Posted by Unknown

http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2026/03/the-daleks-master-plan.html

You can’t watch Daleks’ Master Plan for the first time.

You already know too much about it. The longest, most epic Doctor Who story. The one in which three companions die. The closest the BBC ever came to putting the Dalek comic strip on TV. The episode without the Doctor in it. The Notorious Christmas Episode. Sara Kingdom ages to death. Nicholas Courtney before he was the Brigadier...

We knew it by reputation: but what’s it actually about? We were always a little more vague about that. My childhood Bible, The Making of Doctor Who was unhelpful. “The Doctor’s travels took him to Egypt during the building of the great Pyramid, where he met the Time-Meddling Monk again, then to the planet Kembel, where the Daleks were preparing an invasion of Earth and then to France in 1452.” My other constant companion, the Radio Time Tenth Anniversary Special couldn’t even get the title right.

I knew what Tomb of the Cybermen was about before I saw it. “Silly archaeologists find frozen Cyberpeople and wake them up, egged on by one of those mad scientists who thinks he can make an alliance with them. The Doctor sends them back to sleep.” Daleks’ Master Plan defies that sort of description: “The Daleks form a big alliance to conquer the entire universe and world. They invent an ultimate weapon called the Time Destructor. The Doctor steals the weapon’s power source and...wanders around aimlessly while the allies squabble.”

We’d heard that it was very bleak, ending in a pyrrhic victory. And it certainly does contain two very bleak episodes. In part four two characters who are arguably companions and certainly goodies are killed off; and in part twelve, their replacement is reduced to dust in an actually genuinely disturbing sequence that doesn’t feel like anything else in Who. But the overall tone is pretty light. Bickering baddies, ranty mad villains, vampire triffids, invisible giants and ray-gun wielding spacemen in black uniforms. This is Doctor Who does E.E. “Doc” Smith. More precisely, it’s Doctor Who does Dan Dare.

Some people think that, if we could see Mission to the Unknown (the one-off prologue) through the eyes of a 1965 viewer, we would perceive it as having a vicious twist in its tale. We see two heroic chaps being menaced by evil plants on a jungle planet; we assume that the TARDIS will arrive at some point and the story will get started. But it never comes. That’s the twist. They both die. The terrible surprising message is: the Doctor can fail.

But pretending that it’s 1965 and we’re watching Daleks’ Master Plan on our 405 line TV makes about as much sense as pretending that it’s 1601 and we think Hamlet will marry Ophelia. Everyone knows that Mission to the Unknown is “the Doctor Who story in which the regular cast don’t appear.” And I do mean “everyone”. The Radio Times for Oct 9 1965 is quite clear. “Today’s episode sees no such confrontation [between the Doctor and the Daleks]. In fact the Doctor does not even appear. It is a hint, a warning of things to come.” No first night audience ever existed. No-one ever watched Daleks’ Master Plan for the first time.

What Mission to the Unknown does do is radically change the programme’s viewpoint. We’re no longer looking through the Doctor’s eyes. Stuff happens in the universe, and stuff will carry whether the Doctor is there or not. (The clumsy transition at the end of Galaxy Four underlines this point. “Look at that planet” says Vicki “I wonder what is going on down there?” “Yes, yes, I wonder...” replies the Doctor—and we pan down to Kembel.) This shift of viewpoint is taken for granted in the Nightmare Begins (episode 1 of the story proper). The Doctor, Katerina and Steven are tying up the lose ends of the Myth Makers; a couple of Space Agents with ray-guns and Licences to Kill are following up events in Mission to the Unknown; the Daleks are having their alien council of war; and at one point we cut away to two civil servant on Earth watching a TV interview with soon-to-be-revealed traitor Mavic Chen. We’re outside, looking in at a universe in which the Doctor is just one character. Paths cross; people pursue different objectives; characters come together and separate.

That’s why the story is so hard to sum up. The Doctor doesn’t have a single clear objective. He steals the Taranium Core—the McGuffin which powers the Time Destructor. At one point he mutters that it would probably be a good idea to destroy it (presumably at Mount Doom). There is some talk of needing to get back to earth and warn it about the coming invasion. But a lot of the time the Doctor seems directionless; part of a separate narrative. “I’d forgotten about the Daleks” says Sara Kingdom—quite an odd thing to say in the middle of the longest ever Dalek story.

But in a funny way, this reasserts the basic nature of the Doctor: makes him feel more Doctor-ish than ever before. At the centre, on Kembel, the Daleks are machinating. On the periphery, the Doctor goes from Kembel to Desperus; from the Trafalgar square to Ancient Egypt without any destination in view. He’s a wanderer; and that old ship of his seems to be an aimless thing.

The Daleks’ Master Plan is not a twelve part story. It is barely a story at all. It’s an experiment with the structure of Doctor Who: the programme re-envisaged as soap opera. For the first time it’s a window into something we could call “The Doctor Who Universe.”

The political plot is pretty perfunctory: “thieves fall out” on a universal scale. Mavic Chen, serious Shakespearean villain in the Iago mould, turns out to be more like a comic opera villain in the Mikado mould. It isn’t clear what a Time Destructor does. Destroy Time, I suppose. In that great final scene, it seems to be speeding time up, causing everything exposed to it to age super-quickly. How that fits into the Daleks’ plan we don’t discover. Were they going to hold the universe to ransom? Or was the plan to hide in a bunker, kill everyone else in the universe, and then emerge as the supreme beings? It matters very little. Nor does Terry Nation’s confusion about the difference between “a solar system”, “a galaxy” and “a universe”. The Universe consists of Twelve Galaxies and one of those Galaxies is called The Solar System. I think. But it creates a general impression of a universal war, a context in which the Doctor’s aimlessness occurs. It feels exhilarating even today. It must have been intoxicating if you were the right age in 1965.

This makes it harder to dismiss the digressions and comedy in the middle episode as flaws. They are almost the point. Everyone knows that Feast of Steven went out on Christmas Day. The BBC didn’t want anything scary to go out on the holiday [1] and came up with something Dalek-free. Everyone does not know that the following episode (transmitted seven days later on the first Saturday of 1966) is very nearly as silly—and much funnier. The TARDIS materializes at the Oval Cricket ground, and then at Trafalgar Square on New Year Eve; in between they encounter the Meddling Monk, as played by comedian Peter Butterwoth on an alien planet. The main “jeopardy” is the Monk’s locking the Doctor out of the TARDIS. The Doctor fixes the lock using the magical properties of his ring, which he declines to explain. (“I don’t want to discuss this any more. About turn.”) Completely separately, the Daleks test their Ultimate Weapon and discover that the Doctor has tricked them (by switching a fake McGuffin for the real one.) The Serious Bit (Daleks plotting), the Light Hearted Bit (the Doctor and the Monk on the volcano planet) and the Silly Bit (cricket commentators wondering whether the materialization of a Police Box will stop England making seventy-eight runs in forty-five minutes) exist alongside each other. The idea of the Doctor jumping from the Oval to Tigis to Trafalgar Square to Ancient Egypt catches the idea of the Doctor so perfectly that it hardly matters that he doesn’t do much in each place. [2]

From this point of view, the Meddling Monk stops being curiously irrelevant and becomes indispensable. If the Doctor (in a time machine) is being chased by the Daleks (in a time machine) then of course they are going to run into the only other being in the universe who also has time machine. In a comic book the casual reappearance of a minor character would hardly be worth commenting on. Doctor Who had never worked that way before: it hardly ever did again.

Daleks’ Master Plan works at a conceptual level: we enjoy the idea of it much more than we enjoy the individual episodes. It need never have ended. We could have imagined the Doctor bouncing around that milieu indefinitely: someone would replace Mavic Chen; the Daleks would rise again; some new threat would appear. In fact “Huge Space Soap Opera” turned out to be the wrong answer to the question “What should Doctor Who be?” (The right answer turned out to be the Tenth Planet and the Moonbase.) It was followed by a strange, slow historical story that was hardly a Doctor Who story at all. When the Dalek next appear (in the Power of the Daleks) they have nothing to do with the imperialists we met in this story. Dalek’s Master Plan was an evolutionary dead end.

Unless. Perhaps Master Plan changed the idea of what Doctor Who was in a way that couldn’t quite be unchanged. The founders of Doctor Who fandom, not to mention Mr Douglas Adams, were precisely the Right Age in 1965. What if, once you have seen the Great Big Soap Opera you take it for granted that that is what Doctor Who is from now on? If you “read” the Massacre and the Ark as the next few scenes in the soap opera; the next few windows into the Doctor Who universe? Perhaps Daleks’ Master Plan never finished—because we say it didn’t.

[1]Unless you count Jimmy Savile presenting Top of the Pops 65 and Max Bygraves Meets the Black and White Minstrels.

[2] The Doctor knows about Christmas and positively wants to celebrate it, but has never heard of New Year or cricket. Discuss.

This article first appeared in The Viewer's Complete Tale by Andrew Rilstone, still available....

If you want to read other Whovian essays by Rilstone and support his writing endeavours, please consider joining his Patreon.

http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2026/03/the-daleks-master-plan.html

crooked_timber_feed

Posted by Chris Bertram

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/15/sunday-photoblogging-shed/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55035

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/15/sunday-photoblogging-shed/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55035

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/14/view-from-a-hotel-window-3-14-26-tucson-az/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59780

I didn’t get a shot when I got in — I was busy doing other things and then I was busy taking a nap — but here’s one to make up for the lapse. I’m in toen for the Tucson Book Festival, and if you come to it tomorrow (Sunday) I will have two panels and two signings. Come on down! And wear a hat, they’re having a lot of sun here.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/14/view-from-a-hotel-window-3-14-26-tucson-az/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59780

skepchick_feed

Posted by Rebecca Watson

https://skepchick.org/2026/03/is-the-us-military-trying-to-bring-back-jesus/

https://skepchick.org/?p=133554

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Last week I saw a news story going viral on social media: “U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus”! And I thought, yep. Obviously. I was an adult for …

https://skepchick.org/2026/03/is-the-us-military-trying-to-bring-back-jesus/

https://skepchick.org/?p=133554

crooked_timber_feed

Posted by Doug Muir

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/14/imperia-a-european-culture-story-part-3-and-last/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=54941

Third and last part of an article discussing Imperia, the large concrete statue of a semi-fictional medieval sex worker. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

A Clandestine Erection

Imperia went up in April 1993, and I won’t even try to explain the insane backstory.

Short version: some people in Constance wanted a cool statue to add luster to the waterfront. Most of them were thinking of something like a Statue of Liberty. A minority, however, had a more subversive idea. And those guys picked Peter Lenk, a sculptor with a reputation. But when the City Council of this fairly conservative small German city saw the plans… you can probably guess how that went over. There was, let us say, some pushback.

But Lenk and his allies went ahead and put up Imperia anyway. The statue was prefabricated and shipped to the harbor in pieces. Most of the construction happened in a single night, between midnight and dawn.

So Constance woke up to Imperia, and… honestly, it wasn’t love at first sight. “Bemusement” was one common reaction. “Disgust” and “outrage” were up there too.

Part of it was, of course, that she’s a gigantic sex worker. Another part is that she was satirizing something that happened almost six hundred years previous, which even in Germany is not exactly front page news. And of course, there were her let’s say attributes,

Imperia (2026) - All You MUST Know Before You Go (with Reviews)
[there are a lot of photos of her from this angle for some reason]

plus the fact that she was holding a naked Pope in one hand. Constance is a pretty Catholic town, and the whole “naked Pope” thing didn’t really go over well.

Sculptor Lenk eventually addressed this point, saying:

“The figures in the Imperia are not the Pope or the Emperor, but rather jesters who have appropriated the insignia of secular and spiritual power. And to what extent the real Popes and Emperors were also jesters, I leave to the historical knowledge of the viewers.”

— which pretty obviously Lenk was lying through his teeth, and grinning while doing it.

Eventual Respectability

But naked Popes notwithstanding, over years and decades people gradually got used to Imperia. I wouldn’t say she ever became a beloved mascot. You won’t be greeted by posters of her when you pick up your checked bag at the local airport. But the cries to take her down gradually dwindled away, and a modest cottage industry grew up selling Imperia-themed tourist tat.

Imperia Statue Long Sleeve T-Shirt Magnete Bodensee Damen T-Shirt "Konstanz Imperia No. 2"

It was during COVID that Imperia really made the final step to respectability. She wore a (very large) mask for several months, and was used as a symbol in the city’s public health campaign.

[she’s literally a role model]

So she’s part of the community now, and will be adorning Constance’s modest skyline for a long time to come.

While Richard Nixon, Karl Popper, and Jerry Garcia were still alive

Another thing that happened in 1993: Bill Clinton was inaugurated as US President.

MTV — remember MTV? — held its own “Inaugural Ball”, a celebratory concert that was, briefly, the must-have ticket. It was hip and cool! It was a coming-out party for the twentysomething Generation X, which had turned out for Bill Clinton in force! Don Henley performed, and so did Boyz II Men! Dennis Miller was the host!

And then there was a bit where Michael Stipe (R.E.M.) and Natalie Merchant (10,000 Maniacs) did a duet of “Candy Everybody Wants”. I watched it at the time, and I remember being struck by the sense of joy and optimism coming off that stage. Stipe is a guy whose default affect is somewhere between stoic and gloomy, but he’s actually showing signs of mild enthusiasm here. Merchant is practically bouncing off the stage.

And why not? The Soviet Union was gone, and now the Reagan-Bush years were over. Ding dong, the witch is dead! We had a charming new President, who was going to use American power to push for peace in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the Middle East. The economy was picking up. A bunch of promising new drugs were about to start pushing back the AIDS epidemic. Nirvana was working on a new album. People were talking about this new thing called the Internet, and it sounded pretty cool.

That said, “Candy Everybody Wants” was a distinctly odd choice. Because there’s a huge disjunct between the music — which is a big cheerful aural hug, all happy brasses and soaring major chords — and the dark and cynical lyrics. The music is fist-pumping inspiration. The lyrics are about how our choices in media consumption are making us cruel and stupid. Presumably they chose it because it works well as a duet — 10,000 Maniacs’ other big hit, “These Are Days”, was very much a delivery system for Merchant’s distinctive voice — but still: 0dd.

Over in Germany, Peter Lenk was finalizing his designs for Imperia. She’d go up a few months later. I very much doubt he watched or listened to “MTV’s Inaugural Ball”. But I definitely think he was picking up on that early-1990s, post-Cold War swell of optimism.

That zeitgeist was particularly strong in Germany, where the dust was still settling from the fall of the Wall.

When the Wall Came Tumbling Down: The American Public and Berlin ...
[no lie, that was a moment]

Re-unification! All those Soviet armored divisions just across the border suddenly just… going home! The looming threat of nuclear war dwindling to almost nothing! And — wildest and most surprising — the sudden disappearance of a corrupt and oppressive system that had seemed invulnerable, immovable. If Soviet Communism could suddenly just vanish, what might not be possible?

So I think Lenk was definitely feeling that surge of national optimism. And I think he was reacting against it. You might say that while the rest of us were dancing to the music of “Candy”, Lenk was listening carefully to the words.

And I think — whether deliberately or not — he set up Imperia as a critique of that historical moment. As a counterpoint. Imperia may be about the Council of Constance, but she’s also about 1993. If she’d gone up five years earlier, or five years later, I think she would have been something very different.

Give ’em What They Want

Okay, so through the last two and a half posts we’ve zigged and zagged through a bunch of European history and culture: Botticelli, Balzac, the Emperor Constantine, bad Popes, Expressionism, Renaissance bankers, Nazis. But none of this answers the question: is Imperia (the statue) a serious work of art?

I think yes, she is. And part of the reason is this: she rotates. She makes a complete turn every four minutes.

Yes, rotating sculptures are generally dopey. But here I think it works. Because Imperia means “empire”, and empires don’t look one way. Empires have broad horizons. Imperia turns because her claim to authority is very great. Universal, perhaps. Hegemonic.

You can see her as a straightforward comment on hypocrisy and that works. You can see her as powerful men baffled by female sexuality and charisma — reduced, as we noted, to impotence or frustration. You can see her as the patriarchy turned inside out. And those things work, sure. But I think Imperia is most interesting and alarming when we see her as a system.

Remember, the members of the Council of Constance came together to reform the most important institution in their world. They had the tools to do so. They had the brainpower, they had the time, there was broad popular support. But the Council failed because the Council members chose, collectively, to not solve the problem. And they made that collective choice because they were themselves part of the corrupt system. Everybody took bribes. Everybody was profiting. Everybody was complicit. A clean and honest Church would have been better, everybody knew that, but they simply couldn’t get there from here.

[nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft]

In 1993, the Germans were still basking in the afterglow of the end of Communism. Communism was corrupt, oppressive, and claimed to be universal. But — in Eastern Europe, at least — Communism was imposed at gunpoint, from outside. And I think, whether deliberately or not, Lenk was saying: all right, the bad system imposed upon us is gone. Does that mean we’re done with bad systems? Or will we, collectively, choose something that’s every bit as bad?

And that’s what I think we’re looking at here. Imperia is a system, and she’s a bad system, and she’s the system that we create for ourselves by our collective choices.

Imperia is a bad Nash equilibrium. She’s that corner of the Prisoner’s Dilemma where we all choose to send each other to jail forever.

Imperia is the house always wins. Imperia is a gacha game. Imperia is vendor lock-in. Imperia is our fossil fuel addiction. Imperia is the algorithm that, based on our choices, limits our choices. She’s the Love Island franchise. She lifts us up — and leaves us impotent or frustrated. Imperia is closing down all the newspapers and killing the high streets. She’s all of us knowing what we want, and getting it, good and hard. If you’re workin’ for the Man every night and day, it’s probably Imperia you’re working for. When all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life? He’ll look upwards to meet Imperia’s concrete smile.

Every four minutes, she turns. She looks out over the river that the Romans bridged, and the lake where the Hapsburgs fought the Swiss, and the city that the Allies could have bombed but didn’t. She looks north to Berlin where the Nazis burned Lovis Corinth’s paintings, and east to where Jan Hus came to be burned by the Church. She looks south to the Rome where Raphael immortalized her namesake, who died young, and then died young himself, and she looks west to Paris where Balzac wrote a story about her and then killed himself through overwork and coffee. She looks beyond that to the New World that Prince Henry started the search for, all unknowing, back when the Council of Constance was closing up shop, and where Lovis Corinth’s painting of her rests in a private collection. And in one hand she holds the limp and depressed Emperor, who claims secular power over the bodies of mankind, and in the other she holds the petulant and helpless Pope, who claims spiritual power over the souls.

And oceans rise, and empires fall, and the tourists come and gawk and snap selfies and maybe buy a keychain. And she smiles her small cruel smile, and she turns, and she turns, and all the horizon comes under her stony gaze.

And that’s all.

Deutschland, Baden-Württemberg, Konstanz, Bodensee, Hafeneinfahrt mit Imperia Statue im Winter, Sonnenaufgang, lizenzfreies Stockfoto

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/14/imperia-a-european-culture-story-part-3-and-last/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=54941

anil_dash_feed

Posted by Anil Dash

https://anildash.com/2026/03/13/coders-after-ai/

For the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I talked to Clive Thompson about one of the conversations that I'm having most often these days: What happens to coders in this current moment of extraordinarily rapid evolution in AI? LLMs are now quickly advancing to where they can virtually become entire software factories, radically changing both the economics and the power dynamics of software creation — which has so far mostly been used to displace massive numbers of tech workers.

But it's not so simple as "bosses are firing coders now that AI can write code".

For one thing, though there are certainly a lot of companies where executives are forcing teams to churn out slop code, and using that as an excuse to carry out mass layoffs, there are plenty of companies where "AI" is just a buzzword being used as a pretense for layoffs that owners have wanted to do anyway. And more importantly, there are a growing number of coders who are having a very different experience with the tools than those bosses may have expected — and a very different outcome than the Big AI labs may have intended. As I said in the story:

“The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see LLMs differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, LLMs take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” Dash says. “And in coding, LLMs take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.”

This is a point that's hard for a lot of my artist friends to understand: how come so many coders don't just hate LLMs for stealing their work the way that most writers and photographers and musicians do? The answer boils down to three things:

Coders have long had a history of openly sharing code with each other, as part of an open source, collaborative culture that goes back for more than half a century.
Tools for writing and creating code have almost always offered a certain degree of automation and reuse of work, so generating code doesn't feel like as radical a departure from past practices.
Software development is one of the fields with the least-advanced cultures around labor, as workers have almost no history of organizing, and many coders tend to side much more with management as they've been conditioned to think of themselves as "future founders" rather than being in solidarity with other workers.

What this means is, attitudes about automation and worker displacement in tech are radically different than they would be in something like the auto industry, and in many cases, I've found that being part of a coder workforce has meant witnessing a level of literacy about past labor movements that is shockingly low, even though their technical knowledge is obviously extremely high.

Coders, in their heads and hearts

To be somewhat reductive about it, there are two main cohorts of coders. A larger, less vocal, group who see coding as a stable, well-paying career that they got into in order to support themselves and their families, and to partake in the upward economic mobility that the tech sector has represented for the last few decades. Then there is the smaller, more visible, group who have seen coding as an avocation, which they were drawn to as a form of creative expression and problem-solving just as much as a career opportunity. They certainly haven't been reluctant to capitalize on the huge economic potential of working in tech — this is the group that most startup founders come from — but coding isn't simply something they do from 9 to 5 and then put away at the end of the day. For those of us in this group (yeah... I'm one of these folks), we usually started coding when we were kids, and we have usually kept doing it on nights and weekends ever since, even if it's not even part of our jobs anymore.

Both cohorts of coders are in for a hard time thanks to the new AI tools, but for completely different reasons.

For the 9 to 5

The people who started to write software just because it represented a stable job, but who don't see it as part of their own personal identity, are going to be devastated by the ruthlessness with which their bosses will swing the ax. These new LLM-powered software factories can generate orders of magnitude more of the standardized business code that tends to be the bread-and-butter work for these journeyman coders, and it's not the kind of displacement that can be solved by learning a new programming language on nights and weekends, or getting a new professional certification. Much of the "working class" tech industry (speaking of the roles they perform functionally within the system; these are obviously jobs that pay far more than working class salaries today) are seen as ripe targets for deskilling, where lower-paid product roles can delegate coding tasks to coding AI systems, or for being automated by management giving orders to those AI systems.

One of the hardest parts of reckoning with this change is not just the speed with which it is happening, but the level of cultural change that it reflects. Coders are generally very amenable to learning new skills; it's a necessary part of the work, and the mindset is almost never one of being change-averse. But the level at which the change is happening in this transition is one that gets closer to people's sense of self-worth and identity, rather than to their perceptions of simply having to acquire knowledge or skills. It doesn't help that the change is being catalyzed by some of the most venal and irresponsible leaders in the history of business, brazenly acting without any moral boundaries whatsoever.

For the nights and weekends

For the coders that see being a coder as part of their identity, the LLM transformation is going to represent an entirely different set of challenges. They may well survive the transition that is coming, but find themselves in an unrecognizable place on the other side of it. The way that these new LLM-based tools work is by turning into virtual software factories that essentially churn out nearly all of the code for you. The actual work of writing the code is abstracted away, with the creator essentially focused more on describing the desired end results, and making sure to test that everything is working correctly. You're more the conductor of the symphony than someone who's holding a violin.

But there are people who have spent decades honing their craft, committing to memory the most obscure vagaries of this computer processor or that web browser or that one gaming console, all in service of creating code that was particularly elegant or especially high-performing, or just really satisfying to write. There's a real art to it. When you get your code to run just so, you feel a quiet pride in yourself, and a sense of relief that there are still things in the world that work as they should. It's a little box that you can type in where things are fair. It's the same reason so many coders like to bake, or knit, or do woodworking — they're all hobbies where precisely doing the right thing is rewarded with a delightful result.

And now that's going away. You won't see the code yourself anymore, the robots will write it for you while falling around and clanking. Half the time, the code they write will be garbage, or nonsense. Slop. But it's so cheap to write that the computer can just throw it away and write some more, over and over, until it finally happens to work. Is it elegant? Who cares? It's cheap. Ten thousand times cheaper than paying you to write it, so we can afford to waste a lot of code along the way.

Your job changes into describing software. Now, if you're the kind of person who only ever wanted to have the end result, maybe this is a liberation. Sometimes, that's what mattered — we wanted to fast-forward to the end result, elegance be damned. But if you were one of those crafters? The people who wrote idiomatic code that made that programming language sing? There's a real grief here. It's not as serious as when we know a human language is dying out, but it's not entirely dissimilar, either.

If ... Then?

What do we do about it? This horse is not going back in the barn. The billionaires wouldn't let it, anyway.

I've come to the personal conclusion that the only way forward is for more of the hackers with soul to seize this moment of flux and use these tools to build. The economics of creating code are changing, and it can't just be the worst billionaires in the world who benefit. The latest count is 700,000 people laid off in the last few years in the tech industry. We'll be at a million soon, at the rate things are accelerating. Each new layoff announcement is now in the thousands.

It's not going to be a panacea for all the jobs lost, and it's not the only solution we're going to need, but one part of the answer can be coders who still give a damn looking out for each other, and building independent efforts without being reliant on the economics — or ethics — of the people who are laying off their colleagues by the hundreds of thousands.

I've spent my whole career working with communities of coders, building tools for the people who build with code. I don't imagine I'll ever stop doing it. This is the hardest moment that I've ever seen this community go through, and it makes me heartsick to see so many people enduring such stress and anxiety about what's to come. More than anything else, what I hope people can remember is that all of the great things that people love about technology weren't created by the money guys, or the bosses who make HR decisions — they were created by the people who actually build things. That's still an incredible superpower, and it will remain one no matter how much the actual tools of creation continue to change.

https://anildash.com/2026/03/13/coders-after-ai/

anil_dash_feed

Posted by Anil Dash

https://anildash.com/2026/03/08/neo-apple-embarassment/

Last week, Apple released a parade of hardware announcements, and the one that captured the most attention across the industry was the $600 ($500 if you’re in education!) MacBook Neo, the brightly-colored low-end laptop that they launched to great fanfare. The conventional wisdom is that this product opens up Apple to the low end of the laptop market for the first time, radically changing the dynamics of the entire market, and throwing down the gauntlet to the garbage Windows laptop market, as well as challenging a huge swath of Chromebooks which tend to dominate in the education market. This is incorrect.

Apple has, in fact, sold a MacBook Air with an M1 chip at Walmart for years, which it has intermittently discounted to $499 at key times like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The single-core performance of that laptop (meaning, how it works for most normal tasks that people do, like browsing the web or writing email or watching YouTube videos), is very nearly equivalent to the newly-released MacBook Neo.

But. A laptop with an old design, using a chip that has an old number (the M1 chip came out six years ago!), sold exclusively through a mass-market retailer that is perceived as anything but premium, presents an enormous brand challenge for Apple. It is, to put it simply, embarrassing. Apple can have low-end products in its range. They invest lots of effort in that segment of their product line, as the new iPhone 17e shows, making a new basic entrant to their most recent series of phones. But Apple can’t have old, basic-looking products that people aren’t even able to buy at an Apple Store.

And that’s what Neo solves. It’s a smart reframing of a product that is nearly the same offering as the old M1 Air: the Neo and that old M1 machine both have 13” screens, both weigh just under 3 pounds, both have 8GB of RAM, both start at 256GB of storage, both have about 16 hours of battery life, are both about 8”x12”, both have 2 USB ports and a headphone jack, and both of course cost almost exactly the same. They did add a new yellow (citrus!) color for the Neo, though.

Wake up, Neo

What was more striking to me was Apple’s introductory video, which clearly seems aimed at people who are new to Apple computers, or maybe people who are new to laptop computers entirely. They’re imagining a user base who’s only ever had their smartphones and are buying computers for the first time — which might describe a lot of students. There’s no discussion here of the chamfers of the aluminum, or the pipelines in the GPU cores, and there’s barely even the slightest mention of AI; instead, they describe the basics of what the laptop includes, and even go out of their way to explain how it interoperates with an iPhone.

There’s also a very clear attempt to distinguish Neo’s branding from the rest of Apple’s design language. The type for the “MacBook Neo” name in the launch video, and the “Hello, Neo” text on the product homepage are a rounded typeface that’s so new that it’s not actually even an actual font that Apple’s using; they’ve rendered it as an image instead of a variation of their usual “San Francisco” font that Apple uses for everything else in their standard marketing materials. The throwback to 2000s-era design (terminal green, the word “Neo” — are we entering the Matrix?) couldn’t be more different from the “it looks expensive” vibes of something like the Apple Watch Hermès branding.

In all, it’s pretty impressive to see Apple use its marketing strengths to take a product that is remarkably similar to something that they’ve had for sale for years at the largest retailer in the world, and position it as a brand-new, category-defining new entry into a space. To me, the biggest thing this shows is the blind spot that traditional tech trade press has to the actual buying patterns and lived experience of normal people who shop at Walmart all the time; it would be pretty hard to see Neo as particularly novel if you had walked by a Walmart tech section any time in the last three years.

At a time when Apple has lost whatever moral compass it had, even though its machines still say “privacy is a human right” when you turn them on, we still want to see positive signs from the company. And a good one is that Apple is engaging with the reality that the current moment calls for products that are far more affordable. It is a good thing indeed when affordable products are presented as being desirable, when most of the product’s enclosure is made of recycled material, and when the lifespan of a product can be expected to be significantly longer than most in its category, instead of simply being treated as disposable. All it took was removing the stigma over the existing affordable laptop that Apple’s been selling for years.

https://anildash.com/2026/03/08/neo-apple-embarassment/

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/12/the-big-idea-cindy-cohn/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59775

When you’re trying to get folks excited about their own digital rights, a lot will depend on the examples you give them to understand the fight. As the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn certainly has examples. But which ones to choose? In this Big Idea for Privacy’s Defender, Cohn offers up her choices and explains why they matter.

CINDY COHN:

Do we have the right to have a private conversation online?

In this age of constant, pervasive surveillance, both government and corporate, how do you get people to believe that they can and should have that right?

And how do you show that safeguarding privacy is part of safeguarding a free, open and democratic society?

In Privacy’s Defender, my Big Idea is that by telling some rollicking stories about my three big fights for digital privacy over the past 30 years, I might inspire people not only to understand why privacy matters, but to actually start fighting for it themselves.

The challenge was different for each of the three stories I told. The first one, about cryptography, was in many ways the easiest, since it had a pretty straightforward narrative. Before the beginning of the broad public internet, in the early 1990s, I led a ragtag bunch of hackers and lawyers who sued to fight a federal law that treated encryption – specifically “software with the capability of maintaining secrecy” – as a weapon. We argued that code is speech and put together a case based on the First Amendment. By pulling in help from academics, scientists, companies and others, and by the grace of several women judges who were willing to listen to us in spite of the government’s national security claims on the other side, we won.

Many other stories from the early public internet are about men and the products they built. This one is different: It tells how some scruffy underdogs beat the national security infrastructure and brought all of us the promise of a more secure internet. But it’s otherwise kind of a hero’s tale with a dramatic ending when I was called to DC to negotiate the government’s surrender.

The second and third stories don’t end in such clean wins, which perhaps makes them more typical of how actual change happens when you are up against the government.

The second set of stories are about the cases we brought against the National Security Agency’s mass spying, starting after the New York Times revealed in late 2005 that the government was spying on Americans on our home soil. The fight was pushed forward by a whistleblower named Mark Klein who literally knocked on our front door at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in early 2006 with details of how the NSA was tapping into the internet’s backbone at key junctures, including in a secret room in an AT&T building in downtown San Francisco. This is the most cloak-and-dagger of the stories, made possible both by Mark’s courage and that of Edward Snowden, who revealed even more about the NSA spying in 2013 because he was angry at watching the government lie repeatedly to the American people, including before Congress.

As a result, Congress rushed in to protect… the phone companies, killing our first lawsuit. Later, after Snowden’s revelations, lawmakers passed some reforms to some of the programs we had sought to stop, but not nearly enough. In the end, the Supreme Court supported the government’s argument that – even though the whole world knew about the NSA spying and that it relied on access to information collected and handled by major telephone companies – identifying which company participated would violate the state secrets privilege. But we had dramatically shifted how the government did mass spying: ending two of the three programs we had sued over, scaling back the third, and providing far more public information about what the government was doing. In writing my book, I wanted to tell the truth about the progress we made without sugarcoating that we had not succeeded at nearly the scale that we did in the cryptography fights.

The third set of cases had a similar trajectory – an early win in the courts and some reform in Congress but ultimately not enough. These were the “Alphabet Cases” – so named because we couldn’t even name our clients publicly, assigning the cases letters instead – that we brought from 2011 through 2022 to scale back a kind of governmental subpoena called National Security Letters (NSLs), which let the FBI require companies to provide metadata about their customers but gagged them from ever telling anyone what had happened.

Though an appellate court ultimately sided with the government, we did succeed in helping our clients participate in the public debate and use their own experiences as evidence to counter the government’s misleading assertions. We had increased the procedural protections for those receiving NSLs, including clearing the way to challenge them with standards that were not quite as stacked against them. And we had helped create a path for corporate transparency reports that at least gave some information to the public about how often these controversial tools were being used.

I wanted this book to bring readers with me into the actual work, the bumpy ride, the incremental progress of protecting privacy, especially in the courts, in hope that people will think about how they too can join the fight. What we worried about in the 1990s, and fought to prevent in the 2000s and 2010s, seems closer than ever: that surveillance becomes the handmaiden of authoritarianism. But even in our troubled times, I’m confident that we are not powerless and we can prevail if we are patient, smart, thoughtful and work together. The Big Idea is that privacy is not just a coat of anonymity that you throw on before doing something embarrassing – it’s a check against unbridled government power. And as it turns out, the actual work of protecting that privacy can make for a fun, exciting and surprising life.

Privacy’s Defender: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/12/the-big-idea-cindy-cohn/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59775

crooked_timber_feed

Posted by John Q

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/12/fifteen-years-after-fukushima/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55019

It’s the 15th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and any lessons from that event seem to have been forgotten by most. Political leaders of all stripes, from centre-left to far right have been keen to promote nuclear power as at least a partial solution to the problem of replacing coal and gas. The peak of enthusiasm was reached at COP 28 when Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Rishi Sunak signed a pledge to triple nuclear power generation by 2050.

To call this pledge ambitious would be an understatement. No nuclear plant has started in construction (as defined by first nuclear concrete) in Europe or North America since the disastrous Hinkley C project in 2017. And the future is not much better. The UK will presumably go ahead with the Sizewell C project, duplicating Hinkley, but that will only replace retirements of existing plants. In France, sites for six reactors have been identified, but no investment decision has been made. And in the US, even the announced restart of reactors closed as uneconomic in recent years is looking doubtful.

Actually existing nuclear power programs around the world are similarly limited. China has an established industry which starts construction around 10 new plants every year, and typically connects them 5 to 6 years later. Russia builds about one per year, mainly to replace old RMBK (Chernobyl style) plants.

Russia’s nuclear firm Rosatom also has an export business. The typical pattern is a generously financed project, building two to four reactors in a middle-income country that wants the prestige of having nuclear power. South Korea has completed one such project (Barakah in UAE, which took about 15 years) and has a contract for another with the Czech Republic. Because nuclear power is uneconomic even with subsidies, these deals are typically “one and done”. Having shown that they can generate nuclear power, few countries have been willing to strain their budgets for a second vanity project.

The great remaining hope is Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

This term is commonly used to refer to reactors small enough to be built in a factory and modular in the sense that they can be shipped to a site in the numbers required to meet the power needs of the installation. It is also used more loosely to refer to reactors generating less then 500 MW of electricity, compared to the 1000-1400 MW that have been standard in recent decades.

SMRs of the first kind don’t exist and probably never will. All the early proponents, with one exception have given up. The only surviving firm, Nuscale, had to abandon its initial plan to construct plants in the US because of cost over-runs. A contract has supposedly been signed with Romania, but the Romanian PM sounded distinctly unenthusiastic in a recent interview.

As I remember it is a fairly big sum, USD6-USD$7 billion and the business plan must also account for how the energy will be consumed. The investment will be made once a funding formula will be found. Given the very large amount of money, the complexity of such projects and the technology being in early days, I estimate we will not see the investment immediately.

For reference, given a capacity of 462 MW (6 units of 77MW), the implied unit cost is $US13-15 billion per GW, comparable to the disastrous Hinkley C project.

There are quite a few small but non-modular reactors around. Unfortunately most of these are relics from the early days of nuclear power (Gen II in the jargon). There are only two recent prototypes, one in China and one in Russia. Quite a few others have been announced, but they have no real advantage over the larger designs from which they are derived. Even if a handful get built, they are irrelevant to the future of energy.

In summary, nuclear power is a technology of the past. The only routes to a clean energy system are renewables and energy efficiency.

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/12/fifteen-years-after-fukushima/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55019

crooked_timber_feed

Posted by Hannah Forsyth

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/11/women-have-been-crazy-successful-at-building-spaces-for-themselves-in-the-economy-thing-is-that-is-often-exploited-too/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55015

I have to admit that I am not at all sure of the date of International Women’s Day. It seemed to be every day of the past week or so. Which perhaps ought to be the case every damn week.

So it seems timely to tell you about the current issue (Volume 35) of Women’s History Review, edited by me and Claire EF Wright, who based at the University of Technology Sydney. Claire was recently listed as Australia’s leading economic historian – which is especially impressive because she might also be the youngest (not to mention one of the most female). This was about citations. Just in case your mind leapt to the anti-DEI propaganda flooding the world right now.

We called the issue ‘Cheap Labour’, which describes on one level the price of women’s work, producing the gender pay gap (relatedly, I learned at work this week that even in fields where almost all workers are still women, there is still a gender pay gap in favour of men).

But we were not just wanting to repeat the well-known inequitable pay system. We wanted to use this special issue to think about women’s place in the history of capitalism. ‘Cheap labour’ refers to the kind of cheapness described by Raj Patel and Jason W Moore in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. They show that way that surges in profitability have been driven by exploiting something that is (usually but not always temporarily) crazy cheap. For the capitalist, anyway: the cost of fossil fuels, time caring for family and stolen land is borne by someone – and, ultimately, everyone.

So in the introduction to this special issue, we look at the ways that women have been remarkably successful in carving out spaces in the economy for themselves. But then, over and over, the space that they made was exploited in ways that proletarianised them, reducing their pay, conditions, capacity and time – so much of their one precious life.

Vanessa May, who is a historian at Hunter College CUNY, wrote ‘For the benefit of mothers and children:’ welfare, daycare, and cheap labor in the 1960s’. She shows that attempts to enable mothers to work were later met with American policy interventions that split the identity ‘mother’ from ‘worker’, inhibiting support for much-needed childcare for working-class women.

Eileen Boris, Hull Professor at UC Santa Barbara, wrote ‘Emma Goldman’s ‘the traffic in women’ revisited: sex work, sweatshops, and discourses of slavery’. Eileen uses a classic essay to examine relationships between race and and gender in thinking about women’s work, which she shows ‘complicates scholarly assumptions about the continuum of cheap, free, and coerced work under racial capitalism’.

Matt Bailey, who is currently head of history at Macquarie University, wrote ‘Gendered, aesthetic and emotional labour in Australian department stores across the twentieth century’ which charts the transformation of retail work from the sort of work that valued ‘appropriate and prescribed appearances, provide personalised customer service, and possess detailed product knowledge’ to the highly casualised, part-time and very cheap work that it has become.

Hannah Forsyth, whose new website you have no doubt read cover to cover (so to speak) wrote ‘Frontiers of human capital? women and the professions in the Angloworld’, which considers two surges in women’s white collar work, one in the late 19th century and the other in the late 20th. “The proletarianization and feminization of white-collar professions in recent decades”, I argue, “making professionals less autonomous and more precarious, can be explained by the ‘cheapness’ of women’s human capital investment, now appropriated by a masculinized managerial class”.

Josh Black, who was then a postdoc at the Australia Institute and/or possibly a Fellow at the Whitlam Institute (I can’t remember which one when he wrote this) and is currently a political speechwriter, wrote ‘From ‘literary air hostesses’ to ‘top bananas’: the professional identity of the woman publisher in Australia’. “Where men often controlled the decision-making processes at the apex of the industry, women’s editorial, emotional and entrepreneurial labour remained vital to the construction of its core product: the published book.”

We might note that as women worked more in paid employment, some of the care work that they were no longer able to do 24 hours a day was turned into an industry. This sounds like quite a good idea on the surface, though the industry that grew ‘drew on long-standing cultural and historical assumptions about women and ethnic minorities’, according to Freya Willis, DPhil candidate at St John’s College Oxford, who wrote ‘Caring for the community on poverty wages’: care workers’ experiences of low pay, exploitation, and precarity in Britain (1979–2010).’

Claire EF Wright wrote ‘The boss: female executives and the inertia of postfeminism’ about the growth of women in corporate leadership, by which corporations aligned ‘women’s empowerment, their assumed ‘natural’ femininity, and the needs of Australia’s corporate economy at the turn of the millennium’…funnelling them into feminised leadership portfolios and restricting them to corporate ‘housework’. Postfeminism, she argues, simultaneously enabled women to enter corporate leadership positions, but simultaneously inhibited them.

Happy International Women’s Day.

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/11/women-have-been-crazy-successful-at-building-spaces-for-themselves-in-the-economy-thing-is-that-is-often-exploited-too/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55015

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/11/damn-its-windy/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59768

We briefly had a Tornado Warning in our area, which fortunately was quickly downgraded to a Thunderstorm Warning. Not that we had to be warned about that, it was in fact happening, and it brought with it 80mph winds. It was those winds that just now took out our porch railing.

We’re fine and everything else is fine, minus the power being out, which is a thing happening all over town. If this is the worst that happened around here because of this storm, we’ll count ourselves lucky.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/11/damn-its-windy/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59768

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/09/the-long-and-short-of-it/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59746

I promised Krissy that I would not buy any new guitars in 2025, and that was a promise I mostly kept (I did buy one guitar, but it was for her). However, it is now 2026, and last month I turned in two full-length books, and I thought therefore it might be okay to treat myself. That said, I pretty much have every guitar I might ever need, in most of the the major body shapes, so if I was going to get any more of them, they needed to fill a niche that was not otherwise occupied.

And, well, guess what? I found two stringed instruments that fit the bill! What a surprise! And as a bonus, neither is technically a guitar.

Small one first: This is an Ohana O’Nino sopranissimo ukulele, “sopranissimo” being a size down from the soprano uke, which is typically understood to be the smallest ukulele that one might usually find. The O’Nino here is seventeen inches long from stem to stern, and is absolutely dinky in the hand. Nevertheless, it’s an actual musical instrument, not a toy, and if you have small and/or nimble enough fingers, plays perfectly well. It’s not going to be anyone’s primary ukulele (I have my concert-sized Fender Fullerton Jazzmaster for that), but if you’re traveling — and I often am — and want to take along a physical music instrument — which I sometimes do! — then this is very much the travel-sized uke to tote around.

Watch on YouTube

There are even smaller ukes available, but those do start being in the “is this a musical instrument for ants” category of things. I’ll stop with a sopranissimo.

Almost literally on the other end of the scale we have the Eastwood BG 64 Baritone Guitarlin. The one type of guitar I did not have in my collection was a baritone guitar (which adds an additional four frets to the guitar on the low end, allowing for a lower/heavier/twangier sound). This particular baritone is one of an esoteric variant of guitar known as a “guitarlin,” in which the guitar adds frets on the high end to be able to access notes that one would only usually find on a mandolin. So, basically, this instrument goes from baritone to mandolin over 35 frets, which is, to be clear, an absolutely ridiculous number of frets to have on a single instrument. I can already see the serious guitarists out there despairing about the intonation in the mando frets, but those people are no fun.

I was traveling when my guitarlin arrived and I haven’t yet been able to play around with it yet, but here’s a short video of the guy who helped design it fooling about with it:

Watch on YouTube

(And yes, I got the one with the tremolo, because of course I did.)

Between these two instruments my collector itch has been scratched for a bit, and I look forward to messing around with both in the upcoming months. I won’t say I won’t get any other guitars ever, but at this point it’s getting more difficult to find where the gaps are in what I have, so I do imagine my acquisitions will slow down rather a bit. Let’s hope, anyway. I’m running out of room in the house for them. Although I guess I do have a whole church, don’t I. Hmmm.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/09/the-long-and-short-of-it/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59746

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/08/there-is-no-selling-out-anymore/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59740

A couple of days ago the New York Times published an essay from writer Jordan Coley called “How Selling Out Made Me a Better Artist,” in which Coley discovers that all the less-than-amazing pay copy he’d written over the years, from marketing to puff-piece articles and everything in-between, actually made his creative and/or more serious journalism work better, not worse. The still-lingering debate of “art vs commerce” weighs heavily in the piece, as do issues of class and race (Coley is black and comes from a working class background, unlike many of his Yale University contemporaries), and how they both impact how one make’s one’s way in a creative trade.

I encourage you read to read the piece (the link above is a gift link so you can read it at your leisure). I don’t know Coley, or have read enough of his work to say anything about it one way or the other. But I certainly remember my freelance writing years (roughly from 1998 to 2010, when the novel gig finally become remunerative enough that it made sense to focus on it primarily), and my willingness not to be proud about how I was making money, because I had bills to pay and a family to support, and there was no financial support system for me to fall back on. My experience with freelancing certainly resonates with his.

In fact, if I do have any judgements to make against anyone in the “art vs commerce” debate, it’s with the sort of person who would look down on anyone who has to work for a living while also trying to write/create things of significance. One, of course, it’s an immensely privileged position to take, and one that is increasingly at odds with the reality of making a living in the writing field, or in the arts generally. It’s never been a great time to be a professional writer, ever, but these days the field is being aggressively hollowed out both from above (newspaper/magazine/Web sites laying off staff positions) and below (“AI” being used, usually poorly, for a gigs that writers used to do). Anyone who looks down their nose at someone else’s hustle to exist, can, genuinely, go fuck themselves. Short of writing hateful material, here in this capitalist hellscape, a gig is a gig.

Two, and as Coley points out in his essay, the experience of the hustle is in itself fertile ground for writing. It makes you develop a range of writing tools you can employ elsewhere, it puts you in situations that you would not have otherwise been and allows you to mine those experiences for later writing, and it makes you get out in the world and see it from the point of view of people who might not have come into your orbit and situation. That includes any day job, not just ones related to the arts. As a writer, and as a creator, nothing one ever does, professionally or personally, needs to be wasted. It’s all fuel for the creative engine.

With all that said, I think it’s important not to construct a strawman opponent, just to burn it down with self-satisfaction. Coley’s battle with “art vs commerce” was more about his own internal battle than it was against the opprobium of others. I have run across a few snobs in my time who seemed to look down at people who had to work for a living, but it’s only been a few. The vast majority of the creative folks I know are entirely comfortable with the idea that you have to pay bills, and sometimes that means doing less than 100% creatively fulfilling work in order to keep the proverbial roof over one’s head. Whether that has to do with me mostly working in genre literature, which has always been the domain of jobbing writers, is a question to be answered some other time.

The point is the internal discussion of “am I wasting my life paying bills when I should be making art” is these days as much if not more often the issue, than any external question about how one is spending one’s time. For myself, I tended to resolve this question as such: The fact of the matter is I am only really ever creative a few hours a day, three or four hours tops, and often less than that. So why not spend that creative downtime, you know, making money? Concurrent to this, the stuff that I was doing to make that money were frequently things I could bat out fast and with facility, enough so that often my train of thought was “I can’t believe how much I’m getting paid to do this.” I wasn’t cheating anyone or ever turning in bad product. It was just, you know, easy. I was delighted to make easy money! I would do it again!

Anyway: If you’re a writer or creator, never be ashamed of what else you do. It’s 2026 and this special flavor of gilded age we live in at the moment means that what qualifies as “selling out” has an extremely high bar. Making a living was very rarely “selling out” in any era. I think these days the phrase should be mostly reserved for writing things you absolutely don’t believe, for the sort of people you would in fact despise, with the result of your work is you making the world worse for everyone. Avoid doing that, please.

Short of that, get paid, have those experiences and develop new tools. All of it will be useful for the art you do care about. That’s not selling out. That’s learning, with compensation.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/08/there-is-no-selling-out-anymore/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59740

crooked_timber_feed

Posted by Chris Bertram

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/08/sunday-photoblogging-vw-reflection/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55010

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/08/sunday-photoblogging-vw-reflection/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55010

el_reg_odds_feed

Posted by Carly Page

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/08/neurons_doom/

What hath science wrought?

A clump of living human brain cells wired into a silicon chip has answered the internet's most important computing question: yes, it can run Doom.…

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/08/neurons_doom/

crooked_timber_feed

Posted by John Q

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/08/every-child-should-be-wanted/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55007

It’s a truism that every child should be wanted. While there are plenty of exceptions, the birth of an unwanted child often turns out badly for both mother and child (and father, if they are present). Sometimes, once a child is born, the fact that they were initially unwanted fades into irrelevance, and the bond between parents and child is as strong as with a planned birth. But this isn’t true on average: children born after their mother was denied an abortion (due to time limits) experience, on average, more poverty and poorer maternal bonding The extreme case is that of Ceausescu’s Romania, where abortions were banned, and the resuling unwanted children received miserable upbringings in orphanages.

The birth of an unwanted child can be an economic as well as a personal catastrophe. This is crucial to understand when we are assessing claims that “the economy” would benefit if families had more children than they currently choose.

Raising a child from birth to adulthood requires huge inputs of labour, time and money. In the context of a loving family, these parental inputs are more than offset by the joy of having children. Because this context is assumed, most estimates of the costs of raising children typically focus on the financial costs incurred by their parents. That’s been estimated at 13 per cent of a family’s disposable income on the first child and a further ten percentage points for each child after that. For median couples, that amounts to about $300,000 over 18 years for the first child. Subsequent children would be about $230,000 each.

That’s a lot of money. But if the main work of parental care is replaced by paid workers unrelated to the child the cost is stupendous – in Australia $100 000 a year for foster care and as much as $1 million a year for high-needs children. And in the case of an unwanted child raised by their parents, the same work must be carried out without pay.

On top of that, there is public expenditure on schooling and childcare, around $20 000 per school-age child per year or another $ 300 000 by the time high school is completed. On average, this a good investment for society considered purely in financial terms. The extra earnings of more educated workers are shared with society as a whole through the tax system and are sufficient to cover the costs of schooling with a surplus left over. But that surplus is tiny compared to the public and private costs of raising a child.

The policy implication here is that there is no point in trying to induce women, and their partners, to have more children than they currently want. However the economic costs of raising unwanted children are divided between parents and the states they far exceed the benefits accruing to society as a whole [1]

The only way to increase birth rates is to remove obstacles to childbearing for those who want more children than they already have. Those obstacles include infertility, the lack of a suitable partner and economic insecurity. We could probably do more on infertility (including options like surrogacy) but addressing the other big obstacles would require huge social changes. Many of these, such as a reduction in the time demands of paid work, would not be welcome to some of the advocates of higher birth rates.

fn1. Of course, once a child is born their interests count just as much as anyone else’s. But we do no harm to any of the uncountable trillions of possible children by not bringing them into existence in the first place.

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/03/08/every-child-should-be-wanted/

https://crookedtimber.org/?p=55007

scalziwhatever_feed

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/07/what-if-we-kissed-under-the-chihuly/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59735

This particular one is found at the San Antonio Public Library, and it’s a doozy. They tell me it’s disassembled every couple of years in order to clean it. I could never do that job. I would break everything and have to live in shame for the rest of my days.

In other news, today’s Pop Madness convention at the library was lovely. Martha Wells and I had a full room for our conversation, and my signing line went on for a while (thank you to everyone who stuck it out). Plus I ate some absolutely amazing empanadas. It was a good day.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/07/what-if-we-kissed-under-the-chihuly/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59735

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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/06/view-from-a-hotel-window-3-6-26-san-antonio/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59728

Inspiring view, isn’t it.

I’m here in San Antonio specifically to be part of the Pop Madness Convention at the San Antonio Public Library tomorrow, March 7. I’ll be there along with Martha Wells, Robert Jackson Bennett, John Picacio and other cool folks, being on panels and signing books and all that good stuff. If you’re in the San Antonio area tomorrow, come down and see us!

And if you’re not in the San Antonio area tomorrow, I mean, have a good Saturday anyway, I guess.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/06/view-from-a-hotel-window-3-6-26-san-antonio/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59728

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/05/the-big-idea-randee-dawn-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59724

If everyone only wrote what they knew, how many books would we be deprived of? Author Randee Dawn has some concerns about the age-old advice, and suggests writers should get out of their comfort zone in the Big Idea for her newest novel, We Interrupt This Program.

RANDEE DAWN:

There are many phrases writers long to hear: Your book is a best-seller! Your book changed my life! Your book is getting a Netflix adaptation! Your book props open my screen door!

Maybe not that last one.

But if there’s one phrase writers are a little tired of hearing is this: Write what you know.

What does that even mean? For years, I thought it was reductionist and stupid. I write speculative fiction. Spec fic is about dragons or distant planets or zombies or dragons and zombies on distant planets. I have yet to encounter any of those things. But isn’t that what imagination is for? Make stuff up!

Write what you know is a rhetorical piece of advice that sends young writers off on the wrong path, and often confuses older ones. It explains why twenty-two year olds write memoirs. They don’t know anything but their own lives!

But it can have value. My first useful encounter with understanding write what you know came when I plumbed my entertainment journalism past – including time at a soap opera magazine – to write a goofy first novel, Tune in Tomorrow (helpfully given its own discussion in The Big Idea in 2022). I knew what backstage on TV and film sets looked like. I’d spoken to thousands of actors, producers, and directors. It wasn’t so far a leap to imagine how things might be different if magical creatures were running things.

Then it came time to write the next story in the Tune-iverse. I’d used up a lot of Stuff I Knew. So what could come next to keep things interesting?

That was when I discovered that the advice isn’t stupid. It’s just not the only advice that matters. Writing what you know can – pick your metaphor – give you a frame, a recipe, or a direction to follow.

But writing what hurts gives you substance. Writing what hurts gets you into the subcutaneous zone.

With We Interrupt this Program (the next, also standalone, novel in my Tune-iverse), I tried to picture what the rest of the fae entertainment universe – run by the Seelie Court Network, of course – would look like. I imagined whole villages run by fae, populated by humans full-time, whose lives fit into neat little tropey stories. What if all the Hallmark movies were shot in the cutest, sweetest, village ever? What if there was a whole burg populated with humans who’d pissed the fae off and were being punished? What if a seaside town existed where a gray-haired older lady author solved cozy mysteries?

The latter one gave me Winnie, an older woman whose cozy mysteries about her TROPE Town neighbors were turned into movies for SCN. But Seaview Haven is in trouble when we meet Winnie, and she discovers she’ll have to write a really good story to fix matters. So she writes about a love affair with the town’s Seelie Showrunner/Mayor/Director.

But those who vet it say it isn’t good enough. It’s nice. She wrote what she knew. Then she’s told to write what’s hard.

The novel took me by surprise here. I hadn’t planned to make her write two important stories. The love story should be enough. But it was only good. It wasn’t great. Despite being supernatural, it felt mundane. Tropey.

In going deeper to find Winnie a hard story, I discovered I already had one based on events in my real life. I gave them to her. Sure, it’s about love. But it’s also about betrayal and writerly jealousy, the kind delivered with a stiletto and not a butcher knife. Frankly, I’m a little embarrassed it’s in there. It’s not an epic awfulness. I didn’t commit a crime.

Probably.

And in giving it to Winnie, the story worked for me. When she unveils her personal, painful moment, it folds into the story as if I’d planned it. We Interrupt remains slapsticky, punny, and full of lunatic moments. Hopefully, though, that’s why this moment – the hurtful story – hits the hardest.

Readers can sense when we’ve gone deep, and when we skate the surface. A writer always has to find a way to squint at their latest creation and ask if they’ve gone deep enough to make it hurt, no matter what the genre is. That’s what – if I’ve done it right – it means to stick the landing.

So let’s look at that old hoary advice once more. Yes, write what you know.

But don’t stop there.

After you figure out what you know, figure out what’s hard. What hurts. Pull out the stiletto, not the butcher knife … and get cutting.

We Interrupt This Program: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/05/the-big-idea-randee-dawn-3/

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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/05/update-re-secret-project-at-the-scalzi-compound/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59717

We have an outline! Major characters, plot lines, and various important story beats all laid out. Now to start writing it all up. Very exciting stuff.

This is worth noting because this is the first time Athena and I are doing this, but it won’t be the last, since we’ll be using this process to develop other projects soon. This is what our little family business does, after all: Think of cool stuff that we can then develop into actual projects that will hopefully become things you can see and buy. This is, hopefully, the first of many.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/05/update-re-secret-project-at-the-scalzi-compound/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59717