Reading Roundup: September 2025

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. If I had picked this book up earlier, it might have ended my reading drought last month. Written in very short chapters that make for breezy reading, the novel alternates scenes of a spy’s undercover life in rural France and the material she reads–emails she is surveilling, news articles related to her targets, books she picks up when bored. The spy, who goes by Sadie Smith, is trying to get close to a rural France farming collective in order to implicate them in political violence. Although the way, she more or less gets radicalized herself–but not to the farming collective, whose commune is rife with hypocrisies and embedded gender and class inequities. She is drawn involuntarily to the philosophies of a reclusive former political dissident, who the farming collective email for advice and whose rambling, didactic, but captivating messages she is supposed to be reviewing for evidence. The recluse styles himself as an expert on Neanderthal history and culture, so many of the short chapters explore what life might have been like before the rise of Homo sapiens–and contemplates whether there is any way out of the cycle of violence imposed by capitalism.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. In this nature memoir, the author is bitterly grieving their beloved father when they decide, somewhat recklessly, to train a goshawk. They already had ample experience training falcons and smaller birds of prey, and had read widely on falconry since a very young age–including T.H. White’s book The Goshawk, which appears as a sort of ghost haunting the pages of this book. But goshawks are considered wilder and more unpredictable than other raptors, and the author is frequently overwhelmed–by love and admiration, by frustration and fear, and by depression (which is eventually treated).
The author has much to share about the (rather elitist, to say nothing of sexist and nationalist) history of falconry in England and other countries, and I appreciate their careful and nuanced consideration of what drew them to this field as a child and why they remain involved in it despite its questionable points. They also reflect deeply on wildness, and what it means to bond so deeply with a wild goshawk who can be trained but not domesticated, and what wildness even means in 21st century England. That’s the most compelling part of the book to me, even more so than their personal arc of wrestling with grief or the parallel story of T. H. White’s disastrous goshawk training attempt: goshawks are wild birds that were nearly hunted to extinction by humans, then quietly bred and released into the wild by humans, now rarely caught or trained by humans; they hunt in lands that have been mined and cultivated and decimated and rewilded by humans, and the game they hunt in England was mostly imported anywhere from a few decades to a few centuries ago. Wildness has represented different things to human cultures at various points in history, but we almost always think of it as something untouched or untainted by human civilization…. and there is almost nothing in our world that meets that definition. That thread of realization, coupled with the astonishing descriptions of the landscape and the goshawk herself, kept me turning pages.

Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These are short, often meditative essays linking the author’s environmental observations withNishnaabeg oral traditions and musing on larger ideas about what water represents: water is iterative, adaptive, resilient, international. To embrace water is to embrace uncertainty, decentralization. It is perfect for my research and my upcoming workshop on writing about water, but also something I hope to reread in a few years as I have done with Braiding Sweetgrass.

Some short poems and stories I liked:
Valentine for Ernest Mann by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Day They Destroyed the Set of Waterworld by Melissa Llanes Brownlee
Your Life in Parties by Amber Sparks
I Am the NY Times Connections Puzzle and I Am the Reason Everyone Is Angry by Pardis Parker

Elsewhere

Well, this is delightful. Charlie Jane Anders asks Leigh Bardugo (The Ninth House), Mona Awad (Bunny), and Olivia Blake (Gifted and Talented) how to define dark academia.

Also delightful: a love letter to making little guys.

Toward its aim of preventing AI-generated articles, Wikipedia has published a fascinating roundup of stylistic patterns that may (but not always) be a sign of AI-generated text.

AI in the news:
How AI infrastructure is driving a sharp rise in electricity bills (PBS, September 5, 2025)
‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ (Radboud Universiteit, September 12, 2025)
CEOs Are Obsessed With AI, But Their Pushes to Use It Keep Ending in Disaster (Futurism, September 13, 2025)
The False Promise of “AI for Social Good” (Project Syndicate, September 15, 2025)
OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws (Computer World, September 18, 2025)
Behind Grok’s ‘sexy’ settings, workers review explicit and disturbing content (Business Insider, September 21, 2025)
How Much Water and Energy do Data Centers Consume? A New Jersey Bill Demands Answers. (Inside Climate News, September 24, 2025)
Inside the Memphis Chamber of Commerce’s Push for Elon Musk’s xAI Data Center (Propublica, August 22, 2025)

The big news, of course, is that the genAI company Anthropic settled a class action lawsuit and must pay authors whose works were used to train AI. Not because their works were used to train AI–at the moment, that falls under fair use–but because their works were pirated from an illegal library. So, it’s complicated. Some coverage:
What Authors Need to Know About the $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement (The Author’s Guild, September 5, 2025)
Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action (Ars Technica, August 26, 2025)
If The Thieving AI Company Can Survive The Legal Settlement, Then It Is Not Big Enough (Defector, September 8, 2025)

You can search LibGen to see if any of your own publications have been used to train AI.

Minutiae

September came and went almost before I could catch my breath. September is Walk Around Philadelphia Month, and I spent three sunny days trudging around the western perimeter of Philadelphia. The edge of the city is not always beautiful, but we passed through some glorious tree-shaded parks and quiet lanes and waterways where herons and turtles sunned themselves. We ate some fruit off of trees and shared our stories with complete strangers who we may or may not ever see again. September is also Fringe Festival month, and I did manage to catch a couple of good shows: Dogberry and Verges are Scared, a joke-every-minute homage to Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard that managed to be be sharply witty, and PRIDE and Prejudice, a staged reading of the 2005 screenplay that made it a lot gayer.

After six or eight weeks of physical therapy, I found that my injured hip felt the same as my uninjured hip–which is to say, stiff but functional. I started taking more dance classes. I spent a lovely Saturday down by the Delaware for River Fest, an event I have helped staff for the last four years because I really love talking to randos about the environment, and I am always pleasantly surprised by how much passersby want to talk about it. I took a day off and surprised my college best friend by showing up for his birthday dinner in the middle of the week. I started collaborating on a project that excites and energizes me, but which I can’t talk about yet.

It wasn’t all high effort, high reward activity all month. Whenever I spent my physical and social battery, I sank into low spirits and energy. I followed my New Vegas replay (independent Vegas ending, fairly satisfied with my choices) with a Fallout 3 replay. I watched TV shows I can’t even recall when asked (except for the Jane Austen adaptations, inspired by my theater experience, which are actually just as enjoyable the second or tenth time around).