Writing CraftSeptember 9, 2026
Spring is the best season for difficult books and almost nobody uses it that way. The light is long, the energy is back, nothing is competing, and the hard book you keep postponing has a better chance in April than…
Writing CraftSeptember 9, 2026
Summer is the only season most people get a genuinely uninterrupted stretch of days, and that makes it the season for the long book. A nine-hundred-page novel needs consecutive days more than it needs concentration, and nothing else in the…
FictionSeptember 8, 2026
Every October people who never read horror pick the book with the most alarming cover, discover it does nothing for them, and conclude they dislike the genre. What they have discovered is that they dislike one register out of six.…
Critical ThinkingSeptember 7, 2026
In the early 1990s a Bugs Bunny cartoon drew 37.7 million viewers a week and the franchise was valued near $17 billion. Sixty years of owners treated it as a revenue stream instead of an asset. Here is the full…
Critical ThinkingSeptember 6, 2026
There are no good clients. Nobody can do this properly. There is no time. These sound like observations about the world and behave like decisions, because once you believe a thing is unavailable you stop looking, and not looking produces…
Book MarketingSeptember 6, 2026
One creator earned $58,697 from five million plays and started selling sponsor slots. Another with 7.85 million subscribers raised four million and bought a building. Both decided the platform was distribution and the business had to live somewhere else.
Book MarketingSeptember 6, 2026
A journalist put his real Substack and YouTube numbers on screen and called it a collapse. The platform is fine. What broke is the promise that reader subscriptions could replace a salary, and the arithmetic says it was never going…
Critical ThinkingSeptember 6, 2026
The disasters that happen to ordinary people are boring: a power cut in a heatwave, a burst pipe, a job ending. Almost nothing in the preparedness market addresses any of it, because fear sells better than usefulness.
Critical ThinkingSeptember 6, 2026
Seventy-four thousand years ago a mountain in Sumatra came apart and took the sky with it. Sunlight fell, the cold held for years, and the human population may have dropped to fewer than ten thousand. This is what that winter…
Artificial IntelligenceSeptember 4, 2026
An author can now lose a publishing contract because a stranger uploaded their manuscript to a website and got a number back. Here is why those numbers cannot bear the weight being put on them, and what a writer should…
Artificial IntelligenceSeptember 4, 2026
Researchers trained a model on a meaningless maze and found a positive and negative axis that already existed in the base model. Steering it changes behavior far outside the maze. Here is what that evidence shows, what it does not,…
FictionSeptember 3, 2026
Bucharest is the centre of the global adult webcam industry and almost none of the work happens in bedrooms. It happens in studios in ordinary office blocks, in an industry the state declines to classify.
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