an eye asquint at weather roam through the ruins frontispiece in shards anew
cling to my vestments forks in the road are not forks my hairshirt newly shredded
you look up and smile blinded by the ecliptic — apocalyptic — you shall never attain this the world barren bears nothing
What I’m Reading:
Climate fiction is one reason ‘dystopian realism’ is increasingly ‘near-future’ rather than set in some inscrutable distant time. We’re in an era where we don’t have to construct thought experiments to see what a dark future might look like, because these days it feels the end of world as we know it is looming over us. In fact, it can make writing a near-future dystopian a tricky endeavor: Predictions might come true before a book is published.
— Yume Kitasei / “‘It’s Okay But It’s Also Really Not.’ When Dystopian Fiction is No Longer a Thought Experiment” / Lithub
The A plane by way of A. Johnson, brought down by ritual and lack of victuals. Deadeth on arrival: thorny ocotillos and twenty minute count downs. Tomorrow I’ll learn about writing what you don’t know—what throws you. Where have you been all these haggard years? My tears in time are tin stripes running down the length of your inebriate life. You left me unsure of myself and strident and missing the glyphs of my youth. You perish-wither— periscopes down—the Monitor and Merrimack your bedmates at the bottom of the bay. Bring back the ironclads by way of Iron Beer, or at least pass me a Materva because it is tomacal.
What I’m Reading:
… every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.
With the events in Cuba and the Philippines, the United States increasingly became a “culture of war” with a sense of global purpose, prone to jingoistic eruptions. The rhetoric of war became that of patriotism.
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
In my day, we knew how to drown plausibly, to renounce the body’s seven claims to buoyancy.
— Ben Lerner / “The Lichtenberg Figures”
The Splendid War created this, becoming the template for every American “small war” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was a “war of choice” that started in a wave of idealism and disintegrated into brutality. America’s dependence on overwhelming force would form the assumption that, as in Cuba, war should be quick and relatively bloodless. Instead, outgunned opponents became an insurgency: the U.S. response throughout the coming decades would proceed with such near-identical ruthlessness as to seem scripted. Though usually treated as separate conflicts, the wars in Cuba and the Philippines should be seen as a continuum—one that begins with two similar Cuban and Filipino poet-martyrs who shape their nations’ identities and ends with the United States entering as a savior, only to become a scourge . . . As we’d already done to Native Americans, in order to save them, we had to kill them.
Not until the conflict in Cuba and the Philippines did America’s love of war become so bold that one can track the transformation.
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
no more money for the endless throat of money. no more syllogisms that permission endless suffering. no more.
— Sam Sax / “Ode to Those Who Block Tunnels and Bridges”
The culture of war became indelible: a new Orwellian world in which, according to Paul Fussell, war becomes “peacekeeping” and the acceptance of any act “in the name of freedom” a citizen’s duty. “Those who challenged the authenticity of American altruism were by definition evil-doers and mischief makers,” observed the historian Archibald Cary Coolidge. “So fully were Americans in the thrall of the moral propriety of their own motives as to be unable to recognize the havoc their actions often wrought on lives of others.”
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
Today my mum said she doesn’t remember arriving at my house with a dishcloth, doesn’t remember me telling her my kitten stayed overnight at the vet, that I’d be coming over to help with bills. What she remembers is now. She knows her memory is a ship leaving port without permission . . .
— Kelli Russell Agodon / “Dementia Is a New Way to Be Buddhist”
It’s easy for moral certitude and blindness to be one. At its heart lay a darker certainty: those who needed our help were lesser beings—because they were not American. It lay in the order of things that they accept American guidance; dissenters were not only misguided but corrupt, and thus enemies. The myth plays out often—in my life, from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The leaders we elect always act surprised when things go awry.
Since one classical definition of mental illness is the tendency to repeat obviously self-destructive behavior, one wonders how deeply our cherished myths make us willfully blind and mad.
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
What I’m Listening To:
Everything we love is gonna start to die It’s only a matter of time Till all we love has gone and died It’s only a matter of time Till all we love has died At least we tried At least we tried
The longing for home—as darkness descends & sickness and death lurk at the peripheries.
The new ice—the medium-density amorphous ice.
The geophony of home—how the wind howls at 212 feet elevation.
It’s good to be home—wherever that is.
What I’m Reading:
JR: Could you tell us your biggest sources of inspiration?
LK: The bitterness. I am very sad if I think of the status of the world now. This is my deepest inspiration. This could be also an inspiration for the next generation or generations in literature. Inspiration to give something for the next generation, somehow to survive this time because these are very, very dark times and we need much more power in us to survive this time than before.
— László Krasznahorkai, to Jenny Rydén / “First reactions. Telephone interview, October 2025” / nobelprize.org
One thing that is so striking about the modern age is that we’ve lost an ethical vocabulary in engaging with leaders. I mean, fundamentally, what is Donald Trump? He is shameless. It would be very difficult for Aristotle or Cicero or a Renaissance theorist of politics, or indeed the writers of the American constitution, to imagine this degree of shamelessness, this degree of contempt for constitutions, contempt for minorities, contempt for the truth, the open performance of immorality. And very difficult also to imagine that we would have entered a world where we, at some level, are so tempted to just enjoy the spectacle, and have just lost the ability to be shocked that every day he does three or four things which in the old world would have shocked us to our core.
— Rory Stewart / “How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation” / The Guardian
O get me off this train of consanguinity — the congruency of my talents wane. This bass line leaves me ill. This tune is a torrent of deterrents. This road craggy, rent, and ruined.
Can you make purchase and navigate? And what of the fog and interminable rain?
Signs read: Say NO to rat poison.
Is nothing safe?
Ascetic and anesthetized he moves through life in quandaries and sobs, through the ether in quadrants and smogs. He arrives at the media res by ditching the prefatory rags. He travels the cystic creeks with abettors of abattoir asininity, and dires foul the weather with fever speakers.
He delayed his belay because the descent was vitreous not vertiginous — this may sound incongruous, even spurious, but he’d like to throttle himself with a chapped leather belt in an autofictional immolation — an authorial affectation not worth the pissbottle it’s printed on —
and on and on and on —
this infinite obloquy goes on.
What I’m Reading:
in the story i was taught alongside my first language it takes god six days to make the terrible world and on seventh day he rested and on the eighth we blocked traffic.
— Sam Sax / “Ode to Those Who Block Tunnels and Bridges”
You told me once you believed in God. The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I’d like to see him for a minute if I could. What would you say to him? Well, I think I’d just tell him. I’d say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there’s just one thing I’d like to know. And he’ll say: What’s that? And then I’m goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together. Suttree smiled. What do you think he’ll say? The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it, he said. I dont believe there is a answer.
I’m more pessimistic. I don’t think it’ll take 20 years. The Philippines gets an average of 20 typhoons every year. We’re watching islands sink, and yet the west is debating whether climate change even exists.
I think the death of journalism is around the corner within six months to a year. The internet is getting worse by the day, and there are absolutely no guardrails put in place, even as news organisations are being forced to pay for that, and our content is exploited. It is a very predatory online world, and that has translated to the world we live in.
— Maria Ressa / “How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation” / The Guardian
i set myself on fire atop pottery shards an incongruent sight on the public square what corner have you backed into, huh i abraded my burns with salt before the machine steamrolled me into the macadam im afraid i made up my mind
fatalism
is best shaken then stirred when i burn people listen disregard the penalty kick this ship is listing in dire straits the mother verandah crumbles we are all low hanging fruit and the petrol’s tangy mouthfeel electrifies my soul these fanciful superimpositions please use my useful molecules after invoking eminent domain
What I’m Reading:
There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamp’s globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.
Most Germans in 1933, for example, were not psychopaths. So why did they vote for Hitler?
Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
It will be very interesting to see what happens when Trump finally dies, and what will happen to this movement, how much of it is truly beholden to his unique celebrity status, which he has over any of the other members of this movement. If you remove that, what happens to the movement? Does somebody else manage to come in and replace him and be the new focal point of the cult of personality? I don’t know that any of them have the juice for that.
— Mike Duncan, to Nikki McCann Ramirez / “Are We Witnessing the Fall of the American Empire?” / Rolling Stone
As I fell from the sky, I smelled fish. The fish was in my mouth. My eyes were fish eyes, bulging, bugged out.
I fell like this for years, in the fishy air.
— Edward Salem / “My Aerodynamics”
After that Hathney had been silently pensive sometime, he askt the Monk whether the Spaniards also were admitted into Heaven, and he answering that the Gates of Heaven were open to all that were Good and Godly, the Cacic replied without further consideration, that he would rather go to Hell then Heaven, for fear he should cohabit in the same Mansion with so Sanguinary and Bloody a Nation. And thus God and the Holy Catholick Faith are Praised and Reverenced by the Practices of the Spaniards in America.
— Bartolomé de las Casa / A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies
Large language models (LLMs) don’t have intentions or understanding, but they can scheme and lie. For example, tests have shown that various popular models would engage in blackmail, corporate espionage, and even actions that could lead to death in highly contrived scenarios. In a separate test, a model that was told it had control over a robot attempted to disable its ethics module, make copies of itself, alter logs, act dumb, break out of the lab, and hack a car’s computer. Researchers suggest part of the cause might be the fact that LLMs are trained on so many computer-betrayal stories — think Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey — and that papers describing LLM scheming could actually make the problem worse.
— Flora Graham / “AI models that lie, cheat and plot murder” / Nature Briefing
None of us asked to be where we are … What we control is our actions once fate puts us there.
— Hugh Howey / Wool
The fact that the Nazi and Stalinist regimes were founded on cruel fantasies and shameless lies did not make them historically exceptional, nor did it preordain them to collapse. Nazism and Stalinism were two of the strongest networks humans ever created . . . In the twenty-first century, some new totalitarian regime may well succeed where Hitler and Stalin failed, creating an all-powerful network that could prevent future generations from even attempting to expose its lies and fictions. We should not assume that delusional networks are doomed to failure. If we want to prevent their triumph, we will have to do the hard work ourselves.
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
What I’m Listening To:
I broke my finger Playing middle C I keep tryna get you Just to notice me Betrayed
thee istsfor manity reader 