The promise of GLP-1 drugs has always depended on people being able to afford them. These drugs still cost hundreds of dollars per month if you’re paying cash, at which point access becomes a privilege: The higher-income executive who wants to trim a few pounds might be able to afford them either way, but the low-income worker who needs the drug to lose significant weight might not be able to afford them — unless their health insurance covers it.

For a while, the trend lines for GLP-1 insurance coverage were positive. As of 2026, roughly two-thirds of private employer plans, which insure half of Americans, were covering GLP-1 medications for weight loss to treat obesity. Over the summer, Medicare launched a new $50-per-month prescription program. The US has struggled with an obesity epidemic for decades, but it looked like powerful drugs to treat it were finally starting to be more seamlessly integrated into the health system.

At least that’s how things appeared earlier this year. But now, private plans are pulling back from GLP-1 coverage. People are being left in the lurch, debating whether to try to pay for these drugs on their own or stop taking medicines they feel are making a real difference for their health.

The dilemma reveals one of the structural flaws in American healthcare. For working-age adults, your insurance depends on your job. Unfortunately, because people no longer stay at the same job for decades, there is not a strong financial incentive for employers to make investments that will benefit your health in the long term — but there is a strong incentive to minimize short-term costs as much as possible. It’s the kind of perverse rationale that could compel employer-sponsored health plans to stop covering a drug that, if taken over the full course of a person’s life, could help them not only lose weight but ultimately reduce their risk of heart disease, kidney disease and other chronic health problems, improving their health and saving all of us money as they get older.

“An employer or an insurer making coverage decisions doesn’t necessarily care if they’re saving Medicare money,” said Dan Sacks, a healthcare economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That’s a classic problem with the American health insurance system, and it’s certainly salient here.”

This mismatch between what’s good for people’s health and what’s good for the corporate bottom line has long been one of the underlying flaws in the US health system. Now access to GLP-1 drugs is shrinking just as these drugs were starting to make a real dent in the US obesity crisis. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Why employer-sponsored health plans are suddenly dropping GLP-1 coverage

From the beginning, insurance coverage was the big question hanging over GLP-1s and their potential to revolutionize US healthcare. But recently, it looked like we’d turned a corner.

When I attended the Aspen Ideas: Health festival over the summer, pharmaceutical reps seemed visibly relieved that GLP-1 coverage had been picking up among private insurers. In 2026, about two out of every three employer-sponsored plans were covering some of these drugs for weight management, up from about 20 percent just the year before.

“They’re recognizing that this is an investment in their workforce,” said Laura Steele, who leads the cardiometabolic health unit at Eli Lilly, which manufactures Zepbound and Foundayo. “Yes, there is a budget, and there is a benefit design that every employer has. That’s real. That’s not going away. But they’re also recognizing the overall cost that they’re experiencing by not dealing with this too.”

But as employers and private insurers make coverage decisions for next year, they are suddenly pulling back. At least 10 percent of employer plans that currently cover GLP-1s for weight loss say they are likely to discontinue coverage in 2027, according to one survey by the Business Group on Health — and that number may still increase. A Mercer survey of large employers found that 6 percent had dropped coverage in 2026 and another 5 percent were planning to in 2027 or actively considering it. A separate report from the Health Policy Commission in Massachusetts found that the number of commercially insured people in the state taking a GLP-1 drug had fallen by 50 percent between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 as private coverage started to drop off. 

Some of the biggest brands in the US are reportedly eliminating or reducing their coverage: PepsiCo, Starbucks, and Lowe’s among them. And their reasons are simple: It’s too expensive. The drugs still carry a high net price tag — $600 or more for a 30-day supply — and potential demand is high (two in every five American adults have obesity). 

When a lot of people start taking an expensive medication all at once, it’s going to raise costs for employer insurance plans — and they have to figure out how to adapt. Insurers set premiums at the start of each year, based on how many people are on the plan and how much healthcare they are expected to need. But if those estimates are off — say, if more people take an expensive GLP-1 drug than the insurer expected — they have to offset those costs somehow, and raising premiums the following year is a common solution. According to one estimate, premiums are projected to grow by 5 to 13 percent due to GLP-1 costs — and the burden of paying those higher premiums is likely to fall on the workers. The employer can also try to limit GLP-1 use by, for example, asking workers to pay more out of pocket for these drugs; according to Mercer, 27 percent of large US employers instituted some kind of utilization controls for GLP-1 drugs over the past year or plan to next year.

They also have the option to simply stop covering these drugs for weight loss altogether — and that’s the route more and more of them are deciding to take. The abrupt reversal has even caught economists like Sacks off guard.

“I was surprised that anyone would do an about-face because I thought they understood the trade-offs well,” Sacks said. “My guess is that it turned out to be more expensive than they anticipated: Take-up is higher, and possibly more people are sticking with it. That’s one reason that you might not want to continue to offer it.”

For employers, the short-term costs of covering a drug often outweigh the long-term benefits that medication may confer, at least from the employer’s POV. One analysis — notably produced by Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas — concluded that covering GLP-1s for weight loss increased average employee health costs by $7,000 in the first year and another $4,200 in the second, largely due to the cost of the drugs themselves. And yet at the same time, there were no decreases in obesity-related medical events in that time period. Another study from Sacks and his colleagues at Indiana University and the University of South Carolina found that GLP-1 use did not lead to any cost savings over five years.

So in the short term, these employers are arguably making an economically rational decision — but one that may still come at their employees’ expense. “I’m completely screwed,” said one person on Reddit about Cigna’s plans to drop GLP-1 coverage for their own employees. They’re looking at at least $300 for one month’s supply at cash prices. 

They weren’t alone either: “I’m devastated,” said another person, commenting on Starbucks’s decision to stop covering GLP-1 drugs. They said they had an autoimmune condition that had made it difficult to lose weight — until this new class of medicines came along.

Where GLP-1 coverage goes from here

How could we end up here, where it makes good business sense for companies to make a decision that could potentially harm their workers’ health in the long term? It is at least in part a result of the haphazard way the US has ended up insuring people.

When employer-sponsored insurance started to arise in the mid-20th century, eventually becoming the primary way to cover the working-age population, people tended to stay at the same job for a long period of time. In theory, there was a synergy: Companies wanted their workers to stay productive, and so it was worth it for the company to invest in their long-term health via their insurance benefits. And research has found that people who stay with the same company — and the same insurance plan — tend to have better health than those who switch a lot.

But these days, people change jobs all the time or work various gigs to piece together an income. You probably don’t expect to stay at your job for 10 years — and your employer doesn’t expect you to either. Instead, they want to keep their own costs as low as possible in the short term. This leads them to cut GLP-1 coverage, even though doctors do believe that people could benefit tremendously long term from the weight loss these drugs help them achieve and all of its potential health benefits. 

“There are very real health benefits of these drugs,” Sacks told me. “The fact that we don’t find offsets or they’re even more expensive than we thought doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t cover them.”

In theory, the market is supposed to fix the price problem: Drug companies get a period of exclusivity for the drugs they develop, and then, once that time elapses, cheaper generic versions can come onto the market. But generic semaglutide won’t be available in the US until at least 2031 — and for some versions, the generic competitors aren’t going to debut until the 2040s. Offering GLP-1 coverage could become a competitive advantage for employers, a perk they can offer to entice potential workers as part of their benefits package.

Beyond that, though, the path to more affordable GLP-1s is not immediately obvious right now. A lot of people are already willing to pay cash for these drugs — and that may continue as long as people can afford to do it. But with inflation still steadily rising, these drugs could slip out of reach for more and more Americans.

The government could get involved, but, for now, the federal government’s negotiating authority only covers Medicare, not the private plans that are dropping coverage. Serious healthcare reform is probably off the table until at least 2028, and then only if Democrats win both Congress and the White House and decide to make a healthcare package their legislative priority.

But the lesson of these recent developments is that, at some point, the US may have to look seriously at the underlying problem creating this mess in the first place. A patchwork method of insuring people that privileges short-term cost-cutting over people’s long-term health isn’t a real healthcare system.

Searching for your next must-read? Our October 13, 2026 new books video explores the latest arrivals in Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Young Adult fiction.

This week’s selection offers something for every kind of reader, from futuristic adventures and fantastical realms to terrifying tales, mysterious supernatural encounters, and captivating coming-of-age stories. Discover fresh additions to the world of speculative fiction and find new titles to spark your interest or earn a spot on your ever-growing reading list.

Subscribe to stay up to date with weekly new release roundups, exciting genre discoveries, and the latest in speculative fiction. Thanks for tuning in, and come back next week as we explore another batch of new Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Young Adult books!

Als Nachfolger des VC 20 konzipiert und mit einem bemerkenswert komfortablen Basic versehen, ist der C 16 inzwischen zum vielgekauften Einsteigermodell von Commodore avanciert – und das gleich doppelt, nämlich als C 16 und C 116.

Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates drawings of fish. There’s an option to slow the animation down so you can watch it draw the fish line-by-line.

The great grey owl basically has a sound cone for a face, which helps it hunt down voles burrowing through snow in the winter.

The owl’s large facial ruff, formed of dense feathers, helps amplify sound and funnel it towards his ears. Through half a meter of snow, the sound of scampering feet is inaudible to us. But not to him. With the help of a special acoustic camera equipped with 60 highly sensitive microphones, we can see what the owl is hearing.

The footage in this video is amazing — and so is the owl’s sense of hearing. A YouTube commenter says “Cat software in Bird hardware. Bad news for the Rodents.” You can watch a short video on the science behind owl hunting techniques and watch the whole episode this is from about how animals use sound (but only in Canada, it seems…VPN works fine tho).

The only problem with this video is that now I want two hours of just closeup footage of the owl’s face and it flying directly towards the camera. Those eyes! And its mid-flight loaf-of-white-bread-shaped body! I would also like the owl to be my friend.

BTW, this clip is from a show called The Nature of Things, which is a CBC nature series that’s been going since 1960. A good thing to have on your radar if you’re looking for well-produced science & nature programs.

Tags: birds · nature · science · sound · video

How many shots are in the average movie? How does it compare to the past? “You might expect the editor to be the most important factor in the number of shots, but in fact, knowing who directed a film accounts for 70% of the variation in its cutting pace.”

Am 19. November 2026 wird Rockstar GTA 6 veröffentlichen und schon heute wurde der zugehörige Launch-Trailer in Umlauf gebracht. Die neuen Szenen stellen einmal mehr das kriminelle Pärchen Jason und Lucia ins Zentrum, das ihr im Wechsel spielen werdet.

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For the past month, Texas state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton had been competing on roughly equal footing in public attention. The two candidates in what is perhaps the country’s marquee Senate race were being searched for at about the same clip, which is what you would expect of a competitive contest in a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide in decades. Then right-wing influencers invented a story that Talarico had secretly checked into an Ohio psychiatric facility, and the search traffic around the Democrat exploded. The lie collapsed with almost embarrassing speed, and the people who spread it now face potential legal exposure. 

But its political purpose was achieved anyway. By the time the story fell apart, the damage had already been done: A candidate’s health had become a national political spectacle, a social media feeding frenzy had swallowed the news cycle and a Republican politician facing serious questions about his own conduct had been handed a convenient distraction.

This is what Talarico calls the “rage economy.” At a CNN town hall on Wednesday, he described a system in which conspiracy theorists collect clicks, social media platform owners collect profits and the public gets angrier without becoming any better equipped to solve the country’s problems. The Talarico hoax shows exactly how MAGA media governs the information war. While we watched a fake scandal implode, a very real one centering on Paxton slipped by.

The episode began when Talarico spent nine days off the campaign trail recovering from a bout of the flu. There was never any genuine mystery about his whereabouts. He had appeared virtually at an event in early October to inform attendees that he had come down with the illness. But Paxton saw an opening and used it. The attorney general demanded “proof of life” and set up a tip line for information about his opponent’s whereabouts. He led a “Where is James Talarico?” chant at a rally. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “James TalaFREAKo” was “MISSING IN ACTION.”

MAGA influencers filled in the innuendo with the cruelest narrative. Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt claimed to have sources who said Talarico was in a psychiatric facility. By Sunday afternoon, the rumor had acquired its supposed smoking gun. Nick Sortor, a conservative influencer known for filming scuffles outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, and Rhein Amacher, a self-described “right-wing provocateur,” claimed that an employee at the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, had confirmed that Talarico was discharged that evening. Sortor posted a short audio clip, and Elon Musk amplified the claim repeatedly from his account. Within hours, the story had spread across X with millions of views. According to the reporting cited in Talarico’s own account of the episode, 50 accounts pushed the claim within 20 minutes and those posts accumulated 9.3 million views. One account posted the same text 83 times in under two hours.

The problem was that the “proof” was not proof. The full recording, obtained by The Bulwark, revealed that the person on the phone repeatedly denied that anyone named James Talarico was in the hospital system. The candidate said he had never even been to Ohio. The timeline was equally impossible: Amacher said he made the calls on Saturday evening, but Talarico had already appeared at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Friday and attended a Kacey Musgraves concert the next day. He could not have been discharged from an Ohio psychiatric facility on Saturday because he was visibly back in Texas. By Sunday evening, the hospital itself issued a flat public denial that Talarico had never been a patient.

Naturally, the self-correcting mechanism of truth did not immediately penetrate the right-wing ecosystem. Musk had already supercharged the claim. The falsehood had been viewed millions of times before the correction arrived. Right-wing media figures like Megyn Kelly continued demanding answers even after the hospital issued its official rebuttal, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller kept conspiracy-posting long after The New York Times reviewed and reported on time-stamped security images proving Talarico was safely at his home in Austin during the disputed window of time.

The initial burst also illustrates how a relatively small number of high-profile accounts can set the agenda for a much larger audience. This is the difference between an information ecosystem that rewards accuracy and one that rewards attention. In the former, a claim becomes more credible as evidence accumulates. In the latter, a claim can become more influential simply because more people have seen it. The only people who benefit from a manufactured outrage are the people selling it and the politicians who can hide behind it.

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Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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And hide is precisely what Paxton needed to do. On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that only days after being indicted for embezzlement, a fugitive donated $25,000 to the attorney general. The paper also reported that Paxton rang in 2025 at a New Year’s party in Dubai attended by two men federal prosecutors had indicted for allegedly embezzling millions from an Illinois hospital. One of those men was Anosh Ahmed, who according to records from the Texas Ethics Commission, gave Paxton $190,000 between 2022 and 2024. 

These are the kinds of facts that, in a normal campaign, would dominate the week. A sitting state attorney general taking money from people accused of looting a hospital is a story about who he works for — a man accused of being a criminal or the people of Texas. Instead, it was buried under a fabricated tale about his opponent’s mental health.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Paxton personally scripted the Ohio hoax. I am saying something that does not require a conspiracy at all. The right has built an incentive structure in which the people with the biggest megaphones are rewarded for flinging dirt and are never penalized when it turns out to be false. Paxton’s own conduct fits that structure like a glove. He fueled the “Talarico is missing” narrative from the stage and through his tip line. He benefited when the fog rolled in. The MAGA influencer ecosystem did the rest. Nobody had to give an order.

Consider also the broader pattern of the attacks on Talarico. A pro-Paxton super PAC ran an ad that placed the Democrat’s face on a cutout in a dress. Allies of Trump have spent months insinuating that Talarico is somehow insufficiently masculine, that he is “beta,” that he is unmarried and that questions about his sexuality are fair game. At a Wednesday rally for Paxton in Tyler, Texas, Vice President JD Vance openly suggested that Talarico is gay. Republicans have even attempted to other him through food, calling him a vegan. (He is not.) Taken together, the mental hospital hoax belongs to the same family of attacks. It is an attempt to make a candidate seem strange and unfit through innuendo because the substance of his message is hard to rebut. A candidate who talks about food and gas prices and community is difficult to caricature as a threat. So MAGA media built a caricature — Talafreako — instead.

Some of it deserves laughter. A man tricking a hospital receptionist is not exactly a criminal mastermind. But the stupidity is the tell, not the excuse. MAGA media do not need smart lies anymore. They need fast ones, repeated at volume across a captured platform and timed to drown out real reporting about real corruption. 

Earlier fiascos like Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Jack Smith flop should have taught them caution. Instead the right has learned from Trump that there is no penalty for being wrong in public — as long as you are wrong at scale and never look back.

The post A viral Talarico hoax drowned out Paxton’s corruption story appeared first on Salon.com.

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REBECCA MATTE has joined kt literary. She was previously at Bradford Literary Agency.

MEGAN LALLY is now repre­sented by Joanna Volpe of New Leaf Literary & Media. Lally’s “romantic gothic horror” To Death, We Dance and another title went to Vicki Lame at Wednesday Books at auction via Mandy Hubbard of Emerald City Literary Agency. UK rights sold to Pan Macmillan.

 

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Death of the Author by NNEDI OKORAFOR and The Rush by BETH LEWIS are among the five titles shortlisted for the eighth annual Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award. The winner will be announced October 1, 2026 and receives a handmade glass bell and a cash prize of £2,000.

 

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MARISSA LINGEN’s SF That Fatal Discontent sold to Ardyce Alspach at Union Square & Co via Kurestin Armada of Root Literary.

SARATOGA SCHAEFER sold Zeroth, “in which a chronically lonely artist signs up for an AI boyfriend beta test,” to Stephanie Manova at Podium Publishing via Amy Giuffrida of Belcastro Agency.

TAMSYN MUIR sold standalone fantasy Floralinda, “a subversive fairy tale blended with a desperate dungeon crawl” and expansion of novella Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, to Carl Engle-Laird at Tor Books via Jennifer Jackson of Donald Maass Literary Agency. UK rights sold to Tor UK.

AI JIANG sold dark fantasy Vessel Eater, “pitched as Mulan meets The Ghost Bride,” to Vi­engsamai Fetters at Erewhon via Danai Christopoulou of The Tobias Literary Agency.

MICHAEL F. FLYNN’s The Shipwrecks of Time, “in which a man who has stayed alive since the early Middle Ages will stop at no length to keep his immortality a secret,” went to Shahid Mahmud at Caezik SF & Fantasy.

Four books in DEVNEY PER­RY’s dystopian City of Saint series went to Susan Barnes at Bramble for eight figures at auction via Ge­organa Grinstead of The Seymour Agency. UK rights went to Gillian Green at Bramble UK for seven figures at auction.

WILL WIGHT’s Overworld went to Lindsey Hall at Tor in a pre-empt via Seth Fishman of The Gernert Company (NA).

J.S. MERESMAA’s short story collection Tears for the Sea, trans­lated by Greta Katz and Christina Saarinen, went to Wizard’s Tower.

SARAH BETH DURST sold “cozy fantasy” The Ninth Life of an Erstwhile Witch and the fifth and sixth books in the Spellshop series to Ali Fisher and Dianna Vega at Bramble for seven figures via Andrea Somberg at Harvey Klinger. UK rights sold to Gillian Green at Tor UK via Chris Scheina at Macmillan.

AR FREDERIKSEN sold “coast­al gothic horror novel” Portrait of Two Women and another book to Daniel Carpenter at Titan Books via Christine Goss of FinePrint Literary Management.

CHARLIE N. HOLMBERG sold A Charm for Mythical Beasts, “a cozy fantasy version of All Creatures Great and Small” to Julia Elliott at Voyager; Holmberg’s contemporary fantasy romance Willow Vane went to Bria Ragin at Delacorte, both via Hayley Nus­baum and Joseph Veltre of Gersh Agency.

EUGEN BACON sold short story collection Betwixt, Children of the Storm: Sauútiverse Stories, and “Norse murder mystery no­vella” Jintu to Nick Wells at Flame Tree Collections.

SHANNA MILES’s contempo­rary fantasy The Witch of Star Jasmine went to Elizabeth Agy­emang at 47North via John Cusick of Folio Literary Management.

J.D. SOUTHWELL’s Ezra and the Forbidden Scroll, first in a dystopian epic fantasy series, plus two more books sold to Kei­sha Mennefee at Honey Blossom Press.

ANDROMEDA ROMANO-LAX’s Fixed Stars, a re-imagining of Sylvia Plath’s life, went to Alexa Wejko at Soho Press via Michelle Brower of Trellis Literary Manage­ment.

SARAH DAY sold Moonchaser, “a courier’s discovery of a forsaken body leads to a remote mining settlement strained by murder, ambition, and secrets,” to Mark Teppo at Underland Press.

LEGION20’s Supreme Magus and two more titles went to Rhett Bruno at Aethon & Vault. Damian Wassel will edit.

JKSMANGA sold My Vampire System and two more titles to Rhett Bruno at Aethon & Vault. Damian Wassel will edit. JKS­Manga sold The God Slayer with L.E. GRAVES to Bruno at Aethon & Vault in a separate deal with two more books via M.H.F. Saint of Achilles Literary Agency.

ANNA SHOMSKY’s The Abbey of Saint Zosimos went to Kayla Mullinax Puga at Ooligan Press. Isabel Matthews will edit.

REBECCA F. KENNEY’s Rift­walker duet sold to Kelly Smith at Zaffre via Nicole Resciniti of Alliance Rights Agency on behalf of Allyson D’Antonio at Midnight Rose.

ANNE BISHOP’s third book in the Isle of Wyrd series went to Anne Sowards at Ace via Jennifer Jackson of Donald Maass Literary Agency.

ANDREA BARTZ sold specula­tive thriller Delete Your Account to Hilary Rubin Teeman at Bal­lantine via Alexandra Machinist of CAA.

DIANA PETERFREUND sold Ghost/Writer to Susan Barnes at Wildthorn with another title in a pre-empt via Kate Schafer Tester­man of kt literary.

MAX WALKER’s romantic fan­tasy Dating & Dragons went to Thaisheemarie Fantauzzi Pérez at Alcove Press via Kirsten Lang of Zeno Agency.

JAMES L. SUTTER’s Hearts Against the Machines, “a gay romance between a young medic and a newly paralyzed soldier in a field hospital for humanity’s doomed resistance after robots massacre civilization,” went to Marcy Harris at Alcove Press via Josh Adams of Adams Literary.

GRYFFIN MURPHY’s roman­tasy Ash’s Airborne Apothecary sold to Meg Hood at Bindery Books via Brent Taylor of TriadaUS Literary Agency.

CLAIRE WINN sold Shadecall­er, first in a romantic dystopian fantasy duology, and a second title to Amanda Ferreira and Stephanie Alleyne at Random House Canada via Kaitlyn Katsoupis of Belcastro Agency.

LEXI C. FOSS and ANNA FURY sold Rebel Bloodlines and an untitled book sold to Lizzie Poteet at Bantam Dell via Amy A. Collins of Talcott Notch Literary Services.

Brittany Ziegler writing as BRIT­TANY BADAHSS sold Salt Eden, “a selkie romantasy-eco thriller,” to Leah Wilson at Benbella Books via Amanda Elliott of Movable Type Management.

VICTORIA M. SORENSON sold An Immortal’s Grievance, “a gender-bent paranormal fantasy retelling of Dracula,” to Caroline Timmings at Alcove Press in a pre-empt via Liz Gettle of Myth Literary Agency (world).

E. CATHERINE TOBLER’s Sour Girl went to Tee Tate at City Owl Press via Jennie Goloboy of Donald Maass Literary Agency.

JENNIFER ASCIENZO’s The Golden Lord and The Butterfly Princess went to Tanya Anne Crosby at Primera.

ELIZABETH DEAR sold three books in the Shifter Guardians series to Sarah McCabe at Scarlett Press via Katie Reed of Katie Reed Literary.

ANASTASIA RYAN’s Ruin, first in the Daughters of the Black Tide trilogy, sold with two more titles to Meredith Wild at Page & Vine via Jess Gilbert of D4EO Literary Agency.

BREANNE RANDALL’s The Se­cret Society of Second Chance Magic went to Daniel Ehrenhaft at Blackstone Publishing via Natalie Lakosil of Looking Glass Literary & Media.

CHRISTINE WITCHER sold Congratulations, Your Fake Boy­friend Is Evil and another title to Kimberly Laws at Gallery via Brent Taylor while part of TriadaUS Liter­ary Agency.

AMALIE HOWARD’s The Eclipse in the Mirror and another book went to Liz Berry and Jillian Stein at Blue Box Press via Thao Le of Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.

JENNIFER NATALYA FINK sold A Mischief to Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore at Bunny Presse via Amanda Annis of Trident Media Group.

CATRIONA WARD sold The Solitude, “a supernatural tale in which a personal assistant aboard a superyacht must try to survive the voyage as the affluent passengers are murdered one by one,” and another book to Kelly Lonesome at Nightfire via Robin Straus of Robin Straus Agency on behalf of Jenny Savill of Andrew Nurnberg Associates. UK rights went to Sophie Robinson at Night­fire UK via Jenny Savill of Andrew Nurnberg Associates.

MATS STRANDBERG’s “gothic folk horror” The Muse went to Michael Homler at St. Martin’s via Brittney Payer at Pan Macmillan on behalf of Elisabet Brannstrom of Grand Agency.

LUKE DUMAS sold Forever Home and Fury on the Waves to Loan Le at Atria via Maria Whelan of Mushens Entertainment.

BITTER KARELLA’s untitled gothic novel and another untitled campus novel sold to Angelica Chong at Run For It via Julie Gou­rinchas of Bell Lomax Moreton Agency.

MARIA TUREAUD’s Her Blood Is Ruin, pitched as reclaiming the folklore that inspired Dracula, to Elizabeth Trout at Kensington via Amy Giuffrida of Belcastro Agency.

M.I. MINAEVA’s Saint’s Hotel, “pitched as The Shining meets Silent Hill,” went to Bindery Books via Miriam Cortinovis of Ki Agency.

JEAN-BAPTISTE DEL AMO sold The Ravaged Night to Chris­topher Richards at Scribner via Laurence Laluyaux of Rogers, Coleridge & White.

JOSHUA BLACKWOOD sold Our Boy to Cassandra Thompson at Quill & Crow. Mathew Reyes will edit.

PHILIP FRACASSI sold short fiction collections Behold the Void, Beneath a Pale Sky, and No One is Safe to Alan Lastufka at Shortwave via Elizabeth Copps at Confluence Literary Agency.

ANIA AHLBORN sold supernat­ural novel Valerie to Ed Schlesing­er at Gallery via David Hale Smith of Inkwell Management.

STEVEN PATCHETT’s Flock for a Dead God went to Alex Woodroe at Tenebrous Press.

KRISTAL STITTLE sold The Devil’s Address to Alex Woodroe at Tenebrous Press.

CHRIS FORMANT and GARY M. KREBS’s Mortuary Tree, “where a scientist experimenting on combining human and plant DNA discovers an ancient ritual of burying humans inside hollowed trees to form a monstrous new hybrid species,” went to Anthony Ziccardi at Permuted Press.

TYLER JONES’s horror and supernatural short fiction col­lection Arson by Design sold to Mitch Hull at Rapture Trade via Elizabeth Copps of Confluence Literary Agency.

DAVID PEAK sold horror novel XLR8 to Benjamin DeVos at Apoc­alypse Party.

AIDEN THOMAS’s Remember Me, “a twist on Disney Pixar Coco for the Twisted Tales series,” went to Heather Knowles at Disney-Hyperion via Jennifer March Solo­way while part of Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

I.V. MARIE sold Cursed and Crowned, first in a romantic high fantasy duology for young adults and another title to Lydia Gregovic at Delacorte via Ariele Fredman and Gwen Beal of UTA. UK rights sold to Sarah Levison at Electric Monkey via Stephanie Thwaites of Curtis Brown UK.

ALEXIS AURIGEMMA’s fantasy Sisters of Sun and Shadow went to Tamara Grasty at Page Street Kids via Elizabeth Copps of Con­fluence Literary Agency. Kumari Pacheco will edit.

A.K. LIM sold YA fantasy Gar­den of Venom and another book to Hoda Agharazi at Mayhem Books via Emily Forney of BookEnds. UK rights went to Rebecca Hilsdon at Michael Joseph.

EMMA CLANCEY sold YA con­temporary fantasy This Blood Will Betray Us to Claire Stetzer at Amulet via Jim McCarthy of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.

LOLA STVIL sold Rage of An­gels and at least one other book to Kwame Alexander at Kwame Alexander Books via Allison Rem­check of Stimola Literary Studio. Margaret Raymo will edit.

OLIVIA SUN’s paranormal fan­tasy We Rose from the Sea and another book went to Alvina Ling at Alvina Ling Books in a pre-empt via Gwen Beal of UTA.

SCOTT REINTGEN sold Tita­nos, an SF retelling of the Titanic, to Kate Prosswimmer at Margaret K. McElderry Books via Kristin Nelson of Nelson Literary Agency.

JULIA ALEXANDRA sold duol­ogy Hunt the Wild Night and Tame the Vengeful Dark to Eileen Rothschild at Wednesday Books via Ellen Goff of HG Literary.

HELEN COMERFORD’s The Cafe at the End of the World went to Amber Flame at Generous Press via Christabel McKinley of David Higham Associates. Elaina Ellis will edit. UK rights went to Bloomsbury UK Children’s.

SAYANTANI DASGUPTA’s Daughter of the Sun and another title went to Alexandra Cooper at Quill Tree via Brent Taylor while part of TriadaUS Literary Agency.

EMMA LORD sold MJ Loves Spider-Man to Brittany Rubiano at Random House Children’s via Luci­enne Diver of The Knight Agency.

RENA BLAKE sold debut novel Nostalgia, “in which a woman living in a world engineered to erase overstimulation discovers a forbidden word—nostalgia,” to Jen Monroe at Berkley at auction via Emma Leong of Janklow & Nesbit UK.

CONSTANTIN FLORIN BOS­NEAG’s debut, space opera House of Wolves went to Lawrence Knorr at Hellbender Books.

CORVIN A. DOUPAGNE’s de­but, “queer dark academia fantasy” The Academy of Macabre Arts went to Elana Gibson at Alcove Press via Rebecca Podos of Neigh­borhood Literary.

MICHELLE DENHAM’s debut Hell Princess and another book sold to Amy Baxter at Avon UK via Michelle Hauck of Storm Literary Agency.

S.H. CARE’s debut, romantasy The Edge of the Blade sold to Maxine Shen at Alcove Press via Laura Bennett of Liverpool Liter­ary Agency.

CLAIRE GAYLE and MIKE GAY­LE sold debut Not Quite Myself to Leah Mol at Park Row Books in a pre-empt via Amy Mitchell of United Agents on behalf of Ariella Feiner. UK rights went to Clare Gordon at HQ at auction.

CHRISTINA GONZALES sold debut Tongues, “a work of super­natural femgore and body horror,” to Ed Schlesinger at Gallery via Ron Eckel of CookeMcDermid.

JONATHAN MARX’s debut Bump in the Night went to Randall Lotowycz at Quirk Books.

SOPHIA ESCAJEDA sold debut Sins of Levaria to Jean Lowd at Creative James.

EMILY VALE’s debut Wild Thing went to Cassandra Thomp­son at Quill & Crow.

NATASHA MIHELL sold debut, “sapphic, gothic horrormance” Malivestra to Marcy Harris at Alcove Press via Clara Chuiton of The Rights Factory.

CLARE OGAWA sold debut This Town Will Eat You Alive to Dina Davis at Hanover Square Press in a pre-empt via Jenny Bent and James Mustelier of The Bent Agency.

ANNALEE NEWITZ sold no­vella Noodle Union, a sequel to Automatic Noodle, to Stephanie Stein at Tordotcom via Laurie Fox of Linda Chester Literary Agency.

CHERYL S. NTUMY, XAN VAN ROOYEN, and J. UMEH will edit Sauúti Love Songs for Nick Wells at Flame Tree Press via Bieke van Aggelen at African Literary Agency.

ELLEN DATLOW will edit an­thology Dark End of the Street, featuring Dana Cameron, Clay McLeod Chapman, Rachel Har­rison, Nick Mamatas, George Sandison, and others, for R.B. Wood at Ruadán via Merrilee Heifetz of Writers House. Datlow will also edit anthology Bad Sex for Tachyon Publications.

JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS and OLIVIE BLAKE will edit dark academia anthology Forbidden Knowledge, featuring authors such as Alix E. Harrow, Alexis Hen­derson, Ken Liu, and Emily Tesh, for David Pomerico at Voyager via Seth Fishman of The Gernert Company for Adams and Amelia Appel at TriadaUS Literary Agency for Blake.

THOMAS HA sold novella Sons of Nod to Avery Davis at Tordot­com via Michael Curry of Donald Maass Literary Agency. Ann Van­derMeer will edit.

 

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KIRSTY THOMAS is now the Assistant Publisher of Uncanny Magazine.

SHELDON TEITELBAUM has been appointed senior editor of BC BookWorld.

Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey, and Aaron Schaffer, reporting for The Washington Post (News+ link; Archive.today link):

A list obtained by The Washington Post reveals all the major donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project, including previously undisclosed contributors who have benefited from regulatory decisions, government contracts and, in one case, a pardon for a family member.

Tech giants Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount, the list shows. The Adelson family, one of the GOP’s largest donor dynasties, committed that sum as well, as did billionaire Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of telecommunications company Dish Network.

Absent from the list is Trump himself, who has said that he is helping to pay for the project. “It’s being paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine,” he said last year, days after demolition began on the old East Wing.

The White House publicly identified 37 people, companies and foundations as donors last October, without revealing the amount of their individual gifts.

The list obtained by The Post, an internal spreadsheet used to track contributions for the fundraising effort, contains the source, date and amount of all 67 donations above $10,000 recorded as of late last month. It shows a total of $333 million from private donors, aligning with the administration’s public statements. Additional records, also internal to the fundraising effort, provide more detail about the donations and indicate that at least $77 million came from donors who requested anonymity.

In addition to being a shameful display of abject corruption, it’s also a shameful act of support for horrendous architecture. This entire edifice ought to be destroyed — I won’t vote for any Democratic candidate in the 2028 primary who doesn’t pledge to knock all this Trump cack to the ground in January 2029. That’s table stakes.

Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World. “The epic story of how a handful of surprisingly simple mathematical ideas have sparked today’s technological breakthroughs — from Netflix’s recommendation algorithm to medical imaging to AI…” Interesting!

I ran across this post on Instagram by Bobby in Space (who posts about design and the psychology of place) and wanted to pull it onto the actual internet. Here are some snippets of his “5 hills I will die on as someone who studies the psychology of place”. I don’t think these are universal (e.g. people who live in rural areas likely prioritize other needs) or even necessarily the most important considerations (climate, sunlight, crime, schools), but they resonated with me.

1. Your 10-minute radius matters more than almost anything else about where you live: Think about what you can get to in ten minutes without making it a whole thing. I can get coffee, get groceries, go to a park, and go to a friend’s place.

This is the biggest thing that was missing for me living in rural VT for the past 10 years. My 10-minute radius required a car to access and even then was not teeming with options. My 10-minute radius here in Tokyo is, obviously, bonkers. It makes me so happy. A photo I took inside my 10-minute area a couple of weeks ago:

2. More space can give you a smaller life: This one I’ll actually argue about. Idk why we’re obsessed with getting more sq footage, but sometimes the bigger house means you spend way more time inside it. House, car, work, car, house. Meanwhile, someone in a tiny apartment might walk downstairs, grab coffee, run into someone they know, walk to dinner, stop at the park. Technically they have less space. Butttttt their actual life might be way bigger.

One of the things living in NYC taught me was how to treat the city as an extension of your home. I’m not sure people who live in rural and suburban areas think that way about the relationship between their homes and locations.

3. The best neighborhood amenity might literally just be other people outside. […] You don’t even need to talk to any of them. Just seeing other people out living their lives makes you feel like you’re part of something.

Yep. I have been so missing this in my life. My first few days here in Tokyo, I was craving being in huge crowds of humanity so much that I spent a lot of time in ultra-busy areas like Shinjuku and Shibuya.

4. Moving somewhere new will change you, just probably not in the way you think: trust me, I still tend to do this. I think that a new city can solve all my problems. But it will not. You’re still going to be you.

Haha, yeeeeep. Even a month into my travels, I have been disappointed to learn that my bad habits are still with me. Would really like to speak to the manager about that one…

5. Where your friends live should influence where you live way more than we admit: I don’t even feel the need to explain this one. Relationships are the most important thing you’ll do in your life. Go live near people that light you up

Even though it’s halfway across the world from where I’ve been living for the past 50+ years, I’ve seen more friends here in Japan in the past month than in the past 3 months in VT. It’s not going to be like that everywhere I go and I’m not near the most important folks in my life here, but it’s nice to have it while I’m here.

Tags: cities · travel

Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Maybe this isn’t the best show in the world, but I have been enjoying it. I thought s02 was better than s01 so at least the trajectory is promising.

Tiny Little Office is “an office suite with no accounts and no server that holds your work. Every document lives in the address of its page… Copy the link and you have copied the document.” Includes a word processor, spreadsheet, calculator, etc.

Gestern hat das Koop-Survival-Action-RPG Enshrouded des deutschen Studios Keen Games den Early Access verlassen und ist in Version 1.0 für PC und PS5 erschienen.

Weiterlesen

Microsoft hat bereits damit angefangen, Spiele wieder Xbox-exklusiv anzubieten. Gears of War - E-Day wird nicht für PS5 erscheinen, Clockwork Revolution genauso wenig. Der Konzern zieht in Erwägung, diese Strategie noch deutlich auszuweiten – und das nicht bloß auf Spiele, die von Xbox Game Studios gepublisht werden.

Weiterlesen

Earlier this month, three data centers in western Russia suddenly went dark due to a “rapid unplanned disassembly,” to use euphemistic engineering parlance. They exploded, in other words. Operated by Yandex, a Russian technology company often compared to Google that offers many similar services — a search engine, online shopping, cloud computing and the like — the centers were heavily damaged in a series of coordinated drone strikes over four days by Ukraine, which saw them as a valuable target in the country’s military campaign against Russian infrastructure.

As Russia’s war against Ukraine slogs on, both sides are increasingly adopting this strategy. While power plants and oil refineries have been hit, data centers and internet facilities are becoming the latest quarry for drone and missile strikes — and not just in Europe. Data centers operated by Amazon in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have also been targeted in the ongoing Iran war.

Few Americans have probably heard of Yandex, let alone use its services, and most likely didn’t notice when many of its hosted websites became inaccessible. But after Ukraine’s attacks, many people started to claim that social media was seemingly different. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was quick to suggest his country had dealt a massive blow to Russia’s online disinformation machine, saying, “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms. There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.” Several reports seemed to support his claims, citing data from internet monitoring service Cloudflare, that allegedly showed “Russia’s Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight.” 

But the truth is far more complicated, as some experts have noted. Yandex did experience a crash in bot activity, but at least some of that traffic seems to be legitimate. “When Cloudflare data shows a precipitous drop in ‘bot’ traffic, that does not mean ‘automated social media troll accounts’, it means ‘software that makes automated web requests on a large scale,’” Michał ‘Rysiek’ Woźniak, an internet infrastructure expert, told The Guardian. Others noted that they haven’t seen an actual drop in online disinformation. “Our platforms are still monitoring Russian social networks across the world and there is no discernible change in their posting patterns,” said Amil Khan, the chief executive of Valent, a tech startup that tracks disinformation.

None of that has stopped Reddit and other corners of the web from celebrating and memeing the issue. If those celebrations aren’t quite justified, there’s still something to be learned from the ordeal, which digs into the so-called dead internet theory. The basic premise is that almost nothing we see online is human-generated anymore. In his 2025 book “Market-Oriented Disinformation Research,” business academic Carlos Diaz Ruiz, who has studied how disinformation spreads in social media echo chambers, describes what many of us experience online on a daily basis: “an eerie feeling that the Internet is made up of bots talking to bots, following and liking bots, and posting AI-generated content designed for machine consumption, the algorithm, not humans.”

Indeed, bot traffic makes up an increasingly large share of the internet, surpassing human traffic for the first time in history over the summer, according to a June Cloudflare report. No doubt the surge in generative artificial intelligence use is what tipped the scales, but of course, not all bots are created equal. Many have legitimate, beneficial uses, like archiving web data.

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Some people have wedged dead internet theory into a conspiracy theory that Diaz Ruiz divides into “weak” and “strong.” The weak version of the theory is that the internet is now little more than a hall of mirrors used to manipulate the masses into fighting a culture war instead of a class war. “The Internet drama keeps the population occupied and distracted, preventing them from resisting the elites secretly controlling the world,” as Diaz Ruiz says. “The ‘strong’ version of the dead internet conspiracy theory claims that online activity is entirely disconnected from human activity because our society ceased to exist some time ago. In some versions, a catastrophic event occurred in the past, triggering society’s collapse.”

OK, so we’re basically talking the plot of “The Matrix” here. The argument that humanity peaked in 1999 may be compelling, and I won’t argue against it. If reality truly is nothing more than a hallucination, dream or computer screensaver in the brain, why should we waste time disputing it? Proving a negative with such a lack of evidence is fruitless. The point is, some people may be taking dead internet theory a little too far, but that doesn’t change the fact that within the last week people felt like they got a taste of some version of it.

If we lift the hood on some of these conspiracies, we can understand what people are really afraid of. Last December in the journal Computer, Hal Berghel, a computer science professor at the University of Nevada, argued the dead internet is more than a conspiracy and should not be dismissed, writing, “There’s certainly evidence of the distortion of the internet from the original concept as a liberating, self-healing, packetized purveyor of useful and important information: the original commitment to net neutrality is on life support, the goal of a shared public information repository is constantly compromised by paywalls, the content has moved from valuable scholarship to a sub-cerebral landfill, and the users are subjected to a mind-numbing cacophony of digital threats: spam, phish bait, spyware, malware, online bullying, online fraud, extortion, hacking, VoIP 911-swatting, doxing, slander, pretexting, etc.”

In other words, there’s a good reason so many people find dead internet theory attractive. Once a zone of promise and connection, the web has not only rotted and enshittified, it’s turned into a literal warzone. There really are algorithms out there, unleashed by governments actively dropping bombs on one another, that are designed to infect our minds and prejudice our ability to perceive the truth. It’s one of the many ways modern warfare has become invisible, pervasive and endless. No wonder social media is making so many people depressed — it can be a form of assault.

“In tandem with proxy warfare, cyber operations have become a central pillar of modern statecraft. Cyber warfare enables states to conduct aggressive acts; espionage, sabotage, infrastructure disruption without engaging in kinetic violence,” philosophers Oluyemi Opeoluwa Adisa and Kareem Shwan Adham wrote last year in a study published in the International Journal of Scientific Research and Management. “The strategic advantage of cyber warfare lies in its stealth and ambiguity. Because it blurs the line between war and crime, attribution becomes difficult, enabling perpetrators to operate with minimal consequences.”

How do we even tell how much of the dead internet theory is true? Perhaps through that old tech-support adage: Turn it off and back on again. And no, I don’t mean bombing more data centers, though we’re likely to see more of that, for better or worse. If everything feels fake, maybe we’re better off getting outside and experiencing something real for a minute. Yeah, yeah, we’ve all been told to touch grass so much that such advice is routinely mocked, and anyway, not everyone can easily do that.

But here’s your daily reminder that humans are primates whose still-evolving brains are exponentially outpaced by technological advancement. Being in nature is essential because we are nature. There’s a certain reset available in the presence of trees, birds and clouds. Even more important is connecting with real humans: family, friends, neighbors. Socialization is the essence of the primate brain too. You don’t have to uninstall any apps or delete Facebook, though you could try it too. Off, on again. 

And when you are online, which is unavoidable for many of us, try to remember that you are probably interacting with fewer humans than you might think. So don’t take it so seriously. Temper those outrageous emotions, the ones the algorithms have gotten so good at teasing out of us. Maybe instead we can fortify them into weapons to attack the real problems we face, like widening wealth gaps, destruction of the environment and the rise of authoritarianism. 

The post The internet isn’t dead. It’s even worse appeared first on Salon.com.

Jonathan Harker's Journal.

15 October, Varna.—We left Charing Cross on the morning of the 12th, got to Paris the same night, and took the places secured for us in the Orient Express. We travelled night and day, arriving here at about five o'clock. Lord Godalming went to the Consulate to see if any telegram had arrived for him, whilst the rest of us came on to this hotel—"the Odessus." The journey may have had incidents; I was, however, too eager to get on, to care for them. Until the Czarina Catherine comes into port there will be no interest for me in anything in the wide world. Thank God! Mina is well, and looks to be getting stronger; her colour is coming back. She sleeps a great deal; throughout the journey she slept nearly all the time. Before sunrise and sunset, however, she is very wakeful and alert; and it has become a habit for Van Helsing to hypnotise her at such times. At first, some effort was needed, and he had to make many passes; but now, she seems to yield at once, as if by habit, and scarcely any action is needed. He seems to have power at these particular moments to simply will, and her thoughts obey him. He always asks her what she can see and hear. She answers to the first:—

"Nothing; all is dark." And to the second:—

"I can hear the waves lapping against the ship, and the water rushing by. Canvas and cordage strain and masts and yards creak. The wind is high—I can hear it in the shrouds, and the bow throws back the foam." It is evident that the Czarina Catherine is still at sea, hastening on her way to Varna. Lord Godalming has just returned. He had four telegrams, one each day since we started, and all to the same effect: that the Czarina Catherine had not been reported to Lloyd's from anywhere. He had arranged before leaving London that his agent should send him every day a telegram saying if the ship had been reported. He was to have a message even if she were not reported, so that he might be sure that there was a watch being kept at the other end of the wire.

We had dinner and went to bed early. To-morrow we are to see the Vice-Consul, and to arrange, if we can, about getting on board the ship as soon as she arrives. Van Helsing says that our chance will be to get on the boat between sunrise and sunset. The Count, even if he takes the form of a bat, cannot cross the running water of his own volition, and so cannot leave the ship. As he dare not change to man's form without suspicion—which he evidently wishes to avoid—he must remain in the box. If, then, we can come on board after sunrise, he is at our mercy; for we can open the box and make sure of him, as we did of poor Lucy, before he wakes. What mercy he shall get from us will not count for much. We think that we shall not have much trouble with officials or the seamen. Thank God! this is the country where bribery can do anything, and we are well supplied with money. We have only to make sure that the ship cannot come into port between sunset and sunrise without our being warned, and we shall be safe. Judge Moneybag will settle this case, I think!

Hello there!

Much of what we do to be worthy humans is to help other folks and establish a sense of belonging and community. Sometimes it starts out with a cold call or email. From there a relationship begins.

Three years ago, after Ever-Green Vietnamese released, I got an email from Joyce Tang, the baker and owner of Bake Sum, a hip Asian bakery in Oakland. She invited me for a book signing and offered to feature one of my recipes. We chose the Vietnamese Mocha Cake and she replicated it beautifully, complimenting me on how my recipe scaled up well for her commercial bakery needs. She put her own spin on the cake by adding a Vietnamese coffee Swiss meringue buttercream.

I had a fun afternoon hanging out at the bakery and meeting folks. Bake Sum impressed me with how it exists as a hub for anyone interested in Asian American flavors. Joyce and I got talking about a potential book project so she could share her journey and recipes.

Three years later, she has a cookbook, co-authored with another friend of mine, chef, author, and James Beard Award-winning journalist Soleil Ho. With Bake Sum the pastry shop and book, Joyce realized her dream.

If you want to be on the cutting edge of what captivates and influences the cool kids, Joyce has pro-level ideas for you. Bake Sum’s recipes include classics like egg tarts and moon cakes and newfangled gochujang garlic pull-aparts, black sesame snickerdoodles, and a vegan five-spice chocolate cake that relies on an Asian baking technique to get its moist texture.

What about recipe testing bakery formulas for home cooks? If you’re cookbook curious, give a listen to the podcast that and I did with Joyce and Soleil! 🎧 👂

Then make two easy Bake Sum recipes! I’m a matcha fan so I picked these . . .

💎 Matcha Fancy Rice Crispy Treats

My sisters and I used to make rice krispy treats in the 1970s so Joyce’s recipe for Fancy Rice Crispy Treats that caught my eye. It looks grownup and fun with matcha and salty pretzels! It’s gluten-free and you can totally adapted it to be vegan. Instead of pretzels, put salted roasted peanuts in the mixture or add furikake. Get Joyce’s 🆓 Fancy Rice Krispy Treats recipe at my website.

Subscribe now

💎 Matcha Strawberry-Ginger Latte

Bake Sum has a fun menu of drinks and I really liked the Matcha Strawberry-Ginger Latte. It was verdant, zippy, rich and tangy — and had the colors of the Italian and Mexican flag too! The MSGL is the first recipe in Bake Sum! It’s easy to prepare and as Joyce describes, “This drink looks and tastes like California in a cup, filled with pastures of green and tons of strawberries.”

✅ From Joyce: Use in-season strawberries if possible. If you use frozen berries, add a bit of extra sugar and lemon juice to balance flavors. If you don’t have a matcha bowl, a small bullet blender will work; however, you’ll end up wasting a little bit of the precious green elixir.

✅ From Andrea: I cheat by using an electric milk frother to make matcha fast. As for matcha powder, I regularly drink Tenzo Tea and Kirkland brand.

Matcha Strawberry-Ginger Latte

Makes 2 drinks

Ingredients

Strawberry-Ginger Puree

• 1-inch | 2.5 cm knob of fresh ginger, peeled and sliced

• ½ cup | 100g sugar

• ½ cup | 113g water

• 1 cup | 155g strawberries

The rest

• 1 teaspoon matcha powder

• 2 tablespoons water

• Ice cubes

• 2 cups | 454 g oat or cow milk

Instructions

Make the strawberry-ginger puree: In a small saucepan, combine the ginger, sugar, and water and simmer over low heat for about 10 minutes, or until the ginger’s bright yellow color starts to become dull. Remove from the heat and cool for a few minutes until it is no longer hot to the touch.

In a blender, combine the strawberries and cooled ginger and its syrup and blend until it’s pourable but still a bit chunky. The ginger should be minced into fine pieces. (The puree can be made ahead and stored in the fridge for up to 2 weeks.)

Assemble the matcha lattes: Sift the matcha powder into a chawan, or matcha bowl, and add the water (see Note). Use a chasen, or matcha whisk, to start whisking vigorously back and forth in a straight line (not in a circular motion). Continue until the whisk has started to produce microfoam.

Pour the strawberry puree into the bottom of two 12-ounce (355 ml) glasses, then top with ice. Fill two-thirds of the way up the glass with the milk of your choice. Pour the just-prepared matcha over the top. Stir and enjoy as soon as possible.

💎 Enter to win a copy of Bake Sum!

Bake Sum has 75 recipes total so there’s lots more to explore. I’ve got a copy to gift one of you lucky PTFS subscribers!

Bake Sum Cookbook Giveaway lowdown:

• The prize: One (1) copy of Bake Sum: Asian American Pastries, Breads, and Other Treats (value $35)

• Eligibility: You must subscribe to Pass the Fish Sauce, be 18+ years of age, and have a valid U.S. shipping address.

• Giveaway end date: Wednesday, October 21, midnight PST.

• Selection and notification method: Based on the number of comments, I will randomly draw a winner and notify the person by email.

• ⚡️ To enter: ❤️ Like this post AND leave a comment (e.g., What’s your favorite classic or modern Asian-y sweet treat? What’s your favorite Asian bakery? What ingredient(s) signal ‘Asia’ to you?) 👇👇👇

Leave a comment

💎 Coming up . . .

Joyce’s recipes got me all nostalgic so I’m taking a walk down memory lane this Sunday with an updated take on a Viet-Chinese snack. Join us behind the paywall, if you have not!

See you on Sunday,

No, Rome was not built in a day, but it was built at breathtaking speed, its temples, amphitheaters, and aqueducts rising with the help of a magical blend of volcanic ash and lime. Today, that miraculous mortar has a less than enchanting name: concrete.

“Romans lived through a true architectural revolution, and at the foundation of this revolution, literally, was a concrete discovery,” said Admir Masic, a materials science professor at MIT who made waves a few years ago for unearthing the fast-hardening secret sauce for why Roman concrete is so durable. “They were able to take a pile of dirt and mix it together, add water, and turn it into solid rock of any arbitrary size. It literally changed everything.” 

And yet, for a millennia after the fall of Rome, the world largely forgot about concrete, until, in the 18th century, an English mason found that mixing limestone and clay could form a paste that hardened underwater. Another few decades later, concrete as we now know it was reborn, and once again, it changed everything. 

In the centuries since, concrete has come to reshape our way of life, with disastrous results for the climate. What early concrete evangelists didn’t realize was that the modern way of producing the substance released giant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As it has become increasingly central to modernity, it has helped fuel environmental catastrophe.

Today, however, a new generation of concretophiles like Masic have pored over the poured mixture in search of another miracle, a greener, more durable kind of concrete. And they’ve found multiple answers, from concrete that can heal its own cracks — as the Pantheon has for millennia — to electroconductive concrete capable of storing energy to a blend that allows concrete to soak up more CO2 than it emits. 

Together, they suggest that in a not-so-distant future, concrete — yes, concrete — one of the dirtiest substances ever concocted, could help save the planet, transforming our built environment while actually intervening in the climate for the better. 

How concrete built (and polluted) the modern world

It’s no wonder that luminaries of the neo-concrete age, Thomas Edison among them, marveled at the stuff just as their Roman predecessors had. They saw it as a harbinger of utopia, of a world in which anything and everything — a home, an interstate highway, a water pipe, a subway system, or a grand piano — could be molded and poured for a fraction of ordinary costs. 

“As to concrete dogs to stand warningly in the front yard and concrete cats to purr stonily under a concrete kitchen range,” the New York Times teased Edison in 1911 when he described his plans for a concrete home finished with concrete furnishings, “he made no announcement.”

The beguiled inventor’s utopian vision of a world remade by concrete would come true in more ways than he realized. Yes, it changed the way we build forever. Muddy roads and rotting wooden sidewalks gave way to smooth gray pavement, and newly cast sewer systems saved millions of lives in the deathly dirty cities of the early industrial era. Concrete, when poured over rods of steel, proved strong enough to prop up colossal skyscrapers that Julius Caesar could only have dreamed of. 

But there was a trade-off: Every time Edison fired up his trademark 150-foot kilns, scorching the limestone inside into blistering pebbles of cement clinker, he released hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

Yankee Stadium was built not by Babe Ruth’s swing alone, but with around 30,000 cubic yards of Edison concrete, whose creation released at least 5,400 tons of CO2, the equivalent of driving a gas-powered car 12.5 million miles, or to the moon and back more than two dozen times. But this is nothing compared with the roughly 30 billion tons of concrete the world now uses each year, enough to have turned the gluey gray goo into the second-most used material on Earth. (The first is water. Glug glug.) 

The Anthropocene has been built atop a foundation of concrete, its weight eclipsing the biomass of all living things, and its annual carbon tab responsible for up to 8 percent of global emissions, the equivalent of the entire country of India. Critically, unlike the astonishingly enduring remnants of Rome, our modern concrete decays quickly, so it must be repoured time and time again, which only makes it more environmentally catastrophic. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way, not anymore. 

“The future of concrete is to think differently, to go away from claiming that cement is bad,” Masic told me. “Our goal is to turn this around and make concrete part of the solution instead of being a problem.”

This is why we can have nice concrete

Per ton, concrete actually emits far less CO2 by volume than other materials like aluminum, steel, plastic, or glass. 

The problem is that we use so much of it, even a slightly negative footprint can quickly become enormous. But “the upside is,” said Sabbie Miller, a professor at UC Davis who focuses on sustainable concrete, “if you’re able to come up with some small change, then those small changes will also scale” in ways “that could have a huge effect on modern society and its burdens on the environment.” 

One of those solutions takes a cue from the Romans, who made concrete differently than we do today. Their once-mysterious method ensured that hulking structures like the Colosseum or the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct built during Augustus’ reign and still in use today, could survive for millennia while New York City’s Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or the Washington Bridge crumble after just a few decades of use. 

It’s not just that we drive cars over our concrete freeways while the Colosseum has been mostly free of even the bulkiest chariot wheels for millennia. The answer, according to Masic’s research, lies in the Romans’ ingenious recipe for cement, the glue that binds concrete together. When the ancients brewed a batch of cement, they left big white chunks of dormant lime in the final mixture. Later, if a crack formed, any water would react with the idle lime, filling the fissure with new stone. Our modern concrete has no such lime clasts, meaning that if water seeps into a crack, it degrades the structure from within, rusting the rebar that made our big towers possible, leading to a grim condition known as “concrete cancer.” 

Masic has recently turned his research into a startup called DMAT that reserves unreacted lime in concrete, giving it self-healing properties he says could extend a structure’s lifespan by about 50 percent, which in and of itself would reduce its carbon footprint by 40 percent. If the construction industry normalized such concrete or other mixtures that emit, say, half as much CO2 as usual, it would keep hundreds of millions of tons of it out of the atmosphere each year. 

But why stop there? Some startups have gotten much better in recent years at producing concrete capable of quite literally breathing in more CO2 than it emits in a process that takes advantage of concrete’s natural porousness. It could, in theory, turn our cities into concrete rainforests by turning the material into a storage reservoir. As Miller put it, “what if we can use our concrete to undo some of our environmental damages that we’ve already caused?” 

In the Bahamas, the startup Partanna has already built what it’s called the world’s first carbon net-negative home, an unassuming 1,250-square-foot abode that the company claims will sequester 182.6 tons of CO2 in its lifetime, the equivalent of hundreds of trees. Meanwhile, Masic’s lab has been piloting ways to turn concrete into a giant battery, capable of storing solar power during the day and releasing it at night, a green innovation that could cancel out its own carbon footprint within a few years of use. 

Masic believes that electroconductivity could be key to catalyzing a new era of concrete — more so even than his neo-Roman ventures. “It might hold the secret,” he said,  “for turning a bad guy into something amazing.” 

But as promising as these innovations are, it will take time for them to ripple out from model homes and into the concrete that actually surrounds us. American concrete startups have lost billions of dollars in federal funding and expected procurement contracts under the Trump administration. Some states, most notably California, are helping to pick up the slack, but investment still lags behind potential. There’s also the challenge of convincing builders running on paper thin margins that their old ways of doing things might fit better in a new mould. 

But concrete’s staggering scale means that we can’t afford to keep pouring it without considering its ugly trade-offs. More importantly, perhaps, we can’t afford to miss out on the opportunity that such a mammoth, transformative material presents to change everything yet again.