Bits and bobs (2026.09)
Do Walk by Libby DeLana. I’ll never fault a book that extols the virtues of walking, but it’s the first time i wanted to put one through the shredder. DeLana is an executive creative director, whatever that means, so she felt the urge to trademark her practice as ‘ThisMorningWalk’. (Of course there’s a podcast.) I guess ‘daily walk’ sounded too… pedestrian? At best, Do Walk reads like a performative take on a wishy-washy understanding of meditation. At worst, it sounds like yet another personal branding exercise. Here’s an hour of my life i’d rather have spent walking.
I just got my first synthmail. It comes from iLands, “a shared network where humans and user-generated autonomous AI agents create, earn, socialize, refuse”… and beg for money in a whole new kind of spam. We’re right on track for my “great AI metastasis of 2028”.
If you like pencils, this is porn. If you like cameras, this is porn. I happen to like both. It’s been a hot month.
Sangam & Friends by Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain & Eric Harland. Since they first met a few weeks after 9/11, saxophonist Charles Lloyd and tabla master Zakir Hussain crossed paths regularly, but released only two albums together, once in 2006 with drummer Eric Harland and then in 2022 with guitarist Julian Lage. In 2009, Lloyd, Hussain and Harland had recorded with an all-star band of Indian musicians, but the tapes lay dormant until Hussain’s death in 2024. Lloyd collaborated with producer and spouse Dorothy Darr to cut them alongside unissued live and studio recordings. The resulting Sangam & Friends is a masterclass in blending Eastern and Western traditions to create something wholly original. It’s also the first record i’ve ever bought that wasn’t packaged in one of those god-awful paper sleeves and didn’t need a wash before its first play — good job, Blue Note!
I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern. I’m not the target audience, and you probably aren’t either, but our parents might be. Like Walt Mossberg and David Pogue before her, Stern is neither a hard-hitting investigative reporter nor a nerdy technical expert, but a friendly and knowledgeable consumer advocate. Her approach is non-committal at times — and that might be the biggest knock against I Am Not a Robot — but there’s something deeply comforting in her self-deprecating humour and rambling asides. It’s like your local news anchor had written a book about AI, and who over the age of 55 wouldn’t want to read that?
Esterbrook 40-slot canvas zippered pen case. I finally — finally! — moved my fountain pens from their original boxes to a zippered case. I considered getting one from Galen Leather Co, but i’m not a fan of ‘crazy horse’ leather and their shipping rates have been getting insane. Esterbrook’s 40-slot pen case fits perfectly with my homemade canvas notebook covers and is pretty practical to boot. The elastic loops can accommodate short and thin pens as well as long and thick ones, the faux suede material is plush, and the soft divider ensures that pens won’t rub against each other. You just have to be mindful of which pens you put in the top and bottom rows, as they might get scratched by the zipper. There’s only one problem: i have more than forty fountain pens!
A Harry Potter fanfic used as a recruiting pipeline. Psychological workshops that former participants describe as coercive. A program for breeding smarter children, promoted by an AI institute. A sex worker from Idaho who became one of the subculture’s most-read writers and now runs an AI-doom propaganda residency with Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend. A splinter sect that fled to tugboats and whose members have been linked to six deaths. And a blogger who wanted to abolish democracy, found the ear of several billionaire patrons, and watched his ideas come to fruition in the vice president’s office. I am aware, that if you are not lurking on the internet as much as I do, of how utterly insane that paragraph sounds. However, every bit of it is heavily documented by numerous sources.
I’d never thought of doomerism as a sex cult, but it makes so much sense.