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7 posts across all issues
Issue #809 · Sep 11, 2026
Ed West reviews James Marriott's The New Dark Ages. The book argues that television started a decline in reading. Smartphones sped it up. A post-literate public drifts back toward the habits of oral cultures, with repetitive, conservative culture and cruder politics.
Issue #809 · Sep 11, 2026
Sylvain Conchon and Jean-Christophe Filliâtre's French textbook on programming in OCaml is now free in English. Urmila Nair translated it, with funding from the OCaml Software Foundation. It is out under CC BY-SA 4.0, as PDF and EPUB with code. Commenters say it moves too fast for true beginners. Its own introduction aims it at an algorithms course.
Issue #807 · Aug 28, 2026
Science fiction author T. R. Napper says writing has no fixed method except one rule: read a lot, and widely. More of the aspiring writers in his workshops now say they're too busy to read. Napper blames phone time, which wears down the sustained attention that reading and writing both need.
Issue #807 · Aug 28, 2026
Ray Newman argues that we already live in J.G. Ballard's or William Gibson's future. His evidence is a year of news clippings about robot dogs, AI soul singers, narco subs and face-recognition glasses. The strange part is how little anyone notices, since people absorb each oddity within days.
Issue #807 · Aug 28, 2026
Rory McMeekin's short story is narrated by a programmer whose gambling-addicted school friend, Aaron, builds a prediction market run by AI bots. The bots bet on every detail of Aaron's life and leak the site to the public. After a 10K race, a stranger shoots Aaron dead. Someone had bet thousands that he would die during the race.
Issue #806 · Aug 21, 2026
Mark Dominus walks through the seven books he keeps within reach of his desk. They are a 4th-edition Roget's Thesaurus, Thomas Browne's prose, the Decameron, From Frege to Gödel, Orbis Pictus, an NIV Bible and the Belles Heures. For each he explains why he keeps it close and what it has fed into his writing.
Issue #806 · Aug 21, 2026
Ben Balter wrote his 576-page book in Markdown in a Git repo and built it like software. The setup has about 30 custom prose validators, 20 LLM audit lenses and 2,204 test cases. Fourteen parallel CI jobs turn one source into five store-ready formats.