The Frontier What Willa Cather Can Teach Us About AI

Don't you think it was about time someone wrote about O Pioneers! and Alexandra Bergson in relation to frontier AI development?

thefrontier.parseagency.com

🔊 Listen Now: In new book, NPR's Emily Feng explores identity after China refused to let her return All Things Considered on NPR One | 8:00

Proud 😍 @emilyzfeng.bsky.social interviewed by @ailsachang.bsky.social on All Things Considered, talking about her book and work in China

In new book, NPR's Emily Feng explores identity after China refused to let her return one.npr.org/i/nx-s1-5178...

Loving the photos readers are sending me of my book out in the wild

Review | The price of standing out in Xi Jinping’s China In the gripping ‘Let Only Red Flowers Bloom,’ reporter Emily Feng writes about people who faced consequences for failing to toe the country’s line

Rave review in the Washington Post this week and much more to come! If you’re in DC, don’t miss her and @steveinskeep.bsky.social at Politics & Prose 3/27.

www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

4/4

Photo of author Emily Feng and cover of book Let Only Flowers Bloom, gold flowers overlaid on an image of protesters in Hong Kong, one red flower in the center.

Incredible book, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, which publishes today! 3/

Emily is amazing. Despite a hectic and sometimes scary line of work, she’s as calm as the waters of Erhai Lake in Dali, Yunnan Province, where I first met her (on zoom, mid-pandemic, when she was unable to leave China for several years). I’ve been so lucky to work on her… 2/

At dinner last night a friend asked what I’d want my career to be in an alternate life, and I told her I’d be an international correspondent. This is in no small part because I know and admire @emilyzfeng.bsky.social so much 1/

Some thoughts here on what makes an agent valuable, and also a plug for the TV show Call My Agent/ Dix Pour Cent, si tu préfères. Andrea & Gabriel definitely would not be cycling around Paris thinking about agentic AI, but maybe they ought to be 👀

What Makes an Agent? Cool hair, cool shoes, lotta GPUs

As someone who has identified as an “agent”, it felt right to comment on this current moment:

booklog.substack.com/p/what-makes...

“How to brew deliciously” I ♥️ Claude for translation. *Please be careful with hot water

@zswitten.bsky.social you kind of summed this up better in your tweet I quote here, which I happened upon months ago, probably as I was typing one-handed to Claude "how 2 stop baby crying now pls", and am only now getting around to writing about due to said crying

Claude for Babies 🍼🤖

Two things have distinguished my experience with a newborn this time around. One was an incredible luxury and one is readily available - Claude! 🍼🤖 open.substack.com/pub/booklog/...

Felt this same way reading the recent Zoe Saldaña profile in the Times. She almost canceled her audition for EP since she had so convinced herself she wouldn’t get the part!

Yay! Merry is the best. Congrats!

Hope everyone who reads the book enjoys it and feels all the love that went into it!

Here we are getting lunch a few years ago (I was probably telling her the book was “almost done just a *few* more changes..”). And that’s an extreme misspelling of my name on our takeout order. The Tin House copyeditors would never!

Oh yeah and along the way Claire also co-wrote a very cool video game, check that out too while you’re at it: clairejia.com/interactive-...

Wanting - Tin House Ye Lian is thriving in Beijing. She has a well-paid job, a nice boyfriend, and plans to marry and move into a luxury high-rise apartment. She’s wanting for nothing–until her childhood best friend, Luo...

Look at this amazing cover! You can pre-order a copy just as easily as Lian and Wenyu order a red bean latte: tinhouse.com/book/wanting/

I am so thankful to her and SO HAPPY that the novel, which is called ‘Wanting’ (it had many other titles over time!) will be published in a few months from such a special place, Tin House Books. Claire’s editor is Elizabeth DaMeo who brought the book over the finish line. She’s a force!

My career changed a lot as we worked together. I now work only on nonfiction, and with a lot of people in tech who work on things that are very different than novels. But all these years she kept me rooted to a type of creativity that has helped in all my work.

Claire taught me about WeChat and advertising for singles in Beijing parks and specialty Starbucks orders (red bean lattes 😍). The two main characters are young women, but I always felt an affinity for Chen, who is our fathers’ age but searching just as much as they are.

Claire is tireless, meticulous, and extraordinarily funny. She’s creative on a level that you only ever run into if you’re very, very lucky. The novel is about two friends in Beijing figuring out who they want to be, where they want to make their lives, and what matters most.

I started reading and editing outlines and drafts every few months.
Meanwhile, our lives started to change a lot. Claire broke into TV writing and I moved from NYC back to SF, where I’m from. Writing and editing took a long time with so much happening.

When she was leaving, Hillary referred Claire to me and she told me she was writing a novel— I think she had started it as her college thesis? Need to fact check that, it’s been so long. But she had a little bit written which she shared with me and I could tell it was going to be GOOD.

My colleague Hillary read a Modern Love essay by Claire and reached out to meet her and see if she had any longer writing. Hillary left publishing to go to law school and is now a hotshot litigator— people contain multitudes!

It’s been about TEN years since I first met @clairejia.bsky.social who is going to publish her debut novel next spring from @tinhouse.bsky.social 😱
Here’s how this very special project came to be..

My cordless Dyson doesn’t work well anymore 😢 Maybe it’s a metaphor

This conversation about tech & babies reminded me of this poem, Cairn at 4 AM, by Anna McDonald. A favorite of mine for those early days.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

I also had no idea the first baby monitors were developed in the wake of the Lindbergh kidnapping!

The hunger strike scenes are unforgettable. I’d read the book, which was fantastic, but seeing these so viscerally rendered on screen proved the power of adaptation.