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Received — 28 April 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe" (28 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
28 April 2026 at 07:57


Today's links


The Haymarket Books cover for Vicky Osterweil's 'The Extended Universe.'

Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe" (permalink)

Vicky Osterweil's The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World makes the kind of long, polemical, startling and illuminating argument that defines great cultural criticism; it's the sort of book that encapsulates the reasons I read criticism in the first place:

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2525-the-extended-universe

My first brush with this kind of criticism came more than two decades ago, when I read John Kessel's now-classic "Creating the Innocent Killer," a critique of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, a book I had read and enjoyed enough to re-read several times:

https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating-the-innocent-killer

Kessel's argument is that Card used Ender's Game to smuggle in some very ugly ideas, wrapped in a story that was compelling, even exhilarating. In Ender's Game, we meet Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, a small, physically weak boy possessed of a prodigious intellect and a great deal of sensitivity and empathy. Ender is tormented by an escalating series of aggressors, whom he retaliates against with overwhelming force, first to the point of lethality and then all the way to literal genocide. And here's where Card makes his move: Ender's sensitivity and empathy and intellect tell him that he must respond this way, because he can tell that his aggressors will not back off from their intention to harm him; and because Ender is so small and weak, he has to use whatever tactic his brilliant mind can devise, and if that tactic results in the death penalty for mere bullying, well, that's the bully's fault, not Ender's. Indeed, in dying at Ender's hands, these bullies re-victimize Ender, because Ender is a gentle, smart, wise, weak person, and these inescapable murders that he is goaded into committing are a stain on his soul that he can never wash away.

Before reading "Creating the Innocent Killer," I confess I didn't really understand what criticism was for. Like many people, I conflated "criticism" with "reviews," thinking of critical works as a species of inconveniently difficult-to-digest essays that might help me figure out which books to read and which movies to see.

Kessel's magnificent essay changed all that, and not in spite of the fact that Kessel had pointed out some very important problems with a book that I loved, but because of that fact. In helping me understand the ugliness hidden within something whose beauty and virtues I saw very clearly, Kessel taught me more about myself – about where my aesthetics and my values overlapped, and where they diverged. It was literally life-changing.

Like Kessel, Osterweil's 'Extended Universe' deals with media that I have a great deal of affection for – the products of the Walt Disney Company. Though I'm primarily interested in theme parks – I love a big, ambitious built environment of any description and Disney pursues these with a seriousness that few others can touch – the Disney films (and the films of the studios Disney purchased, like Marvel and Lucasfilm) are obviously intimately bound up in those theme park designs.

Osterweil has her own ambivalent affection for these movies. Like so many of us, she's been raised on them, and they've shaped how she sees the world and its stories. But – like me – Osterweil is deeply suspicious of capitalism, American imperialism, and the notion of "intellectual property," and she uses reviews of a dozen Disney films to make the case that Walt Disney and the studio he founded with his brother are standards-bearers for these odious forces, and not just in the overt ways that might immediately spring to mind, but also in subtle ways that can be teased out of a close reading of the films.

In so doing, Osterweil also makes a sharp and well-argued case that intellectual property, colonialism and racial oppression are all facets of the same drive, the drive of people who fancy themselves born to rule to dominate others, which requires that those others also be dehumanized and their work denigrated. When Walt Disney insisted that his be the only name associated with "his" movies, he was playing out the same logic that underpinned his virulent opposition to labor unions and his participation in American imperialism in Latin America.

As with Kessel, Osterweil's argument is full of surprises and illuminations that are especially vivid for those of us who have great affection for these works. As her chapter on Black Panther shows, this contradiction need not go unresolved. There is plenty of scope for fans to seize the reins of the narrative (and as her chapter on the reactionary backlash to the later Star Wars movies shows, it's not just the forces of progress and anti-racism who can pull off this move).

Like the very best criticism, Osterweil's book is more than a way to deepen your understanding of the material she dissects – it's a way to deepen your understanding of the world that produced it, and to deepen your understanding of yourself.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Frank Zappa’s anti-censorship letter https://www.flickr.com/photos/mudshark/117551768/in/set-72057594090059726/

#15yrsago Chemistry kit with no chemicals https://web.archive.org/web/20110427212354/http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/04/chemistry-set-boasts-no-chemicals.html

#15yrsago Russian corruption: crooked officials steal multi-billion-dollar company, $230M tax refund, then murder campaigning lawyer https://web.archive.org/web/20110426045152/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/20/russia_s_crime_of_the_century?

#15yrsago Golden-age short-change cons https://web.archive.org/web/20110429014539/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2011/04/26/tricks-of-short-change-artists/

#10yrsago Campaigners search Londoners’ phones to help them understand the Snoopers Charter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szN7DlmMLYg

#10yrsago Mitsubishi’s dieselgate: cheating since 1991 https://web.archive.org/web/20160427145038/https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mitsubishi-cheated-fuel-economy-tests-since-1991/#ftag=CAD590a51e

#10yrsago Bellwether: Connie Willis’s classic, hilarious novel about the science of trendiness https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/26/bellwether-connie-williss-classic-hilarious-novel-about-the-science-of-trendiness/

#5yrsago The Big U https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/26/moolah-boolah/#poison-ivies

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 25 April 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (25 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
25 April 2026 at 13:17


Today's links


The U Chicago Press cover for Ada Palmer's 'Inventing the Renaissance.'

Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (permalink)

Ada Palmer may just be the most bewilderingly talented person I know: a genius sf writer, incredible librettist and singer, wildly innovative educator, and a leading historian of the Renaissance, and last year, she published her magnum opus, Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning book about so much more than history:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135916.html

All of my friends seem to be writing their magnum opuses these days! When (modern) historian Rick Perlstein and I did an event last year for my Enshittification tour, he told me he'd just finished his 1,000 page (ish? I may be misremembering slightly) history of the American conservative movement. And I recently had dinner with China Mieville, who told me he'd just turned in the manuscript for a novel he'd been trying to figure out how to write all his life.

I can't wait to read these books! And I couldn't wait to read Inventing the Renaissance, and I would have been much quicker off the mark but for the exigencies of book tours and books due and so on – but I've been reading it for the past two months or so, and I think I've pitched it about a hundred times to strangers and friends as I savored it, because it's just that good.

Inventing the Renaissance isn't a work of history, it's a work of "historiography" – the study of how histories get written and rewritten. Palmer's point here isn't to make us merely understand the Renaissance – she wants us to understand how the idea of a Renaissance, a rebirth out of a "dark age" into a "golden age" – has been used, abused, created and demolished, for centuries and centuries, including during the centuries when the Renaissance was actually underway.

Palmer teaches Renaissance history at the University of Chicago, where she is legendary for a unique annual pedagogical exercise in which she leads her students through a weeks-long live-action role-playing game that re-enacts the election of the Medicis' Pope. Every student is given a detailed biography of their character's position, goals, proclivities and history, and for weeks, the students scheme, ally, betray and assassinate each other. At the climax, the students take over the university's faux-Gothic cathedral, dressed in Renaissance drag (Palmer has a Google alert for theater companies that are selling off their costumes, and her tiny office at the university overflows with racks of cardinals' robes and other period garb), and they invest a Pope:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

This exercise is nothing short of genius, and the students who experience it often report that it is life-changing. That's because the final candidates are never quite the same, nor are the cardinals who cast votes for the winner. And yet, there are certain bedrocks that never shift, including the fact that Italy is always invaded by some of the factions involved in the election, though which cities burn also changes.

The point of this exercise is to expose the students to the power and limits of both "great historical forces" and the human agency that every one of us has within the envelope defined by those forces. Palmer wants her students to get a bone-deep understanding that while every moment has great forces bearing down on it, that the people of each moment have an enormous amount of leeway to channel the floodwaters that history will unleash. From the servant who bears a message from one great power to another, up to those great powers themselves, each person guides the course of history, even if they can't halt some of its outcomes.

Though Palmer unpacks this exercise and its meaning and results in the final part of her magnum opus, this message about forces and people is really the key to her historiography. She develops these themes in the most charming, accessible manner imaginable, weaving her own journey into history with her accounts of how different eras consciously created and deployed the idea of "the Renaissance" and how these ideas were bolstered, undermined, or ultimately demolished by new evidence. You could not ask for a better account of why there is not, and can never be, a single, canonical "history" of an era or a moment. There will always be multiple histories, overlapping each other, warring with one another, supplanting each other, or being revived as "lost" histories that reveal a truth that "they" have buried.

This is such an ambitious book, and the ambition pays off in so many ways. Take the book's structure: there's a long middle section in which Palmer describes how more than a dozen figures from the Renaissance experienced their era, with many overlapping events and timelines. Palmer's sensitive, beautifully researched and written accounts of the lives of these figures – highborn and lowly, sinister and virtuous – highlights the contradictions of this centuries-long "moment" we call "the Renaissance" and shows us how those contradictions can't ever be resolved, only acknowledged and understood.

This is Palmer the novelist, blending seamlessly with Palmer the historian. Palmer is a close literary – and personal – ally of the equally brilliant sf/fantasy writer Jo Walton, whose work has mined classical and Renaissance history to great effect since she and Palmer struck up their friendship. First, there were Walton's "Philosopher Kings" books, a three-book long thought experiment in which every person of every era who ever dreamed of living in Plato's Republic is brought through time and space to the doomed volcanic island that will someday give rise to the story of Atlantis, to try out Plato's ideal society for real:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/13/jo-waltons-the-just-city/

Then there was Lent, Walton's story of the fanatical reformer Savonarola, who is forced to re-live his life over and over, with breaks in hell where he is tormented by his failure:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190516170659/https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-jo-walton-lent-20190516-story.html

And this June, she'll bring out Everybody's Perfect, a novel that uses Palmer's trick of telling a story from many viewpoint characters, each of whom perceives the events so differently that their versions can't really be reconciled, except by understanding that there is no one history and there cannot be one history. There are only the histories, ever changing. The omnipotent third person narrator is a lie. I don't know if Palmer got this idea from Walton, or if Walton was inspired by Palmer, but it is a wonderful living example of how intellectual and creative movements (like those that are attributed to the Renaissance) feed one another.

One of Palmer's areas of specialty is free speech and censorship. Along with Adrian Johns, we co-taught a grad seminar called "Censorship, Information Control, and Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet" that connected Ada's work to the current battles over online speech:

https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/research/censorship-information-control-and-information-revolutions-from-printing-press-to-internet

Palmer wants us to understand that the majority of censorship is self-censorship – that the Inquisition could only intervene in a tiny minority of cases of prohibited thought and word, and they had to rely on key people – printers, for example – anticipating the Inquisitors' tastes and limiting their speech without an Inquisitorial edict (if this seems relevant to the Trump administration's "war on woke," then you're clearly paying attention):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

Those correspondences between the deep historical record and our current moment make Inventing the Renaissance extremely important and timely – a book hundreds of years in the making, and bang up to date.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Gloating NYT editorial about the dotcom crash https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/23/opinion/editorial-observer-after-the-fall-the-new-economy-goes-retro.html

#20yrsago RIAA sues family that doesn’t own a PC https://www.techshout.com/riaa-sues-local-family-without-computer-for-illegal-music-file-sharing/

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright troll loses domain https://web.archive.org/web/20110425035158/http://www.domainnamenews.com/legal-issues/righthavencom-invalid-whois/9232

#15yrsago Steampunk Venetian mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/160226.html

#5yrsago John Deere's dismal infosec https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

#5yrsago Foxconn's Wisconsin death-rattle https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#monorail

#5yrsago Laundering torturers' reputations with copyfraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

#1yrago Sarah Wynn-Williams's 'Careless People' https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Received — 21 April 2026 ⏭

Pluralistic: Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed" (21 Apr 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow
21 April 2026 at 15:18


Today's links


The Harpercollins cover for Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's 'Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.'

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed" (permalink)

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed seeks to describe the ideology that gave rise to Elon Musk, the social forces that gave rise to that ideology, and the terrible future that ideology seeks to bring about:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/muskism-quinn-slobodianben-tarnoff?variant=43838135402530

The book's starting point is that "Muskism" isn't merely the things Musk says, believes and does. It's the ideology that coalesces around him, from the people in his wake and the people he follows. Just as Henry Ford neither defined "Fordism" nor precisely practiced it, "Muskism" is centered on Elon Musk, but it's not Elon Musk's creation.

So what is Muskism? To answer this question, Slobodian and Tarnoff enumerate the factors and influences that produced Musk himself. There's apartheid, with its "rational" system of technocratic authoritarianism, which blended together a life of luxury and plenty (for white settlers), brutal surveillance and state violence (for the Black majority) and fascist control over speech (for everyone), combined with a meat-grinder draft that saw young men of Musk's age being called up to suppress liberation uprisings.

Peak apartheid coincided with peak personal computing, the moment where PCs (and then, modems) were getting cheaper and faster, propagating like mushrooms, offering a young Musk access to a broad world outside of the fascist bubble of South Africa, inspiring global ambitions in Musk.

Closer to home, there's Musk's family: his grandfather, a grandiose and vicious white supremacist who moved to South Africa from Canada because of his love for apartheid and racial hierarchy. There's Musk's father, a violent and abusive fool.

Muskism is also a new variant on techno-libertarianism. Traditional techno-libertarianism seeks to dismantle the state – or better yet, exit from the state, in the manner of an Ayn Rand hero. Techno-libertarianism is intimately bound up with settler colonialism, ever on the hunt for an "empty land" (terra nullius) that can be settled without committing the original sin of expropriation, the gravest offense in a religion organized around the total sanctity of private property:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

Muskism doesn't seek to exit the state, it seeks to colonize and control it. Long before DOGE, Musk was playing the organs of the state to his own tune, securing massive contracts and subsidies for his solar and rocketry businesses, relying on the massive, deep-pocketed government to keep his businesses afloat.

Obviously (DOGE!), Muskism also seeks to dismantle the state, but only the parts of it that can be transferred to Musk's own private hands. Muskism is about big government…for Musk, but not for you. It embodies that important conservative value summarized in Wilhoit's Law:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

This is Musk through and through – a man who demands the right to call innocent strangers "pedo guy" without legal consequence; and also wields the power of the state to shutter businesses that boycott his platform because of its shitty practices:

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/courtside/elon-musk-sues-advertisers-who-boycott-x-under-anti-trust-laws/

Musk grew up on science fiction novels and weaves stfnal tropes through his offerings (for example, calling his chatbot "Grok"). There's no shortage of reactionary politics in science fiction, but Musk doesn't confine his sf-inspired cosmology to reactionary literature. He's famously very fond of the Wachowskis' "Matrix" movies, and leans heavily into the metaphor of the Matrix in explaining his interest in wiring people directly into computers, in characterizing opposing political beliefs as "mind viruses," and in calling his political enemies "NPCs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

But Musk's relationship to this metaphor differs in a subtle and important way from the right's "Red Pill" rhetoric. Musk doesn't want to break out of the Matrix – he wants to control the Matrix. He wants to decide which opinions you're allowed to see and discuss (because "most people have weak firewalls for bad ideas"), he wants to beam ideas directly into your neural link, and he wants to abolish any form of workplace democracy, conquering the world with South African baasskap (boss-ism):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baasskap

Throughout this slim volume, Slobodian and Tarnoff tease these strains of thought out of Musk's deeds and utterances, and in the systems that he has built or colonized through acquisition. The authors are offering more than a psychoanalysis, though – they're surfacing the material basis for Muskism, the benefits it delivers to its adherents, and the victories it has racked up.

They reveal the method in Musk's chaotic and bullying management style, and recount the times Musk has successfully shattered sclerotic processes to make real breakthroughs, especially in aerospace. You'd be hard pressed to read these passages without feeling some grudging admiration.

Muskism gets stuff done…sometimes. At a cost. A high cost. Tarnoff and Slobodian count that cost, identify who pays it, and conjure up the world in which those costs continue to mount for all of us.

It's a chilling vision, a Torment Nexus dystopia run by someone who thinks cyberpunk was a suggestion, not a warning.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago US, EU want to delay copyright treaty to help blind people for 3-5 years https://web.archive.org/web/20110423170607/http://keionline.org/node/1114

#15yrsago Is sugar a poison? https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

#15yrsago More watch-part motorcycles https://ummaisoumenos.blogspot.com/2008/11/miniaturas-fantsticasbikesfeitas-de.html

#15yrsago Seeds: comic-book memoir of father’s cancer is moving, sweet https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/19/seeds-comic-book-memoir-of-fathers-cancer-is-moving-sweet/

#10yrsago Something New: frank, comedic, romantic memoir of a wedding in comic form https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/19/something-new-frank-comedic-romantic-memoir-of-a-wedding-in-comic-form/

#10yrsago Ben and Jerry arrested at Democracy Spring demonstration in DC https://web.archive.org/web/20160419173913/https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/co-founders-of-ben-and-jerrys-arrested-at-us-capitol/ar-BBrW5tb?li=BBnb7Kz

#10yrsago Competing construction companies stage a bulldozer fight in a busy street https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrtnIImGipg

#10yrsago Chicago Police Accountability Task Force Report: racism, corruption, and a “broken system” https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Final_Report_4_13_16-1.pdf

#5yrsago Facebook's tonsils https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/19/tonsilitis/#mod-traum

#1yrago Against transparency https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/19/gotcha/#known-to-the-state-of-california-to-cause-cancer

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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