Great piece of messaging www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULQ0...
31.01.2026 09:18
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3. Just started Karen Hao's EMPIRE OF AI & it's going down very smoothly.
I bemoaned my unfulfilling 2025 reading life & lo, on this score if not necessarily on others, 2026 delivers.
2. Rereading TERANESIA by the inimitable Greg Egan. It's funnier & more exciting & emotionally deeper than I remembered. Some part of me wrongly thinks I already know Egan's work inside out & yet rereading is still rewarding.
Books are treating me well right now.
1. Just finished PARALLEL LINES. It's easily the best St Aubyn since the Melrose books, genuinely moving & the "combine harvester" line keeps making me laugh
I left UK for Germany in 2010 & was astonished at how much less enticing German supermarkets were (though they win on farmer's markets). The UK is far better at pushing my consumerist buttons. Came back in 2021 & was pleasantly surprised at the rise of decent East Asian food availability too.
It is unfair to chickens that we besmirch their good names with this inaccurate metaphor.
But chickens in fact go home to roost every night, with clockwork precision, when the sun goes down, and they do so as a precautionary measure. It is an act performed regularly and with foresight precisely to avoid the predictable consequences of being very fleshy and tasty.
This is typically used to describe the predictable negative consequences of one's own behaviour being tangibly visited upon one - impliedly after a period of 'getting away with it' wherein the lead time of those consequences was somehow unexpectedly or unnaturally prolonged.
I am here on social media for the first time in a while to complain about the illogicality of the phrase "chickens coming home to roost".
I don't know why I ever thought working on such a big hoop would be a good idea, but after six months of work it is finally done.
Perhaps inevitably, I experimented with audio rather than written content. Although maybe I ought not to have done it while full of cold. rewording.substack.com/p/episode-1-...
I didn't really like their 2018 outing but the new one from June is really good.
I watched The Pony Collaboration only once, 17 or 18 years ago, in an audience of maybe four or five, in a pub in Brixton. I still remember their baffled delight when I went up after and bought their album theponycollaboration.bandcamp.com
I had BBC R4 on, they took 7-8 listener remarks on AI x jobs & it was all shockingly credulous. The person who tried to explain that there was a hype bubble going on & the limits of LLMs got cut off. The host referred to generative AI as "the one that can think for itself". Woeful.
What I call Serfdom of the Self is when our identities, attention, and even emotions become dependent on digital systems we don’t control. We hand over more of our inner lives to these systems, and in return they decide the conditions of our existence.
Some thoughts on books I've read lately rewording.substack.com/p/quick-note...
I'm rereading JUDE THE OBSCURE after some years. I'd forgotten how much flimflamming around Jude & Sue do. Also, he actually spends remarkably little time 'on stage' on either scholarship or religion, although these are posited as his grand thwarted ambitions.
I read @adambecker.bsky.social 's MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER. It's great for many reasons but I responded to it in part as a science fiction reader. rewording.substack.com/p/book-recom... I also appreciated the They Might Be Giants cameo, though I didn't mention it in this piece
I had a really lovely time chatting with and hearing from readers today. It's been years since I've done this! Grateful to the NLB folks for organising and the readers for showing up.
If you'd like to chat with me about my 2021 novel AFTER THE INQUIRY, join us for this online book club session tomorrow!
It's been ages since I spoke to readers! Looking forward to this online book club session organised by NLB Singapore www.nlb.gov.sg/main/whats-o...
And globally, public opinion continues to strongly and steadily recognise the need to tackle the climate crisis. Putting off action will only increase the eventual costs to all.
The current political backdrop presents challenges to this, to say the least. But politics cannot outrun the science or the economic fundamentals - notably the enormous physical risks posed to business by climate disruption.
These leaders show what's possible in terms of supply chain action. But they can't move markets on their own. We need a collective solution for a collective problem. And that ultimately calls for strong and internationally aligned regulation.
New data from @globalcanopy.org tells us that of the world's top 500 deforestation powerbrokers, only 16 companies have both strong commitments to tackle deforestation and evidence of implementation.
www.reuters.com/sustainabili...
I've been talking around many of these themes for some time - but not with this clarity.
Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us carlhendrick.substack.com/p/ultra-proc...
