When a country is intent on committing suicide, as is Britain, it celebrates the very things that have led, or are leading, to its demise. Whether this is because it thinks it no longer has a right to exist and the world would be better off without it, or whether it is because, when something appears inevitable to us, we welcome it to disguise our impotence to halt it, I do not know. But the fact is that London is about to have a museum devoted to the kind of architecture that has turned so much of Britain’s urban landscape into a visual nightmare, a scouring of the retina.
I have long suspected, but cannot prove with an indisputable argument, that this architecture has played its part in the brutalization of daily life and social behavior in the country. Certainly, it has dehumanized the appearance of many towns and cities; its harsh surfaces and willfully austere and jagged designs leave the mere human being feeling that he is about as welcome as an ant on a kitchen counter — which, indeed, he now much resembles.
This architecture is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful, not despite the fact that so many people detest it, but because so many people detest it. They are like the doctors of old, who, if they could not cure their patients, could at least make them take the most repellent and noxious medicine, on the grounds that a little bit of what revolts you does you good.
The projected museum is in a former school in the north of London, designed in 1968. Here is fairly typical commentary on the building:
Despite decades of wear and some unfortunate interventions, the raw concrete structure has remained a cherished example of socially driven modernist design.
It is to be noticed that the cherishing done here is independent of anyone who cherishes; as for “socially driven modernist design”, we might read “totalitarian”. Indeed, the building exudes totalitarianism, as raw reinforced concrete exudes ghastly stains after a short time.
Le Corbusier, one of the founders of this kind of architecture, was indeed a fascist in the most literal sense, though he had no real objection to communist totalitarianism, either. What he most hated was what he called the street, that is to say the place where people behave spontaneously and without direction from above, and where they are not corralled into functions imposed on them by all-wise socially driven architects. It was for this reason that he and his acolytes preferred to build urban wildernesses of the kind that have now been built the world over, but especially in Britain.
The architects who have been given the task of renewing the school building where the museum dedicated to architectural brutalism is to be housed have “noted its distinct geometry, as well as its symbolic presence reflecting the ideals of the school’s broader 1960s Brutalist architecture conceived in an era of social progress”.
Apologists for such architecture write a pure Soviet langue de bois — or perhaps I should say langue de béton, since concrete rather than wood is their favorite material:
Consultation with the school, families and local stakeholders has underpinned the project from the outset, ensuring that the building’s next chapter remains tied to its founding ethos centered on architecture as a tool for collective learning and expression.
Does anyone, after the death of the late, not much lamented, Leonid Brezhnev, have thoughts that correspond to, or are couched in, words such as these? By their language shall ye know them.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Architects of Our Own Destruction”, New English Review, 2025-08-08.
December 2, 2025
QotD: Brutalism “is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful”
November 28, 2025
Social media isn’t completely a depressing waste of time
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen reacts to a political hack who wants to impose regulations on social media that would allow him to shut down people who criticize him and other swamp creatures:
We all know what’s really going on here.
Utah senator John Curtis, and other political hacks like him, are getting their boomer asses handed to them on social media.
They long for the days of television, when they could control the narrative by having a cozy relationship with the networks, and so they could lie to you without fear of contradiction by some autist named @DataRepublican whose existence is solely defined by her full-time hobby of sniffing out lying dirtbags.
So they want to pass a bunch of laws to make the internet behave like television. To filter it all through a set of major website choke-points that they can control by threatening the corporate entities that run them.
Long, complicated, and vaguely defined liability laws are a tool to do that.
Basically what they do is allow John Curtis to put any website out of business if people say mean things about him on it, such as pointing out that he looks like some kind of deranged and malevolent goblin that just crawled out of a swamp.
The problem he has right now is that when I say stuff like that on Twitter, I’m the one who said it.
Not Twitter.
There’s nothing he can do to me. Because even if I get hit by a unmarked sedan tomorrow in a totally unrelated accident, there’s a million more people like me who are only too happy to point out that John Curtis looks like a deranged and malevolent goblin that just crawled out of a swamp.
So he wants legal tools to punish Twitter for what I said.
So how does he go about that? What is a deranged and malevolent goblin, with a “business management” degree, and a history of changing political parties when convenient, to do?
Why, muddy the waters with vague platitudes about “safety”, of course.
Except we’ve heard that song before, and we’re not interested. So let us laugh at him, remind him that he looks like a deranged and malevolent goblin that just crawled out of a swamp, and mock until he goes back to doing what he normally does, which is shilling for the “Fairness For High Skilled Immigrants Act”.
And then we can eventually replace him with someone who cares about fairness to actual fucking Americans.
Update, 29 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
November 19, 2025
Ken Burns’ The American Revolution gets the Howard Zinn seal of approval
CDR Salamander is persuaded, against his better judgement, to watch the latest Ken Burns documentary … and discovers that it’s somehow still 2018-2022 in Burns’ world:
So, I’ve watched the two episodes of Ken Burns’s documentary, The American Revolution, in spite of my stated zero desire to do so. Why? If you are not up to speed with the MSNBCification of Ken Burns over the last decade, catch up.
Anyway, as Mrs. Salamander knows more about the American Revolution than 99.7% of people out there, she insisted we watch it. I’ve been married for over three decades for a reason, so I sat down with her to watch.
FFS.
… and … it started with a land acknowledgement. ISYN.
It doesn’t get better.
By the end of episode two we’ve gotten through the Battle of Bunker Hill, yet there has been no mention of John Locke, Montesquieu, or any of the other philosophical drivers of the revolution. They have plenty of time to quote the memories of an old man about what he thought of George Washington when he ran into him when he was 8 (it wasn’t good).
Let’s pause there a bit. It is clear that they made a decision that for every good thing they say about GW in the first two episodes, they insist on finding a way to smear him with presentism. It is also clear that he really wants to do a documentary on African Americans in the Revolutionary War, but couldn’t get the funding for that. Instead there is a constant referring back to slavery and racial issues. Just overdone to the point of being obvious, given that they were, at best, tertiary issues during the war. It deserves mention, but not in this ham-fisted, patronizing manner it is being done … and done mostly to smear GW up.
The presentism and biased scholarship is not shocking if you’ve read my reports at my Substack over the years about the absolute woke-soaked state of American historical organizations such as the American Historical Association. (see my FEB 2021 Substack, “The War on (Military) History: Half a Century In” for reference.)
The smearing of GW like this is more than “balance” — it is emblematic of the presentism that makes so many modern virtue signaling tiresome — and exactly meets the low expectations I had for this documentary.
There is also the pettiness of their choices of what to comment on, and how — the smug New England perspective of the Acela Corridor that is Ken Burns’ intellectual terrarium. Just one example from the second episode: the arrival of the Virginians to support the patriot forces around Boston. Might as well have called them rednecks.
Even Mrs. Salamander, halfway through Ep. 2, had about enough of the shoehorned in identity politics of “inclusion” … as if everyone ever got over the fever of 2018-2022.
October 23, 2025
Karine Jean-Pierre’s “tell-nothing tell-all” memoir of the Biden White House
In the free-to-cheapskates part of this post (i.e., outside the paywall), Matt Taibbi discusses the former White House Press Secretary’s book Independent as the author does the rounds of TV talk shows to boost it:
Independent, the new tell-nothing tell-all by former Joe Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, is framed in the introduction as the patriotic diatribe of a once-loyal Democrat who’s now “free to speak for myself” and “eager to say what I think”, thanks to a dramatic decision:
After being a party insider for twenty years, I now believe I can fight harder for my country from outside the Democratic Party than from within it. From here on, I am politically an independent.
Just a few pages later, however, Jean-Pierre claims she only noticed something wrong with Biden once, during his infamous debate performance last June 27th. “Whoa … He must be sick,” she deadpans, then reframes Independent as an answer to a book she hasn’t even read:
CNN anchor Jake Tapper kicked off the debate. He later wrote a supposed tell-all about Biden, Original Sin … accusing [Biden] of a cover-up of his mental decline and how his aides quashed concerns. I was technically a part of the president’s inner circle and saw Biden every day and saw no such decline. I never read Tapper’s book and don’t ever plan to because that does not track with what I saw in the White House.
It’s all entertaining stuff (the “technically” is hilarious). Jean-Pierre announces she’s finally free to tell the truth, but begins by declaring that Tapper’s Original Sin — another book marketed as “the full, unsettling truth … told for the first time” — was wrong not because Tapper was lying about how long it took for him to notice Biden’s problems, but because Biden never had any problems to notice.
Jean-Pierre is generating significant negative Internet wattage this week, battered everywhere for insisting she never saw anything concerning in Biden’s private behavior. In a wild exchange with Gayle King of CBS, she doubled down on a book passage claiming she didn’t even see an issue with Biden before the critical debate, even though she traveled to it with him on Air Force One (“Maybe I was too nervous … to notice whether or not he was sniffling?”). Apparently, that trip was a rare instance in which Jean-Pierre not only didn’t talk to Biden on the plane, but didn’t have conversations with anyone who did. “I had no clue Biden had a cold and was off his game”, she wrote, “until he began to speak at the debate”.
Independent reads like an oxygen-deprived sequel to Tapper’s book. The humorous premise of Original Sin involved Tapper’s sources insisting Biden “stole an election” because if he’d stepped aside earlier, the party might have had a “robust primary” — exactly the scenario they spent years fighting to avoid, savaging challengers like Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and smearing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. directly into the arms of Donald Trump. The CNN man insisted “insiders” who had a “much better window into Biden’s condition than the general public” saw things that “shocked them” before last June’s debate, when the awful truth finally became obvious even to news media. But according to Tapper, the problem wasn’t so much that insiders lied, but were lied to. His first chapter was titled “He totally fucked us”, a quote about Biden by Kamala Harris aide David Plouffe.
Never mind that the world could see Biden was in drool-cup mode as far back back as 2019, or that Special Counsel Robert Hur made it legal record that Biden likely couldn’t be convicted because a jury would see him as incompetent, an “elderly man with a poor memory” who couldn’t find his own underpants, let alone classified papers he was accused of mishandling. No, the problem was, “Biden fucked us”.
Jean-Pierre has now one-upped Tapper by insisting nothing was wrong with Biden and that — get this — the real problem was that the press undermined the president, and not after the debate, but all along! “Pretty much since the day he’d stepped into the White House”, Jean-Pierre wrote, “the press had taken every opportunity to imply Biden was too old or mentally unfit for the job”. She is referring to the same press corps that insisted Biden was “sharp as a tack” for four and a half years, while he was serially sternum-poking voters, staring into space, walking off set in the middle of interviews, and turning every public ceremony into a potential Chevy Chase routine
October 19, 2025
Forever War: Becoming the Enemy
Feral Historian
Published 8 Mar 2024The Forever War is a great piece of post-Vietnam social critique, not least in its depiction of a society that deserves to lose the war that its chosen to fight. Here I talk about the story through that lens, meandering toward a point in the usual Feral Historian manner.
Also I wanted to get this one out because I’m going to make some Forever War comparisons in an upcoming video.
Most of the B-Roll is from the Forever War comic adaptation, both the original black and white version and the later color release. Also threw in some clips from Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars just to mix up the visuals a bit because there’s already too much of me sitting on a rock.
00:00 Intro
00:53 The Draft
03:25 It’s so Army …
06:54 No Civilization
09:35 War’s Over. My Bad
13:14 Parting Thoughts
October 13, 2025
Stephen Fry’s Odyssey weighed in the balance and found wanting
Bryan Mercadente received a copy of Stephen Fry’s latest foray into Greek mythology and not only is not impressed, he writes, “Every page wasted on Fry is a page stolen from the real thing. The copy my aunt has given me for my birthday is already skimmed with disgust and thrown into the dustbin: it is too disgusting for the charity shops.”
The Iliad and Odyssey are the founding works of our civilisation. They are poems of war, loss, exile, and return. The hero of The Odyssey is a liar, a man of cunning and cruelty, but also a survivor who longs for home. The Homeric poems have come to us out of the Bronze Age. They have survived the collapse of at least two civilisations, and will survive the collapse of our own. They survive because they are already perfect. The hexameters carry an austere music. Their formulaic epithets — “ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς“, “πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς“, “δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς” — are the memory-tricks of a sung tradition, but they also give the poems a dignity that no one who reads them can ever forget. Like The Iliad, The Odyssey was not written to be read in comfort with a cup of tea. It was composed to be chanted in smoky halls to men who might be dead tomorrow.
Stephen Fry knows none of this. Or if he knows it, he does not care. His Odyssey is Homer without the difficulty. It is Homer stripped of his grandeur, reduced to banter and “relatable” anecdotes. The Observer praised it for bringing “contemporary relevance” to the myths. That line is damning enough. Homer does not need contemporary relevance. A book that has spoken to audiences across three thousand years already possesses the only relevance that matters. To make Homer relevant is to make him trivial.
The Guardian called the book “relatable and full of humour“. Again, the praise condemns. Relatable? Homer is not relatable. The world he describes is harsh and alien. His heroes live by honour and die by the sword. They weep like children and sacrifice to gods who may or may not answer. That strangeness is the point. It is what makes Homer worth reading. To make him “relatable” is to gut him of meaning.
The Irish Independent calls Fry “A born storyteller“. This blurb, like the others, is the language of people who cannot read. No serious critic would praise a reteller of Homer as “a born storyteller”, as if the original poet were not the greatest storyteller of them all. These blurbs are not criticism. They are advertising slogans. And they work. The book is a bestseller.
Why, then, is Fry’s book a bestseller? Not because of merit. It sells because of Stephen Fry himself. For thirty years, he has been cultivated as a “national treasure”. He is the ideal leftist intellectual: clever enough to appear learned, shallow enough never to disturb. He quotes Wilde, sprinkles in Latin tags, and sprinkles them badly. His claque tells us that he is bipolar, gay, witty, and charming. He is on panel shows, chat shows, and literary festivals. He is always agreeable, always moderate, and always applauded.
Fry has built a career on the fact that the English middle classes like to feel cultured without effort. They want Plato without philosophy, Shakespeare without metre, Wagner without subversion, Homer without Greek. They want to be reassured that the classics are not difficult or dangerous, but fun. Fry gives them what they want. He domesticates the wild. He reduces epic to anecdote. He packages civilisation as entertainment.
It is not enough to call this dumbing down. It is worse. Dumbing down implies a reduction in complexity. What Fry does is not simplification but falsification. The Odyssey is not a sequence of funny stories about gods and monsters. It is about endurance and the fragility of human life under the indifference of the divine. To make it “funny” is to destroy it. It is as if someone rewrote the Inferno as a travel blog or recast the Iliad as a football commentary. The whole point of the work is lost.
Popularity, however, is not a defence. It is an indictment. Books that sell by the million are almost always worthless. They are consumed because they flatter the prejudices of the public. They make readers feel clever without having to be clever. They make them feel cultured without culture. They are the literary equivalent of processed food: cheap, sweet, addictive, fattening.
What, then, is the harm? Why not let people have their Fry and be happy? So what if his writing is as inconsequential as his suicide attempts? The harm is that time is short. Every hour spent on Stephen Fry is an hour not spent on Homer. It is an hour subtracted from Gibbon, Johnson, or Shakespeare. It is an hour less of life. The opportunity cost is everything. Bad books are not neutral. They are parasites. They feed on the hours that might have been spent on good ones.
September 17, 2025
Dark Forest Deterrence: Bureaucrats are Destroying the Universe
Feral Historian
Published 2 Sept 2022A quick look at a minor and neglected detail of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem series. I trust that everyone has done the reading.
September 5, 2025
BBC’s new King and Conqueror series
In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank discusses the BBC’s latest attempt to recast British history in a way more pleasing to, as the Critical Drinker would say, “modern audiences”:
If you care about truth, beauty or goodness, I have bad news for you: the BBC has just created a historical drama set in the Middle Ages. Yes, this is the arrival of King and Conqueror, which depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest. The raw matter of the historical record is incredibly promising: ferocious royal intrigues, hagiographical piety, civil and not so civil war, and all the strange poetics and ceremony of French and Anglo-Saxon courtly life. The culture that gave us Lincoln Cathedral and the culture that gave us Sutton Hoo, should be reason alone for the most spectacular of costumes, battles and speeches.
But anyone hoping for a moving epic or a gripping thriller would be equally disappointed, as the brainless BBC tramples cheerfully into a sordid pastiche even more gormless than Game of Thrones (which at least had a decent budget). Future King of England Harold Godwinson (played by James Norton) is introduced to audiences uttering the admittedly pretty Anglo-Saxon phrase “it’s a fucking massacre”, in the manner of someone commenting on an especially brutal 3-nil football match.
I could induce miserable groaning from readers at this point by listing every meta-level historical inaccuracy from the almost entirely fictitious events of the coronation, to the succession of geographical and biographical distortions that rain down on viewers like so many 11th century arrows, to the inexplicable but inevitable (it’s the BBC) presence of black Anglo-Saxons. But none of these departures from the historical record are inherently unforgivable and might in theory be justified in the name of telling a compelling story.
What is truly egregious is not the fictionalisation of details, but the outright misrepresentation of the morals, manners and minds of medieval man. If the past really was a foreign country, then the BBC would be rightly besieged by those outraged at the bigoted, hate-filled and slanderous portrayal of that alien nation in this drama. Edward the Confessor, a man who has been quite literally beatified, is depicted beating his own mother to death. Duke William of Normandy, is shown murdering a man in broad daylight for setting a captured enemy free. Later on, when the enemy — rebellious vassal Guy of Burgundy — is recaptured, he is personally tortured by William’s wife Matilda.
The modern imagination has rendered these figures, and the times they lived in, as more brutal than they truly were. Even the famously ruthless William, who grew up dodging assassins and facing down rebellious barons, is not the thuggish hard man the series would present. The historical accounts suggest that he was a strict adherent to chivalric custom and a deeply pious man. In the real world, William banishes Guy then declares the “peace of God” in Normandy, bringing an end to violence and retribution for the crimes of the past decades. King Edward, who is presented as a snivelling, cowardly mother’s boy, was by every contemporary account a heroic, forceful and gregarious ruler, one who had his mother exiled, and certainly not murdered.
August 31, 2025
Andrew Doyle’s The End of Woke
In The Critic, Titania McGrath reviews The End of Woke, and nobody should be surprised that it isn’t a rave review, although there is some raving:
Renowned grifter Andrew Doyle has written another “book” called The End of Woke. It’s the most repugnant piece of tripe ever to reach the printing press. It’s ignorant, ill-formed and offensive in the extreme. I have absolutely no intention of reading it.
Not content with his previous fascist manual Free Speech and Why It Matters, Doyle in his new book challenges ideological dogma on both the left and the right. It is laughable that he believes that anyone would be interested in such an approach. Imagine being so insecure in your belief-system that you would be open to persuasion and debate.
Doyle is a reactionary monster with a sub-zero IQ, one who is so unenlightened that he does not seem to realise that “liberal values” and “free speech” are Nazi dog-whistles. Having skim-read the blurb of The End of Woke, I’ve gleaned that Doyle supports outmoded and frankly immature notions such as “tolerance” and “liberty”. And he has a head like a cube (see above).
It was to be expected that bigots would approve of this book. The “comedian” Jimmy Carr called it “thought-provoking and entertaining”. The white male author Michael Shermer said it was “a magisterial read”. And that evil cisgender demon Julie Bindel wrote in The Critic that it was “the best work yet by the creator of genius parody Titania McGrath”.
August 22, 2025
QotD: “White fragility”
Carlos Lozada, “White fragility is real. But ‘White Fragility’ is flawed,” Washington Post, quoted by Ann Althouse, 2020-06-19.
August 4, 2025
TERF Island
At Spiked, Jo Bartosch reviews Fiona McAnena’s TERF Island: How the UK Resisted Trans Ideology:
The truth is, before they are revered, history-makers are almost always reviled. From universal suffrage to the abolition of the slave trade, the freedoms we take for granted today began as the unpopular obsessions of the awkward and bloody-minded. Fiona McAnena’s TERF Island: How the UK Resisted Trans Ideology charts how just such a small group of determined women – mocked, maligned and misrepresented – dragged sex-based rights back from the brink, often at huge personal cost. It’s the story of how they were hated before they became feted.
Part battle manual and part whodunnit, TERF Island is an insider’s chronicle of how a scrappy, unfunded grassroots movement of mostly middle-aged women outmanoeuvred a lobby bankrolled by billionaires and cheered on by multinational corporations and well-intentioned human-resources departments.
I have been involved in the TERF wars for a decade, and I know McAnena herself is no bystander. Formerly a volunteer at Fair Play for Women and now director of campaigns at Sex Matters, she has done her time in the trenches, too. Each chapter is a vivid, accurate and compelling profile of a key figure in the movement, including Transgender Trend’s Stephanie Davies-Arai, Fair Play for Women’s Nicola Williams, Let Women Speak founder Kellie-Jay Keen and Maya Forstater, whose case against her employer established gender-critical beliefs as protected in UK law – all women I’m proud to know.
It’s almost hard to remember how recently it was considered heresy to say, to use the words popularised by Keen, that “a woman is an adult human female”. In April, the Supreme Court confirmed this truth in law. The BBC may still choke on it, but the legal precedent stands. Yet only a few years ago, saying this out loud could land you in a police station, on the dole queue or even in hospital.
McAnena captures the febrile atmosphere of those early days, when stating a biological fact was enough to have you smeared as a fascist. She takes us inside the campaigns that exposed the lunacy of housing violent male offenders in women’s prisons, the cruelty of sterilising confused children and the institutional capture of sporting organisations. Now, a decade after Davies-Arai launched Transgender Trend, barely a week passes without a professional body or council quietly reversing a discriminatory “trans inclusive” policy. That didn’t happen by accident.
What makes TERF Island so readable is that it doesn’t just document the headline moments. McAnena records the unglamorous grind: women lobbying MPs, poring over policy documents and calmly dismantling pseudoscience from stalls in the high streets of British towns. As McAnena puts it, the campaign against gender self-identification, which galvanised the resistance, brought “hundreds of women on to the streets and thousands more online to defend their sex-based rights”. “It was the catalyst for greater awareness, resistance and campaigning for the rights of women and children in the face of the demands of transgender ideology.”
June 30, 2025
QotD: Britons and their NHS
I have to run a gamut of procedures to do so and face a receptionist who treats me as a fraud trying to get something to which I am not entitled, and I have no practitioner whom I can call my doctor. The NHS has crowded out private competition, and the nearest private doctor is 25 miles away. Suffice it to say that, if I want to see a doctor, it is easier, quicker and more pleasant for me to go to France than to the health centre about 300 yards from my house in England.
I cannot in all honesty say, however, that my health has suffered in any measurable way as a result of this unpleasantness, because my health is good and I am not a doctor-botherer. But it does reveal something about Britain that is not true in France: in our dealings with the NHS, we are a nation of paupers who must accept what we are given by grace and favour of the system. It may be good or it may be bad, but we have to accept it.
Furthermore, under the NHS doctors themselves are becoming ever less members of a liberal profession and ever more executors of orders from on high, with little leeway to consider whether these orders are good or bad in the case of the individual case before them.
This is a problem in all systems in which a third party pays for patients’ treatment, but it is particularly acute in a highly-centralised and dirigiste system such as the NHS, in which uniformity is the goal, even if it be uniformity of error. And increasingly, it creates an atmosphere of technical, managerial and ethical conformity.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.
June 10, 2025
They Live SG-1: Conquest and Paternalism
Feral Historian
Published 26 Jan 2024Stargate and SG-1 generally don’t go together, but they’re based on the same underlying premise. Our leaders are lying to us, denying us knowledge of fundamental truths about our world. Truths that can be the difference between freedom and slavery for all of humanity.
Sidenote, this is the first time I’ve shot one of these videos indoors instead of in the mountains. It’s -24 out on the day of recording.
00:00 Intro
01:05 Stargate
03:11 Ruling Class
04:18 Secrets
06:02 Illusions
06:48 Conclusion
May 21, 2025
AI hallucinations capture the Chicago Sun-Times summer reading list
Good luck finding some of the highly recommended books on the Chicago Sun-Times list of summer reading … they don’t actually exist (yet):
Critics aren’t perfect.
Sometimes they get facts wrong. Sometimes their judgment is faulty. Sometimes they dangle their modifiers or split their infinitives with everybody watching.
I’ve been there. And it’s awkward.
But I’ve never seen anything as embarrassing as the “Summer Reading List for 2025” in the Chicago Sun-Times.
It gave glowing reviews to books that don’t exist. And I bet you can guess why.
Yes, the newspaper relied on AI to write the article.
The article starts with a recommendation for Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende. This is Allende’s “first climate fiction novel” where “magical realism meets environmental activism”.
It’s a shame that Allende never wrote this book. Nor did anyone else — the book simply doesn’t exist.
(I’ll predict, however, that an AI-generated book with this title will show up on Amazon within a few days. When you live in a world of AI hallucinations, this is how the business model plays out.)
The next book on the Sun-Times list is The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir. This novel is also non-existent. But the storyline — about rogue AI that gains consciousness — makes me think that the bots are now mocking us.
It doesn’t get better. The first 10 books on the summer reading list are entirely hallucinated.
As the story of the fake reviews spread on social media, the Sun-Times got into damage control mode. It issued a public statement denying responsibility.
But that just makes matters worse.
Why are they publishing garbage without vetting it? And the denial is also implausible.
Somebody at the newspaper must have given the okay to this. The printing presses don’t run themselves (although maybe that will be the next stage of the AI business model).
How is this happening?
We are now several years into the AI revolution. I’m constantly hearing about new, improved bots that are smarter than super-geniuses, and can replace lowly humans.
But the bizarre lapses are getting worse — and more dangerous.
AI is routinely making stupid, nonsensical mistakes that even the most incompetent employee would never make. I’ve met some incompetent journalists over the years, but none would make a boneheaded move of this magnitude.
And this is after a trillion dollars has been sunk into AI by the most powerful corporations in the world. This is after they have soaked up much of the energy grid. This is after all the training and vetting and upgrading.
We’re not talking about beta testing or first generation AI. Silicon Valley is actually bragging about this tech — but it’s stupider than the worst journalist in the country.
May 17, 2025
QotD: Suburbs and their critics
It gets a lot of bad press, it has got a lot of influential haters, ridiculers and deriders. There are the urbanists, the town planners, the architects, most of whom can’t abide the sprawl. It’s ugly, inefficient, unsustainable, it lacks amenities and it lacks a sense of community, it prioritises – or privileges, as they would say – cars over pedestrians, it wastes space and it wastes resources, it’s barbaric. Those much smarter and more creative than us have offered a lot of alternatives: high-density living, modernist spaces, Le Corbusier’s houses as “machines for living”. They tore down the slums and erected high rise projects, council flats, banlieues and osiedla. They designed and built whole new districts, rich in concrete and wide bare expanses of public space.
Then there are the cultural as opposed to professional haters, and they too are as old as the suburbs themselves. The sprawl is a prison, a conformist hell. It deadens imagination and stifles creativity. It’s full of dumb people leading dumb lives. It’s a triumph of materialism, selfishness and narrow mindedness over selflessness, community and commonweal. From literature through movies and music to TV shows, suburbs don’t get a break; they are the hotbed of reaction, sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, intolerance, prejudice, oppression and kitsch. “Revolutionary Road”, “Stepford Wives”, “American Beauty”, “Weeds”, “Little Boxes”, Stephen King novels, the list is endless, but you get the drift.
There are many differences between the suburbanites and the suburbs haters, but the one big one is this: the suburbanities are the live-and-let-live crowd – they know what they like but they don’t give a shit if you don’t like it. It’s your business and it’s your life – you can do whatever you like. The suburbs haters, on the other hand, not only know what they like but they believe that everyone else should like it to, and if they don’t, tough luck, they should be forced to change for the sake of what’s really good for them and for the whole community. Suburbs are not something that can be tolerated as an option; they should be destroyed, land reclaimed, ideally by nature, their former residents corralled and concentrated.
In many ways it’s yet another example of the old elite versus the masses cultural clash. The masses essentially just want to be left alone. The elites want to remake the whole world so it accords to their vision of what’s good and useful. The masses’ is not to question why …
Arthur Chrenkoff, “In praise of sprawl”, Daily Chrenk, 2020-05-21.
