Dorothy Westerinen celebrated the Fourth of July the way she usually does, by barbecuing and hanging out around the pool with her wife and close friends. But her relationship to America’s founding, particularly this year’s semiquincentennial, is far from usual. Through her late mother, Julia Jefferson Westerinen, Dorothy is a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, the third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman of African extraction who bore him children.

“My heritage was very much on my mind,” the 68-year-old Long Island, New York, resident said. “Although I didn’t share those thoughts with anybody, my friends all know my story.”

Many others do too. In 1998, scientific analysis of a DNA sample from Dorothy’s maternal uncle confirmed that her third great-grandfather, Eston, was Jefferson’s youngest child by Hemings.

“It’s common knowledge now among anybody,” said Art Westerinen, 64, the family historian and one of Dorothy’s three brothers. Case in point: In a viral video from 2024, an inebriated reality-television personality referred to herself grandiloquently as “Thomas Jefferson’s concubine.”

“There are still deniers, unfortunately,” Art said. “But, generally, it’s accepted as: ‘This is the truth.’”

Eston Hemings was born on May 21, 1808, and raised in slavery at Monticello, the Jefferson plantation in Virginia. Emancipated at 21, he moved to Ohio, then Wisconsin, where he and his half-Black, half-Jewish wife, Julia (née Isaacs), changed their last name to Jefferson and began passing for white. Eston’s decision led to estrangement from his brother Madison, the only one of the four surviving Jefferson-Hemings offspring to remain in the Black community.

“Eston cut off ties with his whole family,” Dorothy said. “I would cut my arm off first. But, you know, he — I mean, we — benefited from it, certainly.”

Unyoked from racial prejudices and prohibitions, Eston’s progeny prospered. Four generations later, the Westerinen children were growing up on Staten Island as mainstream white kids, free of stigma beyond maybe their surname of Finnish origin, which was considered exotic in a sea of Italian, Irish and Jewish last names.

But Dorothy and her youngest brother Marshall Westerinen, now 62, had another truth to be spoken — about their sexual identities. To the best of their knowledge, they are the only openly lesbian and gay direct descendants of Jefferson and Hemings. As they celebrate America’s 250th birthday, they are also contemplating the relevance of their orientation to the nation’s conception of itself.

I first met the Westerinen family in 1999 as a graduate student in New York City, writing my thesis on the rise of genetic genealogy. In the wake of their DNA test results, the family was all over the media. Somehow, I found their phone number, and Julia, the matriarch, graciously agreed to my request for an interview. Dorothy and Marshall, then 40 and 34, picked me up at the ferry landing on Staten Island and drove me to the family home where their mother and Shay Banks-Young, one of their African American cousins descended from Madison with whom they had just reunited, welcomed me. 

We all sat around the dining table for a lengthy discussion on racial identity. But my gaydar was also going off big-time around Dorothy and Marshall, news they found amusing when I told them recently. I did not broach the topic despite thinking it might be a meaningful angle to explore. There was no way to gauge the reaction in the room. It was a different time. While LGBTQ+ voices were far from silent, especially in a city like New York, the idea that their perspectives could inform broader conversations was not as widespread as it has become.

---

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

---

Twenty-seven years later, ahead of the semiquincentennial, I reconnected with Dorothy and Marshall, who happily confirmed they are, and have for decades been, out and proud. “The two worlds have rarely met, in terms of being gay and also being a direct descendant,” Marshall said. “Not only because of the respective communities, but because of me and how I don’t really talk about it unless it comes up.”

The siblings do not regard themselves as activists for the LGBTQ+ or any other community, just people raised to be “accepting of everybody,” Dorothy said.

“Queer folks, and multiracial people are not going away, and rainbow families,” Marshall said. “Whether we’re quiet about it, or whether we’re activists, or whether we’re doing our own small part of keeping people aware or just being who we are, [it] is a political statement.”

What impact could Dorothy and Marshall’s existence as queer direct descendants of the Declaration’s author have on attitudes towards LGBTQ+ Americans in the present and future?

“You don’t know what your siblings are,” Art said. “Maybe they’re hiding something that they’re ashamed to admit because of who you are, what you put forth in the world.”

Nine percent of the U.S population openly identifies as LGBTQ, double the percentage fourteen years ago. Yet a Gallup poll released last month finds support among U.S. adults for LGBTQ+ issues in decline. The 62% of respondents who said they view same-sex relations as moral is the lowest since 2016. This backslide is most pronounced among Republicans, according to Gallup senior editor Jeffrey M. Jones: “Since 2022, the high point for Republicans, the share who say such relations are morally acceptable has fallen 21 points to 35%, compared with an eight-point decline among independents to 64% and no meaningful change among Democrats (now at 81%).”

Such polling did not exist at the time of the American Revolution, but historical records show queerness did. Many believe Jefferson’s frenemy Alexander Hamilton had obvious romantic inclinations toward John Laurens, a military strategist for George Washington. Whether Jefferson had any knowledge or opinion of Hamilton’s fondness for Laurens is unknown. The only tangible clue to Jefferson’s stance on queer sexuality in general is Bill 64, a piece of legislation he introduced to the Virginia Assembly in 1779 containing a proposal to reduce the punishment for sodomy from death to castration for men and nose-cutting for women. 

This was a liberal proposition for the era. It did not pass. But, while drafting it, had Jefferson considered the possibility that the flesh of his own flesh could one day suffer such mutilation?

“I’m not sure what they would have thought as far as having gay descendants,” Dorothy said of her distant grandparents. “Thomas Jefferson was a man of the world. I’m sure he knew gay people. Sally Hemings was enslaved, so I would think she’d be more empathetic because of being an outcast and an outsider.”

“There’s no way to know for sure, no way to even investigate,” Marshall added. “The categories didn’t exist as they do today.”

Five generations later, Dorothy said she has never concealed her orientation at Jefferson-Hemings family gatherings, often bringing her wife of over 35 years. “My partner came along with us to a lot of these events and stuff, and, you know, they gave her just as warm a hug as they did me,” she said, noting that some of her relatives are quite religious. “It didn’t seem to be an issue. But, again, I don’t know what people said behind closed doors.”

In recent decades, scholars and community leaders have turned up the volume on homophobia in the African American church, addressing debates such as opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage. Some historians have also begun to examine the period of the American Revolution through an LGBTQ+ lens. 

Within the Jefferson-heritage establishment, race remains an issue. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello and runs its public educational programs, gradually came around to acknowledging the full subjecthood of Sally Hemings, to the chagrin of some visitors. “Indeed it is the Sally Hemmings [sic] show up there,” wrote one disgruntled tourist on the official Monticello Facebook page, also resenting the mention of queerness. “My guide even talked about LGBTQ rights on the last tour…Ridiculous.” 

A struggle also remains for Jefferson-Hemings descendants to gain the right to be buried in the Jefferson graveyard. The Monticello Association, comprised of Jefferson’s descendants from his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, controls the graveyard and voted overwhelmingly to ban Hemings descendants, as detailed in a personal essay by Salon contributor Lucian K. Truscott IV, a cousin of the Westerinens on the Jefferson side. The irony is that Sally was also Martha’s half-sister — the product of John Wayles’ relations with an enslaved woman — making her biological kin to the Monticello Association members, too.  

With the visibility of Dorothy, Marshall and future openly queer descendants, will a time come when LGBTQ+ perspectives are formally recognized at Monticello? The siblings are undecided.

“Whatever attention this brings,” Dorothy said, “I cannot be anything but myself.”

“Any family tree is going to be filled with colors,” Marshall added. “If you look hard enough.”

The post A founding father’s queer legacy appeared first on Salon.com.

UPDATE: German authorities said Sunday they shot and killed the suspect in the deadly attack near Berlin’s Christopher Street Day Pride celebration after locating him nearly 24 hours after the assault. Officials said the suspect confronted officers before they opened fire. Authorities now say the attack killed one person and injured 29 others, and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt described it as an Islamist terrorist attack.

---

German authorities on Sunday went on a manhunt for the suspect in a deadly vehicle attack near Berlin’s annual Christopher Street Day Pride celebration after a van plowed into a crowd, killing one person and injuring at least 29 others before the driver fled.

Police had issued a wanted notice for the 21-year-old suspect, identified under German privacy rules as Abdul B., warning the public not to approach him because he may be armed and dangerous. Authorities said the suspect is known to police and has ties to Islamist circles in Berlin but also stressed investigators have not yet determined a motive or whether he acted alone.

The attack unfolded around 10 p.m. Saturday in Berlin’s Tiergarten park near the iconic Brandenburg Gate, where hundreds of thousands of people had gathered throughout the day for Christopher Street Day, one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations. Police said a white van drove into the crowd before crashing into a tree. Investigators later said one or more people may have fled the vehicle after it came to a stop, and some victims also suffered stab wounds, raising questions about whether additional suspects were involved.

A woman was killed in the attack. Berlin’s fire service said three people suffered life-threatening injuries, eight others were seriously hurt and five sustained minor injuries. Organizers canceled the remainder of the Pride festivities and evening concert as emergency responders flooded the area and authorities secured the scene.

“What an abhorrent act in Berlin,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote on social media, calling the violence “an attack on our society.”

Was für eine abscheuliche Tat in Berlin. Hunderttausende Menschen aus aller Welt feierten friedlich beim Christopher Street Day. Sie wollten, dass wir gut und tolerant miteinander umgehen.
Das ist ein Angriff auf unsere Gesellschaft.

— Bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz (@bundeskanzler) July 26, 2026

He continued on: “We are open and freedom-loving—and we will preserve and defend that. The act will be investigated and pursued with the utmost severity. My thoughts are with the victims and their families. I wish the injured a swift recovery and thank all emergency responders.”

Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner similarly described the attack as an assault on the city’s values of freedom and tolerance, while other European leaders and LGBTQ+ organizations expressed solidarity with victims and the Berlin community.

---

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

---

The attack comes as Germany has heightened security around large public gatherings following a series of deadly vehicle-ramming incidents in recent years. More than 2,200 police officers had been deployed for this year’s Pride celebrations before Saturday night’s attack.

German authorities said investigators are continuing to examine the attack, including the suspect’s motives and whether he received any assistance, though officials said they have found no indication that others were directly involved.

Locals have already set up makeshift memorials at the scene. “Liebe Siegt,” (“Love Wins”) declares a prominent sign, echoing similar sentiments at LGBTQ+ memorials everywhere, now from the Stonewall Inn to Brandenburg Gate.

---

Updated to reflect the status of the investigation: July 26, 2026, 1:48 p.m.

The post UPDATED: Berlin Pride attack leaves 1 dead, dozens injured, suspect dead appeared first on Salon.com.

When progressive political commentator Keith Edwards recently turned the New York City Pride March into a two-hour livestream of queer joy, he put a name on what he was doing. The GLAAD-backed broadcast was built, in part, for people watching alone in states where Pride can feel dangerous. “One of the most radical things you can do in a moment of extreme fear and a moment of authoritarianism,” he told The Advocate, “is to experience joy and happiness.”

Weeks earlier, RuPaul had posted that the only response to fascism was to party and dance, and was sharply criticized for it. Two moments, weeks apart, but the same uneasy question beneath both of them: Is joy resistance? Or is it what we call avoidance when we want avoidance to sound principled?

In a country where LGBTQ+ people are watching their rights stripped away in statehouses, drag performers turned into political targets and trans people used as campaign-season fuel, “go dance” can sound almost heartless. But queer people have had this argument before.

In a 2013 Washington Blade essay about coming out during the AIDS crisis, Dave Purdy remembered older gay men telling him it was wrong for his generation to dance, party or enjoy themselves while their gay brothers were sick and dying. He and his friends rejected that view. For them, the dance floor was not an affront. It was survival, self-love and something close to church.

During the AIDS crisis, gay nightclubs were not merely places to escape. They were informal mutual-aid networks, grief rooms and information exchanges. They were places where bodies marked by fear could breathe, move, touch and feel alive again. When the state was slow to act, conservative preachers’ sermons were cruel and much of the country looked away, these spaces helped people endure.

I know because, in the early 1990s, I ran one of those clubs on Long Island.

The club was loud, crowded and alive in the way only a queer room can be when the world outside has made everyone inside feel disposable. People arrived carrying the private weight of family rejection, HIV panic, religious shame, police harassment and the everyday terror of being seen too clearly in the wrong place.

Then the bass would start. The lights would move. Someone would laugh loudly near the bar. A drag queen would cut through the room like a flare. For a few hours, fear did not vanish. It changed shape. It became bearable.

To outsiders, nightlife often looks like escape. Sometimes it is. There are worse things than needing to escape a world trying to crush you. But queer clubs were never only about forgetting. They were places where people remembered each other: who was sick, who had disappeared, who had a new doctor, who was pretending to be fine.

I saw that attention at work every night. Power did not only sit in the office or behind the bar. It lived in the queens who could read a face from across the room, the regulars who noticed an absence and the staff who could feel the room change before anyone else did. That was vigilance. Not paranoia. Not panic. A communal intelligence.

The dance floor was not where the crisis disappeared. It was where the living found one another inside it. That is the part America often forgets. Survival is not only the refusal to die. It is the insistence on remaining human while threatened.

Bars hosted fundraisers. Drag performers passed hats. DJs, bartenders, door people, lovers, ex-lovers, activists and friends formed networks that were not always formal but were often lifesaving. In Orlando, the Parliament House Motor Inn, a gay resort and nightclub, became a common site for AIDS fundraisers in the 1980s and 1990s. This detail matters because it collapses the false divide between pleasure and care. A place outsiders might dismiss as decadent was also where money was raised, grief was gathered and a frightened community turned nightlife into a lifeline. Chosen family was not a slogan. It was logistics.

Research has linked synchronized movement with social bonding and increased pain thresholds, while studies of dance and movement therapy have found benefits for depression, anxiety and interpersonal functioning. What outsiders now call resilience was, for us, simply the nightly practice of keeping one another going. 

That is why the word “joy” can be misleading if we make it too soft. Joy in queer nightlife was and is sweaty, sexual, improvised, defiant, sometimes reckless, sometimes holy. It did not erase grief. It gave grief somewhere to go.

---

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

---

None of this means dancing is enough. A party will not stop authoritarianism. A drag show will not repeal anti-LGBTQ legislation. A nightclub cannot replace courts, organizing, voting, or protest. Joy without vigilance can become anesthesia. Joy without community can become branding. Joy without politics can become escape for those privileged enough to leave others behind.

But the answer is not to dismiss joy. It is to understand what kind of joy has power — a lesson America needs now.

The country is confronting a crisis. We are politically exhausted, increasingly isolated, distrustful of institutions and surrounded by reasons to be afraid. More people are discovering that they can follow every headline, understand every threat and still have nowhere to put the fear.

Queer nightlife offered one answer, imperfect but profound: Put the fear in a room. Let it breathe alongside other people’s fear. Let the body remember that it is more than a battleground.

The joy created in queer nightlife was collective. It required a room. It required witnesses. It required people watching the door, watching each other and noticing when the mood shifted before trouble arrived. Pleasure and protection had to coexist.

That was the real survival infrastructure; not joy by itself, but joy attached to community and vigilance.

To survive a hostile world, people need pleasure and community, yes — but they also need history. They need to know what they are up against and what others survived before them. They need to care for each other while they watch the door. They need to build systems that do not depend on the benevolence of institutions that may never come.

The pushback against “party and dance” landed because it sounded like the whole plan. It cannot be the whole plan. But it can be part of one.

We did not dance through the AIDS crisis because things were fine. We danced because everything was not fine, because the body needed proof it still belonged to the living. We danced because grief without community becomes isolation, and isolation is where despair does its best work.

Dancing didn’t solve the crisis, but it helped us survive long enough to keep fighting.

This is not nostalgia. It is instruction.

The post When joy was resistance on the dance floor appeared first on Salon.com.

Today's links

• Lee Lai's "Cannon": A beautiful, subtle, long-lingering tale of duty, sex, and working for a shitty restaurant boss.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Ebay paying to run newspaper classifieds; Chuck Tingle v Sad Puppies; FBI v TOR; Daycare v Goldman Sachs; Scammers re-used covid nose-swabs; "The Adventures of Mary Darling."
• Upcoming appearances: Guelph, Barcelona, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Lee Lai's "Cannon" (permalink)

Lee Lai's Cannon is an extraordinary graphic novel that turns out a beautifully told, subtle and ambiguous tale about Lucy (Lucy -> "Loose" -> "Loose Cannon" -> "Cannon"), a queer Chinese-Canadian chef at a Montreal restaurant whose messy family, work, personal and sex life are all falling apart in ways that are powerfully engrossing:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/cannon/

This is the second outing from Lee Lai, whose debut, Stone Fruit, swept many of the field's awards and won major critical acclaim. When a debut comes out that strong, it's sometimes followed with the dread "second book syndrome" in which a creator who has poured everything they ever thought about putting in a book now has to write another book, from scratch. But Cannon avoids any hint of that second book malaise; rather, it is jammed with dense and densely connected ideas, character beats and graphic signifiers that are brilliant in so many ways:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/stone-fruit

Cannon is a thirtysomething chef in a Montreal restaurant run by Guy, an instantly recognizable hustler who praises Cannon for her culinary abilities and her pliability, talks over her, demands the impossible from her kitchen colleagues and periodically breaks out into soliloquies about his own martyrdom to the hardships of entrepreneurship.

Cannon cares for her grandfather, who has been abandoned by her mother, who has been traumatized by the abuse he meted out to her during her upbringing. Now in decline and unable to care for himself, Cannon's grandfather continues his abusive ways, scaring off all of his home help, which means Cannon must devote even more time to him (she can't bring herself to put him in a care facility that will inevitably be full of white people who don't speak Chinese).

These familial duties leave Cannon isolated, with only one important friendship: Trish, an up-and-coming novelist whom Cannon has known since their school days in Montreal's suburban Eastern Townships, where they were the only queer Chinese girls either of them knew. Trish owes her professional acclaim to her own neurotic social instincts, which she polishes on the page with the help of an old writing teacher who serves as her mentor. Trish may be Cannon's oldest and best friend, but she's not actually a very good friend, and now that they're both in their 30s, neither Cannon nor Trish is entirely sure where they'd make new friends.

This is where Cannon starts, as Cannon tries to resolve all these bad situations, each of which is only worsening. Trish disapproves of Cannon's sexual affair with the new front-of-house woman at the restaurant – even as Trish begins a friends-with-benefits arrangement with a guy from her fitness club who clearly wants more than the odd tumble. Guy the restaurateur positions Cannon as his hatchet-woman and confidante, driving conflict in the kitchen that she is meant to hold the bag for. Her grandfather enters a terminal decline, and still her mother won't answer her calls and texts about it. And then, Cannon discovers that Trish has violated her in a way that is intimate and appalling.

These may sound like the beats that you'd find in a melodramatic soap opera, but Cannon's affect is so stoic, and her interiority is so beautifully and inventively depicted – Lai deploying the unique strengths of the graphic novel form here with total virtuosity – that the vibe is more David Lynch than Dallas.

The result is something that's beautiful, sharp, critical and lingering. Long after I closed the cover, I found myself mulling over the delicate ways that Lai raised the contradictions, sorrows and beauty of queer love, racial identity, camaraderie, self-control, and self-indulgence. Lai's characters have no answers, only questions that can never be fully resolved. Instead, these questions are the defining puzzles, defeats and triumphs of their lives.

It's a magnificent, sensitive and innovative work of storytelling.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Here’s Every Single Death Linked to Immigration Enforcement Since Trump’s Raids Began in 2025 https://lataco.com/ice-death-tracker

• We only win when we’re singing https://www.absurdintelligence.com/we-only-win-when-were-singing/

• Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible https://nooneshappy.com/article/native-apps-should-be-avoided-whenever-possible/

• The Last Comic https://www.thelastcomic.com

• Heartland Institute Podcast Questions Whether All Americans ‘Should Have the Right to Vote’ https://www.desmog.com/2026/05/05/heartland-institute-limiting-voting-rights-lee-zeldin/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Ebay paying newspapers to run listings in the classifieds section https://web.archive.org/web/20010506063910/http://www.business2.com/news/2001/05/ebaypapers.htm

#20yrsago Airline spoons of the world photo-gallery https://www.flickr.com/photos/airlinespoons

#20yrsago Coach passengers arrested for moving to first class http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/4980364.stm

#15yrsago Hidden cognitive costs of doing stuff https://web.archive.org/web/20110507154653/https://us.lifehacker.com/5798202/the-cognitive-cost-of-doing-things

#15yrsago Syria’s man-in-the-middle attack on Facebook https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/syrian-man-middle-against-facebook

#10yrsago Weird erotica author who was dragged into Hugo Awards mess pulls off epic troll https://web.archive.org/web/20160506175535/http://www.dailydot.com/lol/chuck-tingle-trolling-hugo-zoe-quinn-genius/

#10yrsago FBI has been harassing a Tor developer since 2015, won’t tell her or her lawyer why https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/fbi-harassment.html

#10yrsago 2,000 US doctors endorse Sanders’ single-payer healthcare proposal https://web.archive.org/web/20160506095034/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/05/2000-doctors-say-bernie-sanders-has-the-right-approach-to-health-care/

#10yrsago Community college evicts daycare center to make room for Goldman Sachs https://www.golocalprov.com/news/daycare-center-being-moved-out-of-ccri-for-goldman-sachs

#10yrsago Data-driven look at America’s brutal, racist debt-collection machine https://www.propublica.org/article/so-sue-them-what-weve-learned-about-the-debt-collection-lawsuit-machine

#10yrsago Homeland Security wants to subpoena Techdirt over the identity of a hyperbolic commenter https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/06/homeland-security-wants-to-subpoena-us-over-clearly-hyperbolic-techdirt-comment/

#5yrsago NY AG attributes Net Neutrality fraud to telcos https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

#5yrsago Ed-tech apps spy on kids https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#i-spy

#5yrsago Scammers recycled covid nose-swabs https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#up-your-nose

#1yrago The Adventures of Mary Darling https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/06/nevereverland/#lesser-ormond-street

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Guelph: Musagetes Lecture, May 8
  https://riverrun.ca/whats-on/guelph-lecture-on-being-2026/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/

• Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

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):

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

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

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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