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Here, Have a Nice Little Sunset
2026-Mar-19, Thursday 00:11![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Spring will be here soon! I can tell by the sun!
(No, seriously, I can)
— JS
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Habermas, democratic discourse, and class
2026-Mar-18, Wednesday 10:34crooked_timber_feedJürgen Habermas has died, at the age of 96, and traditional and social media are full of obituaries and memories. For outsiders, it is maybe hard to gauge the omnipresence of his name in West Germany,* but his influence on democratic theory more broadly speaking is well-known. When I entered university, people would mention it in the same in way in which Kant or Hegel were mentioned (full disclosure: I saw him a few times in person, but with no chance to have a conversation beyond small talk). I remember – as a young philosophy student, a clueless outsider of the system of academic philosophy – perceiving a kind of tension between what his texts said, namely that only the “forceless force of the better argument” should prevail, and the kind of cult status that many younger people ascribed to him.
It so happened that during my morning jog today, I listened to a political-book-podcast** that juxtaposted a review one of Habermas’ last books – on the structural change of public discourse as a result of social media – with a review of a children’s book on classism. This triggered a whole chain of thoughts for me, about what I admired in Habermas’ approach to deliberative democracy, and where I had always felt a certain discomfort.
In a nutshell, Habermas’ account of democracy is all about what people say – how they communicate, not how they behave. It has long been a criticism, raised by feminist thinkers and others, that he has too rationalist an account of democracy, which shuts out emotions and fails to take into account types of political utterances beyond rational arguments.*** But what is also missing (and is missing in a lot of democratic theory), is what people do. It’s all deliberation, discourse, not behavior and action (which you might distinguish, roughly, as being routinized and following social conventions vs. being planned and directed at goals). This creates an open flank: how to deal with the all-too-frequent gap between what people say and what they do? It’s not enough to have a system in which everyone gets a chance to speak, what democracies ultimately need is a system in which citizens behave and act in ways that are in line with democratic values. And behavior and action are influenced by a whole set of forces beyond rational arguments – emotions, yes, but also material interests (the price of eggs!), and deeper ideological landscapes.
I’ve always been struck by the discrepancy between the talking of a certain academic circles, and the doing of others. What I mean is the way in which academically trained city dwellers, who know everything about today’s societal problems, can talk and read and write endlessly about them, but without ever attempting to do anything (maybe because their academic or artistic jobs are so greedy). And then, there are people I encounter in non-fancy, often rural areas, who have never heard of Habermas or the term “deliberation” (in fact, sometimes I wouldn’t dare to discuss with them about their voting behavior and would try to hide the fact that I’m a philosophy professor because that would come across as so pretentious). But they do so much – they run local associations, they support neighbors, they help newcomers integrate (including newcomers who are refugees). This is about behavior on the ground, rooted in human needs and everday sociability, not highflying discourse.
Yes, I know, these are clichés, and yes, there are exceptions. But I think there is also something to the cliché.
Now, I tend to think that most people are in principle willing to act cooperatively and in line with the basic legal structures of democratic society, because they do accept the system as legitimate (so that the use of force by the state can remain an exceptional means for exceptional cases). But if the system is seen less and less as fair, and as “not working” for one’s own interests, this kind of general acceptance can become fragile. Many people will then complain in discourse, to be sure, but if this does not seem sufficient, they often vote with their feet and change their behavior – by turning to antidemocratic parties, by emigrating, by no longer seeing laws and regulations as bindings, etc. (and I’m fully aware that part of the problem is that while some of the interests in question are legitimate, not all are, which makes the whole situation so complicated…).
Which brings me to the topic of class. Habermas wrote many of his books on deliberative democracy at a time when West Germany understood itself as a “levelled middelclass society” (a notion introduced in 1953 by Schelsky, but which remained part of public discourse for much longer): a society in which class no longer matters because everyone can participate in the consumption of certain material and cultural products that post-WWII economic growth created. It was also a time – especially in the 1970s – with a massive expansion of public education, creating many opportunities for social mobility. And, not least thanks to a pretty strong system of unions and co-determination, there was also some social mobility for those not attending university, with a conveyer belt for talented people without university education into positions of power. I guess that in the zeitgeist of these years, the idea that all citizens can participate in public discourse must have seemed less strange than in seems today.
Today, class obviously matters, in at least two ways. One is the sheer material one. In many countries, average wages have not risen for years. The welfare state and the state as provider of public infrastructure are seen as being in decline, which is often true, and probably has a lot to do with lack of tax money because the rich and transnational coprorations do not contribute enough. If you have a decent income, you can compensate for that privately. You can pay for that extra health insurance package, and the private tutoring for your kids, and the taxi that you take when the bus is, again, failing to show up. If you struggle to make ends meet, you don’t have those options.
In other words, in the time in which Habermas’ most important works appeared, the whole political economy in the background of “public discourse” was in a shape that made the idea of everyone having a chance to participate not completely utopian. But in today’s societies shaped more and more by diverging class experiences, how can this still happen?
The second way in which class matters, which is maybe even more difficult to address, is the ability to participate in public discourse. One can integrate women and non-white people into “discourse,” and we certainly should do more to really make this the case (the whole discussion about “epistemic injustice” is very much about this). But what about those whose education, family background, and job conditions simply do not prepare them for talking in the kind of way that official “public discourse” today requires? When, for example, have you seen a newspaper op-ed written by a non-college educated person? When did you see a podium in which theoretically and practically trained people would have exchanged perspectives?
I guess there are two directions that deliberative democracy can take in response (apart from doing whatever is possible to reduce the socio-economic injustices in its background). One is to turn from purely deliberative towards participatory models, with real involvement of real people. The “sluice” model Habermas had suggested (where the best arguments get filtered out in public discourse, then make it into parliament, get refined even more and end up being embodied in laws) is too vulnerable not only to classist exclusion but also to lobbyism by the super-rich, who prevent laws that would serve society at large but cost them money.
The second is to expand the concept of what counts as democratic participation, from discourse to behaviors – and that, I think, requires a honest conversation about economic conditions and specifically how people are treated at work. If people can train what it means to collaborate, find compromises, and look for fair solutions in their everyday working life, they can bring these skills to the political sphere as well. (Did she do all this spiel about Habermas to end up at her hobbyhorse of workplace democracy, you might think – maybe, but then it’s something I’ve been chewing on for a long time…).
In other words, democracy-as-discourse, important as this idea remains, has preconditions in the wider socio-economic system of society that Habermas did, arguably, not sufficiently address.**** It’s not that he would be against these arguments, I guess – it’s just that they are not at the core of his theoretical building. To think democracy today, and to understand what’s hollowing it out, we need to look beyond the level of discourse.
* I’m not sure about his impact on the eastern regions of the former DDR – it would be interesting to hear from readers about this!
** Andruck in DLF (in German) – highly recommended.
*** Here is – again in German, apologies, AI can help – on of the sharpest but also thoughtful criticisms that I have ever come across.
**** And I’m not claiming that these are the only blind spots; one might, for example, think about the (economic and political) relations of Europe to other parts of the world…
The Big Idea: J. M. Sidorova
2026-Mar-17, Tuesday 19:20scalziwhatever_feed
How is it that fairy tales persist? In the Big Idea for The Witch of Prague, author J.M. Sidorova suggests that it might be because they are malleable and can be made to fit more times and places than just their own. To what use has the author put them here? Read on.
J. M. SIDOROVA:
When I think about a Big Idea of a novel, what comes to my mind first is more of a premise, an inceptive sprout from which the novel had grown. In this regard, The Witch of Prague grew out of a common fairy-tale archetype: an old hag gives a magic gift/poison apple to a young girl; think Sleeping beauty, forests, and castles. Except in this case, the archetype was invoked by true stories my Mom had told me about her young adulthood.
Thus, forests became the Cold War era Eastern European bureaucracies, castles became government departments, and the relationship between the hag and the young girl became complicated, as I, in the act of reimagining the fairy tale, subverted the heck out of it.
That said, this novel took a long time to become what it is now; it evolved in fits and starts while a sizeable chunk of my life was going by and the world was changing, and as a result it became a repository of symbolic representations for the ideas that are not new but have been important for me to unpack and highlight.
There is the Hunt of a Unicorn that, historically, fronts a host of contradictory ideas about power asymmetries between women and men; and then there is a Stag Hunt, which, as an example of a game of trust (or, more broadly, public goods game theory, like it’s better known cousin, the prisoner’s dilemma), stands for a balance of trust/cooperation vs. predation/competition in a given society.
There is also the Orwellian idea that authoritarian regimes not just restrict speech and writing, but, far more insidiously, they warp the very meaning, usage, and purpose of words, of the language itself. My main character, Alica, who’s grown up with mild dyslexia, is primed against such shenanigans because she’s always thought words were treacherous and out to get her, and one of her ways of fighting back was to invent an imaginary friend, a live typewriter with spider legs and word-swatting pincers.
So many different symbols, in other words, that at some point even I, their compulsive collector, felt that it was too much. And my awesome editors, Rachel Sobel and Huw Evans of Homeward Books, were of the same opinion: wait, is the Stag the same as the Unicorn or not? Author, explain thyself! So I went on an editing rampage, and I think I fixed things, and now all symbols are there to serve the story.
But the big — or at any rate the permeating — idea that I would like to foreground since we are talking speculative fiction here, is what constitutes magic in this book. I think if one creates an alternative, fully magic-enabled reality for one’s tales, one can give a reader an escape, a full-on suspension of disbelief and all that, and that is fine. But if one instead injects bits of fantastical or magical into our viscerally recognizable reality, one gives a yearning, gives flickering moments of disassociation, of belief, “what if it were real?” It’s like magic comes to you, instead of you taking a vacation to go see magic.
And of course, so many works of speculative fiction do one approach or the other or anything in between. I personally, prefer the latter end of the spectrum over the former. So, what I was trying to do in The Witch of Prague was to have seemingly small, tenuous even amounts of magic within a historically accurate reality, and I was interested to work with this premise: what if magic was generated from scratch under certain unique constellations of circumstances and human lived experiences and emotional states, for instance, extreme trauma or enduring hope or devotion?
It wouldn’t be by anyone’s design, and it would be hard to predict what or who would become the magic’s “carrier” once it was produced. It would be a sort of undomesticated, involuntary magic for which no one really knows the rules or capabilities, though one could make assumptions or jump to conclusions according to one’s beliefs or character, in trying to harness it to one’s own benefit.
If we agree that as humanity, we have always been “producing” magic in our stories, histories, and self-narratives (“it was a miracle that I survived!”) as a matter of belief or metaphor, to help us parse reality or even just to communicate it — then my premise in this novel simply takes this fact and implements it. Literally and physically.
The Witch of Prague: Asterism|Homeward Books
Chapter 5: The Horse and His Australian
2026-Mar-17, Tuesday 17:57andrew_rilstone_feedBut how widespread are these civilisation-threatening theories? To find out, Lewis turns his attention to a second text book, which he refers to as Orbilius. Is Orbilius tainted with the same ideological impurities as King and Ketley?
Oddly enough, he is. Like King and Ketley, he invents a terrible piece of writing, this time on the subject of horses, and tries to show what is so terrible about it. And like King and Ketley, his main complaint (according to Lewis) is that it says things which aren’t factually true. From this, asserts Lewis, his students will infer that all figurative, anthropomorphic writing—indeed any expression of affection towards animals—is unreasonable. This will colour, and indeed blight, the rest of their lives.
Orbilius is actually one EG Biaginni, and the book is imaginatively entitled The Reading and Writing of English. Biaginni is another New Critic and the book comes with an introduction by FR Leavis.
Here is the passage (again, Lewis does not cite it in full):
The horse is a noble animal, and not the least of man’s dumb friends. Without such a willing servant as the horse, civilisation would not have reached its present stage. The early pioneers of this country can bear witness to what has been said. When they first came here, the prospect was a heart-breaking one indeed. There were no roads, in many places the country was rough and well timbered, developmental material was hard to procure, and above all bush devils, tractors, motor-cars and other mechanical inventions had not yet come to the help of man. In these circumstances the horse was invaluable, and without him Australia would certainly not have become the country it is… [The Reading and Writing of English, page 5]
It goes on to narrate a preposterous story about a horse which smelled burning in a bone-dry farm in summer, broke out of its paddock, trotted to the verandah, and whinnied until the farmer awoke.
Lewis’s complaint is familiar. Yes, certainly, this passage is sentimental and anthropomorphic: but so are many good pieces of writing about animals. Unless this is pointed out, the reader will assume that a rejection of this piece of writing amounts to a rejection of the whole idea of horses.
He contents himself with explaining that horses are not, secundum litteram, interested in colonial expansion. This piece of information is really all that his pupils get from him. Why the composition before them is bad, when others that lie open to the same charge are good, they do not hear…[Abolition of Man, page 6]
But this is disingenuous: the claim that “this is all his pupils get from him” downright dishonest. Lewis is cherry-picking quotes to such an extent that I found myself wondering if he had read the book before opening fire?
It is technically true that Biaginni doesn’t put this silly passage alongside a piece of great literature. What he does do is put it alongside a mildly amusing piece of writing: a modest write-up of a horse-riding holiday in the New Forest. The writer and his friend have hired a horse to pull a caravan and the beast won’t go at more than three miles an hour. They decide it must be sick, but when they unharness it, it gallops off in the direction of its owner.
“By Jove” said my friend “That horse knows more about men than we know about horses”. I could not but agree and have since felt that had that horse the gift of speech his observations on his temporary masters would be exceedingly entertaining. [page 5]
Biaginni says that this piece came from his own diary: and he admits that he wrote the other one himself, making it as bad as he possibly could, to see if students could spot the difference. His comparison of the two texts runs to seven or eight pages, and records what his students said about them:
Passage A (The caravan holiday)
Pros
Amusing
Written from life
Says something specific about horses
Natural and unaffected style
Cons
Offhand, colloquial style
Uses slang
Makes punctuation errors
Starts sentences with And
Passage B (“willing servants of colonists”)
Pros
Serious subject, dignified style
Grammatically correct and well punctuated
Patriotic and interested in history
Cons
Stimulates stock feelings
Says nothing specific about horses
Self-conscious, superior tone
Biaginni says that it is more important for a passage to be engaging, funny and truthful than for it to be technically correct: complaints about punctuation are fault-finding rather than criticism, a bad habit picked up in school. He says that the first passage is the record of a real event and “does by implication tell us something true about the nature of the horse” and that the writer “for good or ill is himself and describes horses as they are”. On the other hand, the story of the horse that consciously woke up its owner during a fire is obviously “twaddle” and has nothing to do with actual equine behaviour.
He doesn’t directly introduce the concept of emotive and referential meaning that is so central to the Control of Language: but he talks at some length about the difference between what is said and how it is said. He asks the reader to think about the difference between saying “My father has died” (factual) “My family has suffered a bereavement” (factual, with an appeal for sympathy) and “My father has kicked the bucket” (factual, with an implication of callousness). His complaint about the bad passage is that terms like “noble animal” and “dumb friends” produce feelings without actually saying anything.
(The writer) knows from experience, perhaps, as a skilful advertisement writer does, that these were expressions which would evoke a feeling of approval in uncritical people; they have now been doing this for two generations or more [page 12]
He says that this sort of writing treats the reader like a typewriter—hitting a particular key to get a particular response. This is the same criticism which King and Ketley levelled at the travel agent. The target is not emotion, but stock emotional responses.
And Lewis is right. Biaginni does mention in passing that the joke passage is factually inaccurate. But Lewis’s claim—that this is all he has to say—is simply untrue. What Biaginni actually writes is:
The horse you will notice, is spoken of as if he had been a conscious and willing agent in the development of a new country. Is this not completely ridiculous? The normal horse, like the normal man, is mostly concerned with a decently comfortable life and has not a passion for well-doing. Since he is referred to as a dumb animal we must not suppose that he could speak, but if he could talk to himself, it seems far more likely that he would say “I have two greenhorns driving me today so I will take things easy” than he would say “here is a country which wants developing so I will cooperate willingly with my master in an attempt to open it up to civilisation.” [page 10]
Anthropomorphism, then, is a literary device. It can be used well or badly. In the first passage it is apt; the second passage it is not. CS Lewis once complained (not entirely seriously) that he couldn’t see how TS Eliot could possibly think that any evening had ever resembled “a patient etherised upon a table”. He was not, I think, debunking the idea of surgery, or anaesthetic, or evening.
In a footnote, Lewis concedes that Biaginni, unlike King and Ketley, does put the bad piece of animal-writing alongside a supposedly good piece. The fact that it is a footnote makes me suspicious: had someone who heard the original lectures pointed out that Lewis was taking Biaginni out of context? But Lewis doubles down: he says that Biaginni thinks that the diary entry is better than the “colonial expansion” essay because it is “factually accurate” and for no other reason—which is not the case.
In his second chapter, Biaginni introduces a third piece of horse-writing. I don’t know if it counts as great literature, but the Rev Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborn is sufficiently well-regarded that Penguin Classics have kept it in print down to the present day. He points to an amusing anecdote about a farmer who owned only one horse and one hen: the two animals appeared to form a friendship.
The passage contains what seem to be well-observed details:
The fowl would approach the quadruped with notes of complacency, rubbing herself gently against his legs: while the horse would look down with satisfaction, and move with the greatest caution and circumspection, lest he should trample on his diminutive companion. [quoted by Biaginni, page 18-19]
Rev. White says that “an apparent regard seemed to develop between these two sequestered individuals”. Biaginni notes that although the animals are certainly individuals and arguably sequestered, “sequestered individual” has a witty, ironic tinge in this context: we’d normally use the term to describe nuns, or possibly hospital patients. He also points out that Rev. White is conscious of using simile—the hen and the horse have an apparent regard for each other and “seem to console the vacant hours of each other”.
Biaginni’s criteria for the legitimate use of anthropomorphic language is in fact perfectly clear. It needs to be concrete; it needs to be apt; it needs to be specific; it needs to imagine a human motivation for something which real animals actually do; and it needs to be aware that it is writing as if animals were human or imagining what they would say if they could talk.
We noted in our last chapter that the Tay Bridge Disaster is a very bad poem—on the assumption that McGonogal intended it to be heroic and tragic. If he meant it to be funny, it’s a very good poem indeed. By the same argument it would be very silly to tell a story about an intelligent horse who rescues its owner from a fire—if what you were trying to write was a serious, realistic essay about horses. If you were writing a fairy tale, it would be a perfectly sensible thing to do. No-one complains that cats don’t really request footwear or that swallows can’t really communicate with statues. So is Lewis’s point simply that The Story of the Australian Convict and his Loyal Horse” could have been a perfectly good starting point for Walt Disney; or that Aesop could have made something worthwhile of How the Clever Horse Saved the Foolish Farmer? Is his point that Biaginni’s’ readers might conceivably run away with the impression that far-fetched animal tales are always illegitimate, when in fact they are only illegitimate in certain contexts?
Lewis, in fact, thought there were some quite proscriptive rules about how animals could be treated in literature. It was okay for rabbits to wear tam o’shanters and hedgehogs to do laundry; and it was okay to envisage imaginary worlds where mice carried swords: what you were not allowed to do was have real-world animals in the wrong relationships to each other. When a schoolgirl sent him a fable about woodland animals she had written, he protested that “real small animals would not be friends with an owl, nor would it know more astronomy than they”. Which sounds a lot like a complaint that a story about some field mice asking the wise old owl why the sun had suddenly gone dark was not true secundum litteram.
Many people feel close to domestic animals, and they often pretend that they have more human characteristics than they literally do. Could Lewis be saying that “animals and humans are friends” is a rock-bottom fact about the universe, in the same way that it is irreducibly true that waterfalls are sublime? So “horses were the willing servants of the first colonists” and “By Jove, these beasts seem to know a thing or two!” are two expressions of a single truth? Is the claim that literature always and only expresses fundamental intuitions: “Sex is nice”, “It’s horrid growing old”, “I love Mummy”, “Isn’t God brilliant!”? Talking about those intuitions is outside the critic’s remit. The only difference—the only difference that critics qua critics should be talking about—is the purely formal one.
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts
And
How you died was really rotten
But you will never be forgotten
are three expressions of the same intuition: that it is awfully sad when someone dies. The business of the critic is to demonstrate that Shelly and Shakespeare handle metre and diction better than the pay-per-word newspaper obituary. To talk about anything but meter and diction would be to deny the basic truth that we feel sad when we suffer a bereavement. (Or indeed, when someone we like kicks the bucket.)
I think we can agree that this position would be absurd.
But that leaves me with the uncomfortable alternative thought that Lewis was congenitally unable to be fair to any text tainted with the stench of Leavisism. He disagrees with the principle of “close reading” so vehemently that he starts to see things which just aren’t there.
One final point.
Seventy Five Prose Pieces by Robert C Rathburn is precisely what it sounds like: yet another collection of texts for students to compare and contrast. Rathburn’s first section is called Discrimination. His first excerpt is Thompson’s commentary on the terrible cruise liner advert. His second is Biaginni’s commentary on the two horse-pieces.
Anyone who has read Abolition of Man will find it disconcerting to discover these two texts side by side. My first thought was that CS Lewis must have known the anthology but not the sources; but Rathburn was not published until 1960 and I can find no evidence of an earlier edition. I suppose it is possible that Rathburn knew Lewis and wanted to denounce him as an anti-Leavis heretic, but it would be a strange procedure: to critique Lewis, as it were, at arm’s length. I think it has to be written off as a coincidence.
Rathburn sums up the two passages as follows:
Biaginni and Thompson stress the desirability of having something to say and saying it simply and unaffectedly. [page 1]
Which rather reminds one of CS Lewis’s own advice to aspiring writers:
The way for a person to develop a style is to know exactly what he wants to say, and to be sure he is saying exactly that.
Well, quite.
This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essays should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section (which runs to six chapters) has already been published in full on my Patreon page, and the second section is being serialised there at present.
Please consider joining the Patreon if you would like to read them, and to support the writer.
Why this blog update is late
2026-Mar-16, Monday 15:57charlie_stross_diary_feed... The TLDR is: the cataract in my one mostly working eye (the other has about 50% retinal occlusion) is steadily getting worse, and I'm scheduled for surgery on March 27th.
NB: no need to lecture me about cataract surgery, I've already had it on the other eye. Same team, same hospital, same prognosis. I know exactly what to expect. Nor are your best wishes welcome: replying to them gets tiring after the fiftieth time (see: poor eyesight, above).
But worsening eyesight means that reading (and writing!) is fatiguing, so I gradually do less and less of it in each session.
Consequently I've been spending my screen time, not on the blog, but on a revision pass over my next novel, and on writing the follow-up.
(No, I can't give you any details: let's just say they're space operas, not Laundry Files, and I'll talk about them when my agent gives me the go-ahead. Book 1 is written, subject to editing, and Book 2 is about 10-15% written. And neither of them is Ghost Engine, the white whale I've been fruitlessly hunting for the past decade, although the viable chunks of GE may get recycled into Book 2.)
After my eye surgery I'll be going to Iridescence, the 2026 British Eastercon, the following weekend in Birmingham. I have some program items: I'll update this blog entry when I have a final schedule.
After Iridescence, I'll be heading to Satellite 9 in Glasgow (May 22nd to 24th). And after that I'll be attending Metropol Con in Berlin, July 2nd to 5th.
I'm not attending any US SF conventions for the forseeable future (being deported to a concentration camp in El Salvador is not on my bucket list), but I will try to attend the 2027 World Science Fiction convention in Montreal, assuming the Paedopotus Rex hasn't gone on a Godzilla-style rampage north of the border by then, and that intercontinental air travel is still possible. (See, my inability to resist that kind of cheap shot is exactly why I'm not visiting the US these days: ICE want to see your social media history going back 5 years, and I gather they're using some horrible LLM tool from Palantir to vet travellers.)
We now return you to your regular scheduled kvetching about the state of world affairs until my eyeballs are firing on all cylinders again. (Say, did you know that 30% of the world's fertilizer is shipped through the Straits of Hormuz? And about 20% of the sulfur that ends up as feedstock in sulfuric acid for industrial processes comes from sour Gulf crude, so ditto? Not to mention the helium that is required to keep MRI machines and TSMC's semiconductor fab lines running, never mind your grandkids' party balloons? Happy days ...)
The Daleks' Master Plan
2026-Mar-15, Sunday 19:56andrew_rilstone_feedYou 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.
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.
[2] The Doctor knows about Christmas and positively wants to celebrate it, but has never heard of New Year or cricket. Discuss.
View From a Hotel Window, 3/14/26: Tucson, AZ
2026-Mar-15, Sunday 00:34scalziwhatever_feed
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
Is the US Military Trying to Bring Back Jesus?
2026-Mar-13, Friday 20:05skepchick_feedThis 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 …
Imperia: A European Culture Story, Part 3 (and last)
2026-Mar-14, Saturday 01:39crooked_timber_feedThird 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,
[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.
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. 
[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.
What do coders do after AI?
2026-Mar-13, Friday 00:00anil_dash_feedFor 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.
The Neo solves Apple’s embarrassment
2026-Mar-08, Sunday 00:00anil_dash_feedLast 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.
The Big Idea: Cindy Cohn
2026-Mar-12, Thursday 13:51scalziwhatever_feed
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
Fifteen years after Fukushima
2026-Mar-12, Thursday 02:42crooked_timber_feedIt’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.
Women have been crazy successful at building spaces for themselves in the economy. Thing is, that is
2026-Mar-11, Wednesday 22:04crooked_timber_feedI 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.
Damn, It’s Windy
2026-Mar-11, Wednesday 14:34scalziwhatever_feed
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
The Long and Short of It
2026-Mar-09, Monday 14:48scalziwhatever_feed
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.
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:
(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
There Is No Selling Out Anymore
2026-Mar-08, Sunday 17:42scalziwhatever_feed
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
Bundle of human neurons hooked to silicon learns to stumble through Doom
2026-Mar-08, Sunday 09:30el_reg_odds_feedWhat 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.…