I just finished reading The Education Wars by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, which discusses the conservative push to privatize public education, taking money away from public schools. I never fully understood school vouchers and the why of our current public education culture war before I read A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. Now that I better understood why conservatives are trying to break apart public education, I feel better prepared to advocate for not selling out and the collective public good of education. I’m going to check out The Privateers. Thanks for sharing!
London: see a production at the Globe if you can! I'm fond of the Tate and the V&A (as museums go), but my most pleasant morning was taking the Tube up to Mornington Crescent and walking to Mary Wollstonecraft's tombstone at Old St. Pancras. Actually, my suggestion is not necessarily that you do that (unless you are a Wollstonecraft, Godwin, or Shelley fan), but that you think of a London-connected writer or historical figure who is meaningful to you and search out the things that are left of them in London. This usually will get you some nice neighborhood walks and you'll see parts of the city that aren't just on the tourist trail.
When I left my middle school in Las Vegas ($35k) and then Denver ($50k) to teach public school in Washington state I thought I was a sellout because I doubled my salary. I wish all states paid teachers a decent wage 😢
It's interesting how teaching as a profession inculcates us into believing that there is some nobility in being underpaid. I used to have similar thoughts when I was teaching of the tenure track at various colleges. I could convince myself that the system needed people like me who were willing to sacrifice for the good of students, but I now recognize how wrong that is, and that you're right, all teachers should get paid a decent wage.
I KNOW! I do feel bad for my students in Las Vegas though. They got me as a less effective, brand new teacher. Then, after I figured out how to teach, I left. It's hard not to feel guilty about that. I also feel terrible for my friends still teaching and earning terrible salaries.
It's hard for a writer to sell out. In YA you could do it for a bit, quickly writing a book to trend. I tried, but the books were never on trend enough to actually excite anyone!
I do think writers who go to work for exploitative mfa programs are kinda selling out. Columbia is the best example. The more famous you are, the more your reputation is whitewashing the fact that they charge an unconscionable amount of money and don't have particularly high admissions standards. But I'm kind of alone amongst writers in that opinion.
I also think agents who have paid substacks are selling out. No matter how much you pretend it's not the case, ultimately you're being paid by writers who want to query you, which is a violation of professional ethics and the spirit of AAR rules.
I hadn't thought about the MFA angle. On the one hand, I can't blame any writer for making a living. On the other, it does start to look like a pyramid scheme. If the MFA isn't funded, it's obviously a cash cow for the institution. I'm sure students can have a good experience in those programs, and some students do use them as launching pads to careers, but that's not most students. I did some musing on this at my IHE blog a bunch of years ago, and I think my thoughts are pretty similar today: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/tuition-debt-and-graduate-creative-writing-programs
I tend to agree on agents as well. I respect that they have expertise people want access to and are willing to pay for, but I do think money flowing from authors to agents is a slippery slope.
I guess with writers and exploitative MFAs, the saving grace is that at least the writer's work doesn't necessarily suffer--lots of great writers work at Columbia. But I still feel like, how can you feel good as a writer knowing that the people who most love your work and want to study w you are going into six figure debt to do it?
Thanks for passing along the Ted Chiang article - I don't think I completely agree, but I appreciate his push back against the dehumanizing possibilities of AI. He briefly mentions AlphaZero, but since he's not a chess player, I don't think he quite understands what AlphaZero was able to do. I tried to tackle it at the end of a recent post, I'm curious what you think: https://litandchess.substack.com/p/the-machines-have-already-won
Lots of very interesting stuff in your piece. I really appreciate you sharing it.
I can't say I have full confidence that gen AI won't at least seem creative in some of its outputs, but I don't know that I would call that "art," because like Chaing and Lincoln Michel (who I linked to above), I think intention is an important ingredient in considering something art.
The Grand Canyon is breathtaking, but it isn't art, IMO. The fact that I experience the wonder of it is housed in me, not the landscape itself. But these are interesting questions to consider, which is one of the positive byproducts of this technology.
I am more skeptical than you that the outputs of at least this iteration of gen AI will be more accurate and trustworthy. We may come to trust them more, but that doesn't mean we should. This is proving harder to solve.
I also take a hard line against gen AI feedback on student writing unless the student seeks it under their own initiative as part of their organic, agentic process. That technology cannot read, think, feel, or communicate with intention, so I don't care what it says about writing, even if it offers a decent simulation of what a teacher might say. The problem of having too many students - which I experienced for the entirety of my teaching career - should be addressed by making teachers responsible for fewer students. Allowing the simulation of gen AI to substitute is a slope I want us to resist tumbling down.
I really like the Grand Canyon analogy and wish I'd thought of it myself! I think that's what I was trying to get to with the idea that, at least in chess, AI can give us a feeling of the sublime - just as the Grand Canyon can.
I found some of my conclusions as I wrote this piece to contradict my assumptions about AI - and they might be wrong, given that the chess engine to generative AI analogy isn't a perfect one. I'd certainly rather live in a world where we make class sizes smaller than a world where we dump each kid in front of some AI program, but I don't really think that's where we're headed, sadly.
secondly, I did a self-organized literary tour of the south of England a few years ago—England does a touching job of preserving the homes of their great writers and putting round blue signs on others’ homes and literary locations. Highlight: the Charleston Trust and Monk House in East Sussex for Bloomsbury at its finest. Henry James’ home in Rye, lovingly preserved. Hardy’s birthplace and ugly house Max Gate in Dorchester. Jane Austin’s home in Chawton (the tiny round table she wrote on!) and her grave in Winchester Cathedral. The famous Cobb in Lyme Regis (as in Persuasion and The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Freud’s house in London. The Heywood Hill Bookshop in Mayfair where Nancy Mitford once worked.
I’ll stop there! oh, except for the National Portrait Gallery! Dicken’s House in London, too!
For what it is worth, I encourage you to include a straightforward pitch to pay for a subscription at the beginning or end of your Substack posts that makes the stakes clear. Knowing you might fold the Biblioracle tent if you drop below a threshold matters.
I can't afford to subscribe to every Substack I want to support so I limit my subscriptions (mostly) to writers trying to make a living, at least in part, from income on the platform rather than folks like me who have a day job to pay the bills. Until this post, I had the vague impression that you were teaching full-time on top of the writing here, at IHE, the Tribune, and the book (and marveled at your output!).
There was a period where I was teaching full-time and doing IHE and the Trib, but that was the limit of my output aside from the occasional freelance assignment at the time. Teaching put a very firm limit on what I could do outside of that. I feel like my output now isn't that special for someone who spends all his time writing. Having a bunch of different things that I work on helps. Even if I'm blocked on one thing, I'm not blocked on everything.
At some point I figure I'll do some kind of pledge drive, but it just isn't a consideration at the moment. Sometimes I feel like I should be more aggressive about monetization, but it's just not something I find motivating. I need a manager or something.
Hi, John. Off topic (sorry, not sorry), but THANK YOU for the article about Elizabeth Strout's Lucyverse in the Trib. Strout is my favorite living fiction author. And now the new book! Much fangirling ensues! Olive and Lucy, together as you've always dreamed. As for your topic, I'm reeling in mock shock at the right wingers taking Ruzzian money to push propaganda, and of course, those who do it without extra money. Apparently we have a near bottomless supply of useful idiots. Re: your trip to London, I would see the British Museum, the V & A (dresses, you know), and the Princess Louise pub if it's still there, and drink some Real Ale. But that's me. You do you and have a wonderful time.
I've had All the Pretty Horses sitting around for 15+ years. Based on that parody, I'm thinking that if I'm ever brave enough to try reading it, I won't get far.
This piece really resonated with me. I've felt like a sellout -- sort of -- for a long time. I realized relatively early that writing was what I was best at, and THOUGHT ABOUT becoming "a writer" in the traditional sense, but never have. Instead, and what nags at me as a semi-sellout-move, is that I went into technical writing. It's selling out in the sense that I'm not writing anything of "my own," but on the other hand I think I've been doing something useful for customers of companies like Apple, Nokia, and a bunch of others. I'm still a bit ambivalent about the whole thing, but I think the pretty good steady income has been worth it. Also I really like computers, so there's that.
I've toyed with "monetizing" a few times, but I was ambivalent about stuffing people's inboxes, so I converted my newsletter into a website. And I'm still getting paid for my day job, so I'm reluctant to "compete with" writers who need the money more than I do. Also I've never convinced myself that what I write is actually worth monetizing.
Another point that resonated was your link to Ted Chiang's work, which I like very much. One of my favorite quotes of his is his answer to "what is AI?": "A bad choice of words in 1954. My team has been ordered to "integrate AI" into our documentation. We've done it, at least to some extent, but it's not at all clear that it's any sort of improvement. To understand AI better I tried building my own tiny little neural network, which turns out to be relatively easy (a side benefit of my career in technology is that I've picked up programming too, although I'm not great at it). I have a "one neuron" AI that can learn how to predict whether the next number in a sequence is a 1 or a 0, given four examples and answers. It can pretty much do it, but needs thousands of repetitions to "learn". If it is learning. If it is, it doesn't seem the same as human learning, but maybe that's just species-ism on my part. Just like some of the things the big AIs can do seem pretty convincing, but still...It's confusing. I find myself wondering if I'm assuming that other people are "intelligent" mostly because they look like me.
Anyway, thanks for the post, and I'm upgrading to paid!
I don't think technical writing is selling out at all. I have lots of it in my past when I had corporate jobs that were very much paying my bills when my writing didn't. I was lucky in that my employer was cool that I was also trying to write and even gave me time off to finish my first book which was on a very tight schedule. I think that writing has paid a lot of dividends in terms of all of the other writing I do. Writing is writing and good technical writing is a significant skill.
I'd be interested in hearing more about the AI integration and where and how it might be an improvement (or the opposite). I'm hearing from other folks that even with lots of experimenting they're not seeing great gains because the AI outputs are so unreliable. It confirms my instinct that because writing is thinking, not allowing that thinking to happen in early drafts creates versions that become very hard to work with.
We have a very large library of technical publications, and the biggest stumbling block for customers is finding the right information. They have to navigate products, hardware versions, and software versions to get to the right document and the right part of the right document.
We hope that AI would be able to help with these things:
- clarify search phrases that customers use
- summarize articles
- enable customers to zero in on a search through a conversational process
- offer a video version of any procedure -- that is, given a piece of software and set of steps, we hoped AI could construct a video-on-demand of performing the right actions in the user interface.
None of these have worked out very well, at least not yet.
- Customers need to be directed to the exact document and the precise location within it. AI is so far (after a year of work) far too imprecise to do this.
- AI has so far been unable to summarize articles accurately, even when training on ONLY our content. The summaries are vague, and sometimes include weird stuff ("hallucinations")
- The conversational "assistant" has had the most success, but it seems to be the case that customers prefer not to use it because it takes more time than simply entering a search and modifying it as needed.
- The video-on-demand project has been a complete failure; evidently no AI currently available is able to interact with a user interface designed for people, let alone generate a simulated video. They simply can't "see the screen," so to speak.
Also, we're not just amateurs poking at this; we're working with professional AI companies (and have spent a LOT). Anyway, so far this effort has been pretty disappointing.
Other parts of my company have had more success building AI into our actual products, although in some cases (so far) it seems to make the documentation more complicated, not less. To be clear, we're not making or selling consumer products; these are enterprise-level tools and pretty complex already.
These are the exact kind of applications that have been long theorized before this generation of LLMs and which were pretty much promised as imminent at the time of ChatGPT's release, so this is very interesting, and syncs with things I've heard elsewhere.
The hallucination issue, even when seemingly constrained seems like a massive, ongoing hurdle. I've seen some people try some things in education products to try to curb this problem and they run into the exact same issues.
And the assistant bots can maybe be useful for people who don't know what they want, but a lot of queries are quite targeted and regular search is a superior approach to the problem.
I don't know enough about the multi-modal stuff beyond the demos which look kind of neat at first blush, but it's not super surprising to hear that this stuff isn't capable of it yet. They're an amazing technological breakthrough, but they aren't magic, and it seems like the things that make them amazing make them ungovernable.
I just remembered “London Walks”, you meet your guide at a tube station, lots of choices, look them up online. Years since I have done this but easy and inexpensive way to experience London.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend Dan Ozzi's "Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994–2007)", a sort of epilogue to the Nirvana/early punk "sell-out" debates.
"Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man."
I just finished reading The Education Wars by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, which discusses the conservative push to privatize public education, taking money away from public schools. I never fully understood school vouchers and the why of our current public education culture war before I read A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. Now that I better understood why conservatives are trying to break apart public education, I feel better prepared to advocate for not selling out and the collective public good of education. I’m going to check out The Privateers. Thanks for sharing!
Same here. I’ll be reading it too
London: see a production at the Globe if you can! I'm fond of the Tate and the V&A (as museums go), but my most pleasant morning was taking the Tube up to Mornington Crescent and walking to Mary Wollstonecraft's tombstone at Old St. Pancras. Actually, my suggestion is not necessarily that you do that (unless you are a Wollstonecraft, Godwin, or Shelley fan), but that you think of a London-connected writer or historical figure who is meaningful to you and search out the things that are left of them in London. This usually will get you some nice neighborhood walks and you'll see parts of the city that aren't just on the tourist trail.
When I left my middle school in Las Vegas ($35k) and then Denver ($50k) to teach public school in Washington state I thought I was a sellout because I doubled my salary. I wish all states paid teachers a decent wage 😢
It's interesting how teaching as a profession inculcates us into believing that there is some nobility in being underpaid. I used to have similar thoughts when I was teaching of the tenure track at various colleges. I could convince myself that the system needed people like me who were willing to sacrifice for the good of students, but I now recognize how wrong that is, and that you're right, all teachers should get paid a decent wage.
I KNOW! I do feel bad for my students in Las Vegas though. They got me as a less effective, brand new teacher. Then, after I figured out how to teach, I left. It's hard not to feel guilty about that. I also feel terrible for my friends still teaching and earning terrible salaries.
It's hard for a writer to sell out. In YA you could do it for a bit, quickly writing a book to trend. I tried, but the books were never on trend enough to actually excite anyone!
I do think writers who go to work for exploitative mfa programs are kinda selling out. Columbia is the best example. The more famous you are, the more your reputation is whitewashing the fact that they charge an unconscionable amount of money and don't have particularly high admissions standards. But I'm kind of alone amongst writers in that opinion.
I also think agents who have paid substacks are selling out. No matter how much you pretend it's not the case, ultimately you're being paid by writers who want to query you, which is a violation of professional ethics and the spirit of AAR rules.
I hadn't thought about the MFA angle. On the one hand, I can't blame any writer for making a living. On the other, it does start to look like a pyramid scheme. If the MFA isn't funded, it's obviously a cash cow for the institution. I'm sure students can have a good experience in those programs, and some students do use them as launching pads to careers, but that's not most students. I did some musing on this at my IHE blog a bunch of years ago, and I think my thoughts are pretty similar today: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/tuition-debt-and-graduate-creative-writing-programs
I tend to agree on agents as well. I respect that they have expertise people want access to and are willing to pay for, but I do think money flowing from authors to agents is a slippery slope.
I guess with writers and exploitative MFAs, the saving grace is that at least the writer's work doesn't necessarily suffer--lots of great writers work at Columbia. But I still feel like, how can you feel good as a writer knowing that the people who most love your work and want to study w you are going into six figure debt to do it?
Thanks for passing along the Ted Chiang article - I don't think I completely agree, but I appreciate his push back against the dehumanizing possibilities of AI. He briefly mentions AlphaZero, but since he's not a chess player, I don't think he quite understands what AlphaZero was able to do. I tried to tackle it at the end of a recent post, I'm curious what you think: https://litandchess.substack.com/p/the-machines-have-already-won
Lots of very interesting stuff in your piece. I really appreciate you sharing it.
I can't say I have full confidence that gen AI won't at least seem creative in some of its outputs, but I don't know that I would call that "art," because like Chaing and Lincoln Michel (who I linked to above), I think intention is an important ingredient in considering something art.
The Grand Canyon is breathtaking, but it isn't art, IMO. The fact that I experience the wonder of it is housed in me, not the landscape itself. But these are interesting questions to consider, which is one of the positive byproducts of this technology.
I am more skeptical than you that the outputs of at least this iteration of gen AI will be more accurate and trustworthy. We may come to trust them more, but that doesn't mean we should. This is proving harder to solve.
I also take a hard line against gen AI feedback on student writing unless the student seeks it under their own initiative as part of their organic, agentic process. That technology cannot read, think, feel, or communicate with intention, so I don't care what it says about writing, even if it offers a decent simulation of what a teacher might say. The problem of having too many students - which I experienced for the entirety of my teaching career - should be addressed by making teachers responsible for fewer students. Allowing the simulation of gen AI to substitute is a slope I want us to resist tumbling down.
I really like the Grand Canyon analogy and wish I'd thought of it myself! I think that's what I was trying to get to with the idea that, at least in chess, AI can give us a feeling of the sublime - just as the Grand Canyon can.
I found some of my conclusions as I wrote this piece to contradict my assumptions about AI - and they might be wrong, given that the chess engine to generative AI analogy isn't a perfect one. I'd certainly rather live in a world where we make class sizes smaller than a world where we dump each kid in front of some AI program, but I don't really think that's where we're headed, sadly.
Hi John,
First, thanks for recommending Search last week!
secondly, I did a self-organized literary tour of the south of England a few years ago—England does a touching job of preserving the homes of their great writers and putting round blue signs on others’ homes and literary locations. Highlight: the Charleston Trust and Monk House in East Sussex for Bloomsbury at its finest. Henry James’ home in Rye, lovingly preserved. Hardy’s birthplace and ugly house Max Gate in Dorchester. Jane Austin’s home in Chawton (the tiny round table she wrote on!) and her grave in Winchester Cathedral. The famous Cobb in Lyme Regis (as in Persuasion and The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Freud’s house in London. The Heywood Hill Bookshop in Mayfair where Nancy Mitford once worked.
I’ll stop there! oh, except for the National Portrait Gallery! Dicken’s House in London, too!
Have a fantastic time!
Churchill’s war rooms are not to be missed - Enjoy!
The Tower of London. The Yeoman Warders do not disappoint. https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/#gs.etvkg8
For what it is worth, I encourage you to include a straightforward pitch to pay for a subscription at the beginning or end of your Substack posts that makes the stakes clear. Knowing you might fold the Biblioracle tent if you drop below a threshold matters.
I can't afford to subscribe to every Substack I want to support so I limit my subscriptions (mostly) to writers trying to make a living, at least in part, from income on the platform rather than folks like me who have a day job to pay the bills. Until this post, I had the vague impression that you were teaching full-time on top of the writing here, at IHE, the Tribune, and the book (and marveled at your output!).
There was a period where I was teaching full-time and doing IHE and the Trib, but that was the limit of my output aside from the occasional freelance assignment at the time. Teaching put a very firm limit on what I could do outside of that. I feel like my output now isn't that special for someone who spends all his time writing. Having a bunch of different things that I work on helps. Even if I'm blocked on one thing, I'm not blocked on everything.
At some point I figure I'll do some kind of pledge drive, but it just isn't a consideration at the moment. Sometimes I feel like I should be more aggressive about monetization, but it's just not something I find motivating. I need a manager or something.
Hi, John. Off topic (sorry, not sorry), but THANK YOU for the article about Elizabeth Strout's Lucyverse in the Trib. Strout is my favorite living fiction author. And now the new book! Much fangirling ensues! Olive and Lucy, together as you've always dreamed. As for your topic, I'm reeling in mock shock at the right wingers taking Ruzzian money to push propaganda, and of course, those who do it without extra money. Apparently we have a near bottomless supply of useful idiots. Re: your trip to London, I would see the British Museum, the V & A (dresses, you know), and the Princess Louise pub if it's still there, and drink some Real Ale. But that's me. You do you and have a wonderful time.
I've had All the Pretty Horses sitting around for 15+ years. Based on that parody, I'm thinking that if I'm ever brave enough to try reading it, I won't get far.
This piece really resonated with me. I've felt like a sellout -- sort of -- for a long time. I realized relatively early that writing was what I was best at, and THOUGHT ABOUT becoming "a writer" in the traditional sense, but never have. Instead, and what nags at me as a semi-sellout-move, is that I went into technical writing. It's selling out in the sense that I'm not writing anything of "my own," but on the other hand I think I've been doing something useful for customers of companies like Apple, Nokia, and a bunch of others. I'm still a bit ambivalent about the whole thing, but I think the pretty good steady income has been worth it. Also I really like computers, so there's that.
I've toyed with "monetizing" a few times, but I was ambivalent about stuffing people's inboxes, so I converted my newsletter into a website. And I'm still getting paid for my day job, so I'm reluctant to "compete with" writers who need the money more than I do. Also I've never convinced myself that what I write is actually worth monetizing.
Another point that resonated was your link to Ted Chiang's work, which I like very much. One of my favorite quotes of his is his answer to "what is AI?": "A bad choice of words in 1954. My team has been ordered to "integrate AI" into our documentation. We've done it, at least to some extent, but it's not at all clear that it's any sort of improvement. To understand AI better I tried building my own tiny little neural network, which turns out to be relatively easy (a side benefit of my career in technology is that I've picked up programming too, although I'm not great at it). I have a "one neuron" AI that can learn how to predict whether the next number in a sequence is a 1 or a 0, given four examples and answers. It can pretty much do it, but needs thousands of repetitions to "learn". If it is learning. If it is, it doesn't seem the same as human learning, but maybe that's just species-ism on my part. Just like some of the things the big AIs can do seem pretty convincing, but still...It's confusing. I find myself wondering if I'm assuming that other people are "intelligent" mostly because they look like me.
Anyway, thanks for the post, and I'm upgrading to paid!
I don't think technical writing is selling out at all. I have lots of it in my past when I had corporate jobs that were very much paying my bills when my writing didn't. I was lucky in that my employer was cool that I was also trying to write and even gave me time off to finish my first book which was on a very tight schedule. I think that writing has paid a lot of dividends in terms of all of the other writing I do. Writing is writing and good technical writing is a significant skill.
I'd be interested in hearing more about the AI integration and where and how it might be an improvement (or the opposite). I'm hearing from other folks that even with lots of experimenting they're not seeing great gains because the AI outputs are so unreliable. It confirms my instinct that because writing is thinking, not allowing that thinking to happen in early drafts creates versions that become very hard to work with.
We have a very large library of technical publications, and the biggest stumbling block for customers is finding the right information. They have to navigate products, hardware versions, and software versions to get to the right document and the right part of the right document.
We hope that AI would be able to help with these things:
- clarify search phrases that customers use
- summarize articles
- enable customers to zero in on a search through a conversational process
- offer a video version of any procedure -- that is, given a piece of software and set of steps, we hoped AI could construct a video-on-demand of performing the right actions in the user interface.
None of these have worked out very well, at least not yet.
- Customers need to be directed to the exact document and the precise location within it. AI is so far (after a year of work) far too imprecise to do this.
- AI has so far been unable to summarize articles accurately, even when training on ONLY our content. The summaries are vague, and sometimes include weird stuff ("hallucinations")
- The conversational "assistant" has had the most success, but it seems to be the case that customers prefer not to use it because it takes more time than simply entering a search and modifying it as needed.
- The video-on-demand project has been a complete failure; evidently no AI currently available is able to interact with a user interface designed for people, let alone generate a simulated video. They simply can't "see the screen," so to speak.
Also, we're not just amateurs poking at this; we're working with professional AI companies (and have spent a LOT). Anyway, so far this effort has been pretty disappointing.
Other parts of my company have had more success building AI into our actual products, although in some cases (so far) it seems to make the documentation more complicated, not less. To be clear, we're not making or selling consumer products; these are enterprise-level tools and pretty complex already.
These are the exact kind of applications that have been long theorized before this generation of LLMs and which were pretty much promised as imminent at the time of ChatGPT's release, so this is very interesting, and syncs with things I've heard elsewhere.
The hallucination issue, even when seemingly constrained seems like a massive, ongoing hurdle. I've seen some people try some things in education products to try to curb this problem and they run into the exact same issues.
And the assistant bots can maybe be useful for people who don't know what they want, but a lot of queries are quite targeted and regular search is a superior approach to the problem.
I don't know enough about the multi-modal stuff beyond the demos which look kind of neat at first blush, but it's not super surprising to hear that this stuff isn't capable of it yet. They're an amazing technological breakthrough, but they aren't magic, and it seems like the things that make them amazing make them ungovernable.
I just remembered “London Walks”, you meet your guide at a tube station, lots of choices, look them up online. Years since I have done this but easy and inexpensive way to experience London.
Great read, as always.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend Dan Ozzi's "Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994–2007)", a sort of epilogue to the Nirvana/early punk "sell-out" debates.
Spot on with Wee Free Men. So fun to read out loud, especially if you can do some English and Scottish accents!