Critical ThinkingSeptember 3, 2026
Web rings were how you found things before search worked. I belonged to more than two hundred of them and ran a dozen, and when I finally closed my account it held 2,900 memberships. On 5 September 2000 Yahoo replaced…
Artificial IntelligenceSeptember 3, 2026
An industry has grown up selling AI visibility, and much of what it sells has no evidence behind it. Here is what the measurements say, what destroyed three real companies, the one documented recovery, and the short list that survives…
Artificial IntelligenceSeptember 3, 2026
A link used to be a vote and cost nothing to give. AI visibility depends on corroboration from platforms that charge admission, which is a spending filter wearing the costume of a trust signal. Here is what it costs and…
Critical ThinkingSeptember 3, 2026
The page I published at ring-master.net in 2000 and 2001 after Yahoo replaced the WebRing system: what changed, what ringmasters said about it on the message boards, and the American Pie parody somebody wrote for the occasion.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
Burn schedules approved, nine worlds. Seven seconds later, archive their naming-day customs before they are lost. She wrote both, and at the time neither entry knew about the other.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
I asked a member of my own team what he would do in an earthquake. He said he would get under the window, without hesitating. He was not stupid. Nobody had ever told him.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
I clicked Publish on my first book in 2016 and watched nothing happen for two weeks. Zero sales. I had assumed writing the book was the hard part, which is the assumption every new author makes.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
I have landed on Iwo Jima. I have died in the mud of the Western Front. Not as belief exactly, but as memory that does not belong to this life and will not leave. This novel began there.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
I quit in 2013, moved to Florida, and decided I would be a professional writer. My first book sold about a dozen copies. The book was fine. The waiting was the problem.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
Show, don’t tell was the advice I disliked most, because nobody ever explained it. Critique groups told me I was telling too much without once saying what that meant.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
I started in 2003 when eBay was still a digital garage sale, and made twenty-five thousand dollars in a year clearing out my own closets. That eBay is gone, so the 2015 book needed rewriting.
Behind the BookSeptember 2, 2026
Four books ago I sat down to write about why Americans had stopped thinking. Each one dragged me somewhere I did not expect, and this is the book where all four of them meet.
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