"Do you have anything you would recommend on...?" It is a question I get asked regularly by readers and those interested in learning more about agrarianism. So, what I thought I would do — as a form pf public service to all agrarians — is create a curated guide of the top books for each of the field
"To think of a satirist as a person who angrily turns against a gale-force wind and sprays liquefied shit at a group of constantly multiplying targets would not be entirely wrong"
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Greetings from Read Max! In todays's newsletter, two items:An exploration of "Elara Voss," a mysterious figure haunting megaplatforms and L.L.M.s, anda genealogy of Stomp Clap Hey, occasioned by discourse regarding the band "Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes."A reminder: Read Max is just one guy
Hello all, Well, here's to another relentless week of (mostly bad) AI news. Between the AI bubble discourse—my contribution, a short blog on the implications of an economy propped up by AI, is doing numbers, as they say—and the AI-generated mass shooting victim discourse, I've barely had time to get
I had to look up arcane (it means mysterious or secret). This typographic retrospective feels like a significant piece in the milieu honoring the life of Ozzy Osbourne who passed this week. Reply via email
Yiyun Li at the Paris Review: Two moments in Graham Greene’s published life have often returned to me in the past twenty years. This may sound strange: an ideal reader should refrain from crossing the boundary between a writer’s work and his life. And yet it is inevitable: rarely does an author have
Alekseyevich Bunin was renowned for his romantic poems and sensual prose. He was also a peerless insult artist
William Golding's Lord of the Flies is one of the best-selling novels of the 20th century. It depicts the rapid descent into savagery that occurs when a group of boys is stranded on a deserted island, and offers reflections on how humans act in the state of nature.But Golding's novel is arguably jus
A friend who travels regularly on Amtrak trains, told me about the Quiet Car. The rules are simple:"Guests are asked to limit conversation and speak in subdued tones." "Phone calls are not allowed." "All portable electronic devices must be used with headphones.""Passengers using headphones must keep
Majorie Kinnan Rawlings at her Florida home. (Photo: Getty)Every now and then I'll come across a letter that feels startlingly current, as though its author, despite being long gone, has somehow managed to write directly into the present. Of course, it's simply a reminder that the human race has alw
The rules for the contest are here, but the summary is that entries to the Samuel Richardson Prize should be longer than 40,000 words, and they should've been self-published in the last five years and available to be purchased or read online. There are ten judges, including myself—we will each pick
The central critical question about Rear Window is: what makes it so compelling? For the first part of the film, nothing happens. The murder only happens a quarter of the way into the film, and it is doubted for most of the duration. From the opening frame, behind the credits, we can see people movi
There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderne
The first time I went out to Silicon Valley, or California for that matter, or anywhere at all west of New York state, was after college. A company cold called me for an interview. If you searched the internet at the time, it happened to look like I knew the most about HTML canvas, and maybe it was
Ella Creamer in The Guardian: Zadie Smith, Michael Rosen, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson are among more than 200 writers who have signed a letter calling for an “immediate and complete” boycott of Israel until the people of Gaza are given adequate food, water and aid. Hanif Kureishi, Brian Eno,
A 4 minute story from The Moth about the gift of books. / via things to click Reply via email
This essay originally appeared in The Tearoom by .I've never liked doctors. As a writer, I am both overly sensitive to my own mortality and something of a hypochondriac; I find most American physicians either unpleasant or downright terrifying, and I'll avoid doctors at all costs until a visit becom
NewsNation's Chris Cuomo wants you to know he's a serious journalist. He's a former CNN anchor, which makes it extra special that he just fell for a laughably bad AI-generated video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling Sydney Sweeney's jeans ad "Nazi propaganda."The fake AOC in the video, which Cuomo
It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone
Hello everyone! Thanks for your patience with my quiet here while I was away trying to get some focused time working on my book. I hope you've had a wonderful summers so far; I have, though it has sped by. My retreat in Paris has me thinking today less about specific craft issues and more about what
Few things in life are more fun than making music. It's just the lessons that suck. That's according to children—who are rarely consulted on such matters. But their actions speak louder than words. Most of them give up music-making forever after a short exposure to lessons.The Honest Broker is a re
by David Beer There was a prevailing idea, George Orwell wrote in a 1946 essay on the Common Toad, ‘that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.’ It was only a couple of years befo
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedYou set out to impress a girl Hotel open to the public Wooden branches, heavy benches Wandering the candlelight You said you liked her sea blue eyes— Why don't you marry her I said I'll see what I can do We are leaning on the ra
Jim Acosta wants you to know he just did something special. "A show you don't want to miss," he promised his Substack subscribers. "A one of a kind interview."What followed was Acosta, the former CNN White House correspondent who spent years asking tough questions of the powerful, sitting down to lo
Photo: GettyIn 1955, travel editor Richard Joseph and his wife, Morgan, left the intensity of New York behind and settled into the relative calm of Connecticut. They adapted quickly to the slower pace of life, and before long had welcomed a Basset Hound puppy named Vicky into their home. One Sunday
Things lately have been, you know, pretty bad. That feels like an understatement but I don't know what else to say. I've had this sitting in my drafts for months and it has never really felt like a "good time" to be like, hey guys I know we're funding a genocide but do you want to read about my nich
The single biggest question facing higher education in the AI era, when students everywhere are logging on to pro AI models for information on every subject on earth is, who sprinkles the magic dust that turns learning into a degree?I've written here, here, and here about how universities need to re
This piece would usually be paywalled, but while I work out the conditions of my visa I am keeping the paywall off of posts like this for now. I shall update you soon. My thanks for your forbearance.The next Jane Austen book club will now be on 28th September not 7th September. On 14th September the
Welcome back to The Spark, our monthly newsletter that’s all about how people just like you are creating positive change, one meaningful step at a time. Simple tips for restoring biodiversity to the land around your home How to start a seed library Help monitor coral reef health without ever putting
"Study Mode," a new educational feature released yesterday by OpenAI to much fanfare, was inevitable. The roadblocks were few. Leaders of educational institutions seem lately to be in a sort of race to see who can be first to forge partnerships with AI labs. And on a technical level, careful prompti
American author and environmentalist Edward Abbey sits in a folding chair as he reads, near his desert home, Tuscon, Arizona, April 9, 1984. (Photo by Ed Lallo/Getty Images)Happy birthday to the following letters, all written on the third day of an August gone by. Oh, oh, oh, the heat!It comes round
Illustration by Alexander NaughtonIf you seek advice from people at the very top of competitive domains, you'll probably hear a lot about the power of tenacity, grit, and determination. There is obviously wisdom in this: You won't get very far in life if you're constantly changing course at the firs
F. Scott Fitzgerald: the most foolish of American writers. He was foolish in his successes, and no less foolish in his many failures
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales," Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. "If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales." Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that
For every person mareveling at the ease of creation, there is another grieveing what feels like the death of the process. Originality, we're being told is becoming obsolete. Chatter on the topic is constant. Plagerism this. Authenticity that. And if not the chatter, the unsettling sameness of conten
I enjoyed this discussion with Colin McEnroe (a very good host: he quotes Shakespeare off the cuff as well as the Rocky movies) and very much. Becca is an excellent critic and the whole thing was very enjoyable for me. We talked about what good taste is, whether everyone can cultivate taste, if it's
Harvey Lederman at Shtetl-Optimized: For the last two and a half years, since the release of ChatGPT, I’ve been suffering from fits of dread. It’s not every minute, or even every day, but maybe once a week, I’m hit by it—slackjawed, staring into the middle distance—frozen by the prospect that someda
Hello! As I work on my book this summer, I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to write—what it means, that is, to sit with one's own mind long enough to encounter both its abundance and its emptiness. It's been an onerous few writing weeks of learning to let go of parts of the book th
Are there any full-time music critics still working for US newspapers? Just a few years ago, hundreds of music writers offered daily coverage to millions of readers across the country. These dedicated professionals played an essential role in their communities—and many got paid a living wage with be
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