June 2026
- Planted:
Unlike previous clippings, this one is organized Robin Sloan newsletter-style: instead of neatly partitioned sections of what I’ve written and what I’ve read, it’s a stream of discrete vignettes from the past couple months.
I read the phrase epistemic vigilance in Jane Friedman’s piece on AI and Libraries: Why Librarians May Become Arbiters of Reality. It’s a fancy but perfectly precise way to describe something I’ve been thinking about for a while: AI hallucinations and slop introduce a tax on our learning—before believing what we read, we must judge where that knowledge came from and whether it’s credible, accurate, true.
Jane’s usage:
...what’s needed isn’t more instruction but something closer to a wellness intervention: relief from constant epistemic vigilance.
I read Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz. The book, content-wise, was super Up My Alley and so I made my way through pretty quickly. It’s a factually dense, chronological retelling of how people get famous on the internet over the last two decades, whereas I would’ve liked a narrower story with more of Lorenz’s editorial opinion on things like who are the good eggs and who are the baddies. But I get that she covers these people and platforms and it might come back to bite her reporting if she threw more punches. It reminded me of Brian McCullough’s How the Internet Happened, structurally. I was most interested in the chapter on blogging, and in particular this:
It’s hard to remember how novel this was. Before the blog era, if you wanted to share your ideas with the public, you had to make it past layers upon layers of legacy gatekeepers. Letters to the editor, call-ins to the radio, article or book submissions—all had to be approved by a faceless authority at a moated institution.
I’ve already quoted that in a riff I wrote the other day, Dickens was a blogger.
I read The Stranger by Albert Camus. The book itself was just ok (for me—one reader, at one moment in time), but our discussion at the Mercantile library’s Zillennial book club was quite interesting. Some days after that I re-read James Somers’s brief blog post, Most book clubs are doing it wrong. His argument—that it’s silly to only discuss the book after you’ve read it and will probably never touch it again—makes a lot of sense in the context of my experience with The Stranger.
I read The Untold Story of Books by Michael Castleman. There were some interesting things in there, like that self-publishing preceded “traditional” publishing, or that independent booksellers getting squeezed by The Big Guys is nothing new (first book fairs, then department stores, then Barnes & Noble, now Amazon). I learned some things, but I found it a bit disorganized, and also—this is a nit—I’m not sure the story of books is really untold (see: The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth, The Book by Keith Houston, etc.).
I’m reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Well, I got over halfway through and sort of paused for now. I’m interested, but honestly it’s a bit of a slog. Part of the problem is that the neighborhood examples are over half a century old, so maybe what I need is a condensed, updated “Jacobs, 50 Years Later” version. I’m not quite reading it just to have said that I’ve read it, but close: I want to understand all the Jacobs references and reactions in urbanism chatter. Like this Bluesky post by Ingrid, “the death and life of great american web pages.”
I enjoyed Dan Greene’s New Yorker feature, The Mystery and Mass Appeal of the N.F.L. Draft. I submitted a letter to the editor, which I’ve never done before (a friend gave me the idea—hello, Jack!), with my brief reaction. I was interested to learn that “All letters become the property of The New Yorker,” per their guidelines. So I suppose I can’t even tell you what I wrote here as that would be publishing something I gave up the rights to. In any case, I already like letters to the editor as a writing exercise. It’s a well-scoped bit of writing practice, without much pressure but still with the possibility of a credible reader on the other end. And it reinforces whatever you’ve learned or found interesting in the piece, increasing the likelihood that I’ll remember something from a piece that I enjoyed engaging with.
I’ve been binging the Longform podcast a bit. I’ve learned many things about storytelling and journalism from many interviewees (and the interviewers—Evan Ratliff, Aaron Lammer, and Max Linsky). In one episode Stephen Dubner made a point that validated (one reason) why I think podcasts are a useful medium: you get a good sense of someone hearing them talk. He said:
I feel you can really tell the character of a person through their voice incredibly well. I think it’s easier to deceive in writing.
I wrote an essay for the Val Town blog, “Code is inert. Val Town makes it ert” which is a play on a Paul Ford line from his novella-length 2015 essay in Bloomberg Businessweek, “What is Code.” Paul’s one of my favorite programmer-writers, and so it was something of a personal milestone when he followed me back on Bluesky. He only follows me and a couple thousand others, so yeah, pretty special huh. I’ve since wiped the grin off my face, but in the unlikely chance that you subscribed to my RSS feed and are reading this, Paul—hello! Do you still plan to publish The Secret Life of Webpages? I hope so!
One more Val Town essay I’ll indulge in sharing here. Slow Mode: the Salt Fat Acid Heat of vibe coding. All the fatigue and eye-rolling re AI makes me hesitant to write about it, sometimes, but Robin Sloan counters that in his wonderful popup newsletter:
I’ll add one more thing. I think we are in a period so interesting that basically everybody ought to be writing about it: reporting, reflecting, resisting, re-everything — in a blog, a newsletter, an email to friends, whatever.
I said this in my first edition: AI language models are a particularly, maybe even uniquely, human technology. They are paradoxical and poetic, like something out of myth: the uncanny double, the magic mirror. Psychological intuitions have proven as useful as technical insights.
You have a stake in this, simply by virtue of being a talking animal. Might as well jot a few notes for posterity, and for the rest of us, here and now.
Speaking of, my coworker Tom has written quite a few things that influence how I think about AI. Most recently: Accidental anonymity. It’s really good. You should read it.
I registered a .com domain name for our wedding website. If anyone’s going to register a .wedding or .rsvp it’s probably me, and yet! When I judge my actions and not my words, or wishful thinking about top-level domains, I remember that dot com is still king, as many investors with skin in that game like to say. Other endings are great, but when you want to prioritize legibility for everyone, including grandparents, you settle on ole’ reliable.
I think “abottom” would be a useful word.
- It’s more economical than “at the bottom”
- People will quickly get it via its analogue “atop”
Per Google’s Ngram View, atop only sprouted up in the last century, and abottom usage is near-zero but not zero (seven 0s to the right of the decimal). I’m going to start using it, and I invite you to join me. Let’s get this thing (back) in the dictionary.
I’ve found a pretty nice rhythm, a groove, on my bookwork in the past couple months. I moved my manuscript from Obsidian to Scrivener, and so far so good. I’m keeping my research notes in Obsidian, but partitioning off the manuscript as an independent artifact makes it feel more real. The cadence of my work-in-public book newsletter has slowed, though, so I have some momentum to recover there.
I was home in Cincinnati for Memorial Day Weekend, and I was proud to see the city at peak vitality. Saturday was the most lively I’ve ever seen it, topping some highlights this year like the No Kings march and Reds opening day. On Saturday I walked to Findlay Market in OTR for a falafel at Dean’s then downtown to return and pick up books at the public library. What was special about Saturday is that between the Taste of Cincinnati food festival on 5th, the Reds-Cardinals series, the sold out FC Cincinnati game, and much more, the city was plurally happening, not just singularly populated for a one-and-done event. Pretty cool.
From Cincinnati,
Pete