I could read a dozen writers all in one handy package delivered to my door.

Again, this is not a lament about the world gone by, but an attempt to add some perspective to claims of revolution. In reality, Substack is simply a way station on the continuous slide down the hill.

Yes, some people have done very well for themselves as individuals by establishing newsletters here. Heather Cox Richardson, Matt Yglesias, George Saunders, random anti-vax conspiracists, have all found audiences sizable enough to both garner money and attention. Heck, if you can combine your newsletter with the preternatural ability to flatter the sensibilities of the tech oligarch class you may find yourself with a nine-figure payday and as the next chief of CBS News!

But I am imploring people to be sensible about the underlying dynamics. Substack is a tech company that has taken in over $200 million dollars in venture capital investment. It’s is theoretically valued at over a $1 billion. They are not here to empower we sensitive wordsmiths so we can revolutionize culture.

They’re in it for the money. I promise.

Moving into podcasts, video, and now Substack TV is part of a larger phenomenon with platforms trying to lock in users with exclusive content. It’s why YouTube and now Netflix are podcast platforms. Substack is betting/hoping that they have some number of participants here that are desirable enough to draw some people toward that TV app, but straight talk here, unless you are the people I named above or Paul Krugman or Katie Couric or Jim Acosta or The Bulwark or some maniac white supremacist who has managed to gather a critical mass of gutter racists around a burning cross, Substack TV is not for you.

Substack is not a filter for quality expression or uniqueness of insight. It is like every other platform, a gatherer of eyeballs. If AI slop newsletters are translated to AI slop video that enough people watch on Substack TV to sell apps or subscriptions, that’s what Substack will promote.1

Do thirty seconds of research on what it has been like for YouTube creators and you will see the ultimate trajectory of Substack TV except you won’t have a chance to make the kind of money that was available on YouTube for at least a while.

You are not going to become Mr. Beast. Substack TV is not a portal through which people will find your writing. Kissing up to Hamish McKenzie doesn’t make the impossible more likely.

McKenzie had another Notes post that I think is especially clarifying in terms of the delusion he’s trying to perpetrate.

Perhaps unintentionally, McKenzie’s use of “independents” and “centralizers” in this way clarifies the relationship between newsletter writers and the platform. McKenzie wants us to believe - like the original note writer whose handle I’ve redacted - that Substack is our portal to the world, but the reality is that newsletter writers are to Substack as drivers are to Uber.

Substack’s pitch to writers has been that you “own your audience,” in that you have access to subscriber emails and could - in theory - move them to another platform. This is not actually revolutionary by itself - the same is true on MailChimp - and increasingly it is no longer true. Followers are not necessarily subscribers. The “discovery” via the social media platform or the “rising” charts are exclusive to Substack. (And already a reason people who are otherwise desiring to leave, stay.)

For the time being, podcast and video contact can be ported to other platforms, but the inexorable trend is towards exclusivity. Substack doesn’t have the muscle to force these choices on newsletter writers, but when they do, they could, and they will.

This is not a collective or collaborative enterprise. The same way Uber has gradually squeezed margins out of the drivers, Substack will do the same here. The platform’s whales will either be exempted or are large enough to absorb the extra hit. The rest of the us will be told to like it or lump it and for those who are overcommitted to the platform either practically or psychologically, they will have to like it.

My advice is that you have to be prepared to lump it at a moment’s notice because your only hope is that Hamish McKenzie is as benevolent as he comes across on his own platform’s social media interface.

But we know he’s spouting nonsense. We know what the trajectory of these sorts of platforms is based on previous experience. Maybe sucking up to Hamish is a smart play. Maybe my criticism here is the act of an idiot and the owners will flip a switch on the algorithm consigning me to newsletter oblivion without me ever knowing.

The point is that these are their switches. Your train is on someone else’s track and they could take action that will cause you to derail. You won’t even see it coming and nothing can protect you.

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So what’s the plan? What’s the alternative?

In More Than Words I argue that the best long term, sustainable bet for writers is to follow the model of entities like Defector and Flaming Hydra and gather together under umbrellas that are actually owned and controlled by the writers themselves. There are not nine-figure paydays in these models, but there is good, interesting, sustaining and sustainable work.

If a person who is smarter and more organized than me got something like this going that was a good fit for my work and could pay me the same amount I make from this newsletter, I would join in an instant. I lament that I don’t have the necessary hustle/drive/time to spearhead something like this.

In the meantime I will continue to write here as long as it makes sense for me to do so. That could be a day - if Hamish takes a dimmer view on me than on the cranks and conspiracists who also populate this platform - or it could be years. I do know that even as my total subscriber base and readership seems to increase, my personal revenue declines slightly year-to-year. (This is an observation about the business dynamics of the platform, not a complaint directed at subscribers of all stripes that I value deeply.)

Others can make their own judgments, but I’m imploring everyone to not be a sucker for Hamish McKenzie’s VC sales pitch. By all means squeeze the Substack lemon of as much juice as possible, but recognize that Substack is not the vehicle for your own liberation. The platform owners do not have your best interests in mind. Quality may matter to some degree, but it is not determinative.

That’s not how these things ever have or ever will work.

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This week at the Chicago Tribune I explored my surprising disappointment in George Saunders’ new novel Vigil. Is it me? Is it the book? Or is it maybe some combination of the two?

At Inside Higher Ed I did my thing where I use the impulse by some to outsource their writing to AI in order to examine the underlying dynamics of the thing they’re being asked to write. In this case it’s the personal statement as part of applying to graduate school.

paid attention to what was going on at Davos and the news is not good when it comes to those of us looking for lives independent of AI.

In other education technology news let me recommend this piece from 13-year-old Micha Blachman reviewing the technology he uses in his day-to-day schooling. Schools should absolutely hire this kid as a consultant, pronto.

Via my friends and by the great John Moe, himself a man of Minnesota, from the laugh to keep from crying category, “I am the Payroll Accountant for Professional Protesters in Minnesota and I am Swamped.”

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Recommendations

1. The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebeard by Walter Moers
2. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
3. If You’re Freaking Out Read This: A Coping Workbook for Building Good Habits, Behaviors, and Hope by Simone DeAngelis
4. The Story of a Snail Who Discovered the Importance of Being Slow by Luis Sepulveda
5. All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Ruth S. - State College, PA

It’s exciting to see a list and know instantly that the right recommendation is by a friend of the newsletter, in this case and her fascinating book, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncovering the Cost of Saving a Life.

Request your reading recommendation.

I continue to believe that this is going to end, but ending it will require concerted and coordinated efforts like the brave people of Minneapolis taking to the streets to register their refusal to be subject to authoritarian rule. The Trump regime will continue to lie even when evidence to the contrary is incontrovertible. But there is simply too much resistance rooted for the authoritarians to win. I believe that.

If anyone has knowledge of how to best support the work closest to the resistance, I urge you to share it in the comments.

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Stay warm, stay safe, stay fierce.

JW
The Biblioracle

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Publishers Weekly has provided a list of the most purchased print books of 2025.

The headline is that the sales of print books continue to increase year-over-year - slightly - but still an increase. For all the sturm and drang about the death of reading, people still seem to be buying physical copies of books. Sales were higher during the peak of the pandemic, but they’ve now settled at a level above pre-pandemic numbers.

Seeing the article and the headline I thought I’d come here and do some thinking - and perhaps celebrating - of the persistence of books in the culture, and maybe even engage in some forward-looking musing about how we may see an increase in interest in books as an alternative to AI and the digital world.

But then I looked at the list of the 20 most purchased print books of 2025 and noticed something interesting. I’ve only read two of them (you can guess which ones and I’ll reveal it at the end):

Maybe this shouldn’t be so surprising. A number of these are kids’ books and I’m not a kid and don’t have any. I did read the first Diary of Wimpy Kid books years ago out of curiosity and maybe a latent wondering if I could think of a suitable copycat concept and came away respecting the originality of vision of authors like Jeff Kinney.

The list is also thick with romantasy, a genre that I’ve written previously just isn’t for me.

I assume the Mel Robbins book is self-help, which…no. I’m sure I need as much help as anyone, but I do not turn to these sorts of books for it. Atomic Habits falls into this category as well. I’m sure if I could follow whatever it recommends I would be a more organized, productive, and successful person, but I’m also certain that I am incapable of sticking with those habits, so reading it would only make me feel like a failure.

The secret to my success is to have reasonable expectations for myself and the world around me.

I read the first three installments of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series over the course of a vacation years ago, but have no interest in dipping back into the universe. I’ve read The DaVinci Code also, but ditto for Robert Langdon’s adventures. I am aware of Frieda Mcfadden and believe I understand the appeal of her novels, but if I’m in the mood for a psychological thriller I have Megan Abbott, Laura Lippman, Ruth Ware, Lisa Lutz, and others who make what I believe to be much more pleasing sentences to turn to.

I’d never heard of Lights Out, which is described as a “dark romance” and went viral on TikTok. Again, not my thing. So, here I am a professional book person who hasn’t read any of the best selling books.

Is it meaningful that the most purchased print books of the year exist almost entirely outside so-called “literary culture”?

I think yes, but also, no. It is for sure a reminder that the culture churns away under its own momentum well outside the chatter of people (like me) who pay outsized attention to a particular slice of it, and because of that attention may have a skewed sense of what’s going on in the world. In some ways it reminds me of the intersection of the terminally online and politics, where some people (like me) are far too aware of every last outrage and can’t imagine a person who is not informed at this level.

In a recent Chicago Tribune column I called Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume a “phenomenon” and in the realm of literary fiction, particularly fiction in translation this is true, but it has sold a tiny fraction of the books on this list. This is not a book that could ever find favor with Jenna, Reese, or Oprah.

I’m thinking on the fly a bit here, but “book culture” - the mass of people who read and write about books as objects of meaning and fascination - is, and perhaps always has been rather small. Books and writers used to be much more prominent in society for sure - Gore Vidal and James Baldwin making the rounds on television shows, for example - but even in that golden age, the best selling books were Love Story and Jonathan Livingston Seagull and the like. Through this lens we can maybe take some encouragement from the persistence of books that are simply enjoyed by readers and purchased in significant quantities.

Every so often the publicity machinery cranks into gear for a literary fiction title, attempting to wedge its way into the broader popular conversation. This is happening as we speak for Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, which is getting play in major print and online media in a way that happens for very few debut novels.

It is impossible to discern what leads to these sorts of conflagrations of attention around a single title/author. Cash has some serious writer credentials and edits a cultishly popular journal. The book is billed as a comedy about a dysfunctional family, compared to both Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and the work of Kevin Wilson, and infused with lots of punning/verbal wordplay. Overall, an attractive package.

Not to me because I have a deep aversion to puns, but I bet the book is quite good, because beyond the fact that there is some marketing muscle ($$$$$$) behind it, this has the whiff of some genuine enthusiasm from the sort of people (like me) who hope to see books be a larger part of the broader cultural conversation. It’s a proxy for a larger desire from a particular corner of the world that every so often coalesces. It’s not wholly organic - it’s clearly well-organized - but it’s not B.S. either when there’s substance behind it.

Like, it’s become fashionable to sneer at last year’s indie rock sensation, Geese, because of what appears to be their sudden ubiquity, but the fact is that Geese kicks ass.

Are there lots of bands you’ll never know exist who are also great? Yes, but that doesn’t mean the one everyone is hyped about isn’t really good. Same goes for books.

Will this phenomenon translate into sales? Here’s a bet I will make: Lost Lambs will sell better than the overwhelming majority of literary novels this year because the overwhelming majority of literary novels get published in such a way that very few people know they’ve even come into existence.

At the same time, I will be genuinely surprised if Lost Lambs is on next year’s list of 20 bestselling books in print.

Oh, and the two books on this list that I’ve read? The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which came out the year before I was born and was read to me probably hundreds of times, and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! which I received three copies of as a graduation gift from high school, even though my mom owned a bookstore.

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This week at the Chicago Tribune I covered Natasha Stagg’s arresting coming-of-age novel, Grand Rapids.

At I discussed why the president of Harvard’s desire for “objectivity” in the classroom is not consistent with the values of academic freedom or the best practices for learning.

Academic Freedom on the Line

"Objectivity" in the Classroom Is Not Consistent with Academic Freedom

In a recent podcast, Harvard president Alan Garber said some things about teaching that I found, at best, odd, and at worse, pretty much nonsense, because if we’re talking about teaching and learning – supposedly the core of the undergraduate experience at Harvard and elsewhere – it doesn’t make any sense…

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4 months ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · John Warner

Really interesting discussion here between authors Vauhini Vara and Karan Mahjan and the hosts of Fiction Nonfiction Podcast about what happens if humans like AI fiction.

This interview with Madeline Cash should give you a good sense of what she’s up to with Lost Lambs. Her list of inspirations has me nodding in approval, but I don’t know…the puns!

and are two teachers talking about reading.

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Recommendations

1. Hush Hush by Laura Lippman,
2. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
3. Normal People by Sally Rooney
4. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
5. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Heather H. - New York, NY

Perfection is a literary novel that didn’t come out of nowhere exactly, but based on a combo of critical acclaim and award attention has become a breakout title in literary fiction. For Heather I’m recommending a book I recommend often, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida.

Request your recommendation!