@johnwest
I report the news with code at the Wall Street Journal. I wrote a book, LESSONS AND CAROLS, and won a Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting and national reporting. New book, THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU, out this year.
I just finished @garthgreenwell.bsky.social's perfect explication of James Merrill's poem "Rescue," and it makes me wish I were more committed to the act of reading and understanding poetry—entirely free of the blind urge to insturmentalize it. garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/james-merr...
Accidental Haiku #8460, from "Telluride, America’s ‘Most Luxurious Ski Town’ Is Tearing Itself Apart" in the Wall Street Journal:
Down Telluride’s
main street chanting, “End it now!”
People were crying.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/telluride-ski-resort-dispute-6e2cc777?mod=hp_lead_pos7
I guess I just think that Albany—and actually the entire zone east of the Catskills from Westchester to Albany/Troy should be considered New England.
Accidental Haiku #8106, from "The Week the Dreaded AI Jobs Wipeout Got Real" in the Wall Street Journal:
respondents said they
worried AI could pose a threat
to humanity.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-week-the-dreaded-ai-jobs-wipeout-got-real-3ba5057b?mod=hp_lead_pos1
Obviously, this misses some important features of a classical haiku—there's no requirement for a seasonal reference or a cutting word, for example. But it's fun!
Then, my code sends the top 50 to a small LLM running on my computer. The LLM gives me the top few it thinks are most grammatical—and contain a poetic turn. I can approve one of them, and then my code automatically posts it.
Yes! Each time I go to a wsj[.]com page, my code finds all possible words in 5-7-5-syllable pattern. It gives each a score based on capitalization and punctuation patterns (periods at the end of lines are worth more than internal periods, etc.). Then, it shows me the top 50 by score.
My automated haiku-finding program, "The Seventeen-Point," found one for the State of the Union (it tracks what I read at the Journal, finds all the haiku in it, proposes the best ones, and then posts it with my permission).
I once ran a tabletop role-playing game (a version of D&D) for sixth graders, and they loved it. They can write their character backstories and motivations, and they can take part in the world-building. This was many years ago, and I know there are now a million tabletop RPGs designed for kids.
congrats!
Pivot to Haiku?
Is this the Future of News?
Ever read a news article and wonder at its accidental poetry?
Well, I made @seventeen-point.bsky.social, which tracks the Wall Street Journal articles I read, finds all the accidental haiku, proposes the best ones for me to approve, and then posts it for me.
This is nightmare fuel
IMPORTANT pls RT
My online novel seed-story.com is loading sporadically/not at all
The servers belonged to Google Creative Labs Sydney (now apparently defunct)
If anyone reading worked there/knows someone who did pls get in touch urgently so this pioneering work of digital literature can be saved
On coffee filters and filter bubbles
escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/on-coffee-...
This was great, I loved this.
I even made this kinda silly data visualization because I couldn't help myself.
I don’t only read litfic; sometimes, I read for work. My second book, The Internet Will Die, and So WIll You—coming out in the fall of next year—required a vast amount of reading to write. Vauhini Vara’s Searches (from PRH) wasn’t just the best reported book about the internet and its discontents; it was also a deeply literary work, which scratched the same itch I hope my book will: work that mounts an argument with artistic beauty in mind. Peter Trachtenberg’s The Twilight of Bohemia (form a favorite indie, Black Sparrow), similarly cannot be read only as a book of cultural history—tracing the rise and decline of Westbeth, subsidized artists’ housing in NYC’s West Village; it must also be read as a work of literature. Emily Henry’s romance novel Great Big Beautiful Life (another PRH book) reminded me that the friction of pushing a novel against constraints, including those of a genre, can spark a fire. Henry’s assured prose, deft characterizations, and sprawling cast and concerns come together to produce a book at once rooted in the tropes of contemporary romance but also transcendent of those very same tropes. A neat trick. My partner and I are expecting a baby in January, and Aysegül Savas’s The Wilderness, a through-written essay from the indie press Transit, which detailed the wild strangeness, beauty, and terror of postpartum life felt like maybe the wrong book to read in advance of a birth. Still, a real feat.
> 4: The number of non-litfic books that knocked my socks off.
- SEARCHES by @vauhinivara.bsky.social
- THE TWILIGHT OF BOHEMIA by @petertrachtenberg.bsky.social
- GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry
- THE WILDERNESS by Aysegül Savas
> 3: The number of litfic books I read that did actually knock my socks off.
- JAMES by Percival Everett
- ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey
- TWO-STEP DEVIL by Jamie Quatro
Honorable mention:
- ORDINARY DEVOTION by Kristen Holt-Browning
Litfic was finally overtaken by romance. Each genre now accounts for about a third of my reading list, though romance novels are a little more and literary novels are little less, an inversion from the years before. I have complicated feelings about this. No, there isn’t anything wrong with romance novels. (Some of them, admittedly, are slapdash affairs, but many of them I’d shelve next to any other bildungsroman—minus the pink-tinged, illustrated cover and happily ever after.) That said, my first love was literary fiction, and I’m sad to see it lose its place atop my list. I’m sad, but frustrated, since many of the literary books I read didn’t exactly knock my socks off.
> 39: The number of books I had tagged as “romance” or “upmarket.”
40: The number of books I read published by Penguin Random House. 2025 was the year that Penguin Random House, the borg cube of publishing, finally devoured my reading list. Between 2020 and 2024, PRH published about 25 percent of the books I read. This year, it reached 40 percent. The consolidation didn’t come at the cost of indie publishers, which continued to account for about 37 percent of my reading list. The shares from Macmillan and HarperCollins, on the other hand, were each cut in half.
Here's my reading, by the numbers.
> 40: The number of books I read published by Penguin Random House.
The top books I read this year: - JAMES by Percival Everett - ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey - GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry - ORDINARY DEVOTION by Kristen Holt-Browning - TWO-STEP DEVIL by Jamie Quatro - THE WILDERNESS by Aysegül Savas - THE TWILIGHT OF BOHEMIA by Peter Trachtenberg - SEARCHES by Vauhini Vara
🎄 It's that time of year again—end-of-year list time! 🎄
This year, I've read 100 books (though it was only 99 when I wrote the newsletter). I was aiming for two a week, so I missed my goal by four. At least I got to a round number! I "starred" eight of them. johnwest.substack.com/p/the-year-i....
🎄🎄🎄
My daughter is currently obsessed with THE GRINCH, and I'm realizing that Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" would have had Cindy Lou et al. in stitches if the Grinch and Max had put it on after dinner.
Book thought of the day: I just finished ORBITAL, and I'm pretty sure it's the literary equivalent of a "cozy" upmarket book. No real drama--and lots of descriptions of food. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Ooo, I've really only gotten through FEAR AND TREMBLING.
Thank you! I love doing this kind of stuff, because it really does feel like I'm visualizing my brain—even thought I know it's so sensitive to my hand-labeling on the one hand and the whims of the algorithms I picked on the other.
