wow--thanks for sending along. Doing an event about The Displacements for next week and this is helpful...

Best part of large holiday gatherings is when the men start summarizing the latest nonfiction books they're reading.

He is indeed! I'm co-organizing with a colleague in History. Watch this space...

Maskers

Thank you so much Helen! Means an enormous amount coming from you...

"some thought"??

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

Link: theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

For all the minimizers out there:

Thanks so much! Glad you enjoyed it.

Ossoff: "You're seeing what I'm seeing, right? The president posting about the Obamas like a Klansman."

Just awful. The cuts at the Washington Post will include the elimination of the Books section--one of the nation's premier outlets for thoughtful book reviews.

seeing conservatives admit alex pretti was disarmed and need to change their message to “well you know where you won’t get shot? at home” is just an impressive level of pathetic allegiance to their dictator

Thanks so much!!

ICE has now carried out two summary executions of innocent people in the streets of an American city.

If you work for ICE, there's no denying that's the mission you're supporting now. You don't get to claim in one year or ten or twenty that you didn't know what ICE was doing. You're complicit.

It's not happening, people. Not anytime soon.

Weed. They were carrying weed.

"Visual culture has changed form. It has become detached from human eyes and has become largely invisible. . . The overwhelming majority of images are now made my machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop."
-Trevor Paglen

NPR going the way of CBS.

I thought this was an Onion story.

There are county records offices in the UK that describe their records in terms of kilometers of shelf space--like 15 kilometers of parchment alone (to say nothing of paper), none of which has been digitized.

Melissa's review of Culpability 5/5: I received Culpability a few months ago and hadn't heard of it until it arrived in the mail. However, it sounded interesting along the lines of Wally Lamb and I added it to my TBR. Once I started...

I recommend Culpability by @bruceholsinger.bsky.social, as it is thought-provoking and absorbing! www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Thanks so much! Appreciate the nice words.

Luis Suárez will be presenting the FIFA Peace Prize.

"that new book is so bad here's our second review, 4th profile, and third podcast about it"

Bruce Holsinger on Culpability — a novel about AI, moral agency, and a family facing impossible choices.
Elizabeth George on A Slowly Dying Cause — an Inspector Lynley mystery set in Cornwall, rich with character, place, and difficult truths. @bruceholsinger.bsky.social
Listen: tinyurl.com/WritersV

Next week Prince Andrew gets a cabinet post over here.

He's a great gadfly but he CANNOT be the nominee.

My university

Abigail Jackson saying: Democrats, calling your political opponents Nazis has consequences. Study: Left-wing terrorism climbs to 30-year high And posting a graph from Axios that shows WAY WAY WAY more right wing terrorism, and showing a very slight increase in left wing terrorism this year that would still have it lower than basically every other year of right wing terrorism.

White House Deputy Press Secretary seen here posting data showing how much more prevalent right wing domestic terrorism is than left wing domestic terrorism... while thinking she's showing the reverse.

Apparently she can only read headlines, but not the actual graph with the data.