Reading Roundup: August 2025

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell. An engrossing story of an Irish family living in England in the 1970s. Their secrets come out during the London drought and subsequent water ban of 1976–a setting that exacerbates family conflicts and makes mysterious more surreal, but otherwise has little impact on their lives (one character fully takes a bath without repercussion, despite the ban). And the novel employes one of my least favorite strategies for artificially dialing up suspense: two characters share a secret and think/talk about it constantly, but it is only revealed to the reader in breadcrumbs. Yet I happily sank into the fractured family life of these characters, lulled by the deft prose of this author (whose novella The Marriage Portrait I loved).

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Nils Bubandt, and Elaine Gan. I’ve had this one on my TBR ince I read the intriguing introduction in a class last year, but I don’t have the attention span for entire academic volumes that I used to. A series of long train rides at the beginning of August offered a good opportunity to buckle down and get into it. It’s an intriguingly arranged book, a do-si-do with the “monsters” section starting on one end and the “ghosts” section starting on the other, stitched in the middle. And the premise is precisely up my alley: the monsters of the Anthropocene are the strange hybrids and intersections and symbioses created by climate change and industrialization; its ghosts are the traces of the past wounds that still make themselves felt. Very poetic, in theory. In reality, this is an essay collection based on a conference (strike one) that brought together speakers of different disciplines (mostly anthropology and biology) that aren’t accustomed to speaking to one another (strike two). There are good moments in individual essays, but the whole doesn’t hang together in a cohesive, compelling argument.

I started Is a River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane, which is beautifully written and opens with an image that is very personally compelling to me: the chalk springs in the author’s native Cambridge that have nearly dried up due to the rising global temperature. The rest of the book will go on to explore different ways of attributing aliveness to a river–in animism, in law, and so forth–but I had to return my copy to the library, so I will have to pick it up another day.

Elsewhere

I feel like everyone has to make their own relationship with social media, because the cost-benefit analysis is just not going to be identical for any two of us, and goodness knows I love a self-harming strategy I can easily access on my pocket computer. But I did quit Instagram, I do not regret it (except that there’s not another great way to keep up with visual artists I love), and this newsletter does a good job of articulating why it was bad for my brain, specifically.

An aching yet humorous meditation on spirituality and the kitsch of Cracker Barrel and other artifacts of Americana.

I actually have never read anything by Elizabeth Gilbert, but the books I read and even the way I write have been impacted by the bestselling Eat Pray Love in some obvious ways and some ways I haven’t even noticed. I loved this New Yorker article that reckons with this influence on the way women frame their life stories. If it’s behind a paywall and you’re not sure it’s worth the effort to plug it into archive.ph or similar, let me assure you–it also digs into the contents of the author’s new memoir, and it is wild. Come for the literary criticism, stay because you love mess.

AI in the news:
Why women are wary of the AI rush (Salon, July 28, 2025)
Musk’s Memphis xAI data center and the making of a ‘Digital Delta’ (Scalawag, July 31, 2025)
ChatGPT users shocked to learn their chats were in Google search results (Ars Technica, August 1, 2025)
AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified (Ars Technica, August 8, 2025)
How Wikipedia is fighting AI slop content (The Verge, August 8, 2025)
As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act (AP News, August 9, 2025)
OpenAI Scrambles to Update GPT-5 After Users Revolt (Wired, August 11, 2025)
AI tools used by English councils downplay women’s health issues, study finds (Guardian, August 11, 2025)
Educational AI Risks Becoming an Authoritarian Vehicle for Thought Control (Truthout, August 11, 2025)
The AI Industry Is Still Light-Years From Making a Profit, Experts Warn (Futurism, August 16, 2025)
Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how much (The Conversation, August 19, 2025)
Historian Mar Hicks on why nothing about AI is inevitable (Fast Company, August 21, 2025)
Why utility bills are rapidly rising in some states (CBS News, August 23, 2025)
Big tech’s selective disclosure masks AI’s real climate impact (Ketan Joshi, August 23, 2025)

WIRED, who I depend on for tech news, had a mishap with a ChatGPT-using plagiarist earlier this year. I appreciate that they were transparent about it.
Wired and Business Insider remove ‘AI-written’ freelance articles (Press Gazette, August 22, 2025)
How WIRED Got Rolled by an AI Freelancer (Wired, August 21, 2025)

I waited until I had a long train ride to read this, but it really gets into the public details about genAI-adjacent stock and trade: The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble (Where’s Your Ed At?, July 21, 2025)

Minutiae

I started the month at a sprint, three train trips in one long week. The first was to Pittsburgh to spend a weekend with my family. The second was just a day trip to New Hope to visit a friend and do some writing. The third was to the Hudson Valley, near where I did the writing retreat in June; this time was to a wedding that involved a pageant, a dance party, and a singalong.

These trips were all lovely in their way, and I got to see some people I love and have some interesting and artful experiences, but together they drained my social battery almost past recuperation. Hence the uncharacteristically short list of books read; all I wanted to do in August was immerse myself in escapist worlds, and I found it most expedient to do that in streaming shows (nothing memorable, alas) and replaying Stardew Valley and Fallout: New Vegas.

I went to physical therapy weekly for my injured hip, which has been extremely effective. I slowly started going back to ballet. I cooked a lot–a poignant pleasure after 11 days of traveling and subsisting mainly on gluten-free toast with various dairy-free spreads. (At this moment I feel that I never want to see bread again.) I hosted a reading group for my fellow watershed stewards at the schoolyard garden I spent the spring working on, and traveled with watershed stewards to a gorgeous flower farm within the city limits that felt surprisingly rural (and extremely eco-friendly). I catsat for various members of my foster community as they went on vacation. After seeing a trailer for an upcoming Odyssey adaptation, I talked my friends into watching The Odyssey (1997), a two-part made-for-TV adaptation that I remember staying up late for and watching breathlessly. This turned to be a hilarious choice. We amassed a banquet of movie snacks and hooted, hollered, and heckled throughout, even as we admired the pre-CGI era of practical effects. (This movie doesn’t hold up to Jurassic Park, which was released several years before, but its creatures were created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, which brought its own charm and pathos.) If there’s a lesson in my August, it might be about pacing. It might suggest cultivating pleasures close to home. Or it might just advise being unserious when you can, who can say.