The Red Arrow by William Brewer. A thoughtful, well-written novel that I admired but couldn’t quite love. Elegantly structured through a narrator’s nesting flashbacks as he hurtles through Italy on the high speed Frecciarossa (red arrow), the novels explores so many themes that are also important to me: creativity, depression, feeling like a fraud, turning to research and reading for inspiration and finding yourself a bit lost there…. let me tell you, this was a tough read while I was procrastinating from my thesis project. It also explores psilocybin therapy in earnest, and doubling, and the possible nonexistence of time even as we experience ourselves hurtling inevitably toward mortality… all gracefully rendered, less painful to read but also a little off-putting.
Platform Decay by Martha Wells. New Murderbot! I read this in a day, relishing the return of familiar faces and some new personal discoveries on the part of our favorite depressed SecUnit (who has a mental health module now).
Eco24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, edited by Marisa Van Uden. My ecofiction Discord server chose this for a community read this summer. It’s a wide-ranging collection with stories that invoke genre conventions from horror and dystopian fiction and fantasy and more, and thus represents a pretty wide range of relationships to the natural world and humanity’s place within it… so, much to think about (especially for a community that reads a lot of ecofiction!) but not the most pleasurable reading experience. We discussed the stories in clusters of four and I mostly read it that way as well.
The Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao is a substantial tome, but such a compelling read I couldn’t put it down. I recommend it highly. I feel like a fairly knowledgeable layperson–I read a lot of AI news, so I knew a lot of the key players and major issues laid out in this book (which felt validating, to be honest). But I understand so much more after reading it. A longtime tech reporter, Hao could explain the history and context of AI development in a clear and accessible way, and in the format of a long book she had plenty of room to explain how and why ChatGPT burst on the scene when it did, how and why tech companies (including but not only OpenAI) exploit cheap international labor, how and why the computational power requirements of generative AI are so much greater than standard tech, and more. I think everyone should read it, especially if they’re going around repeating AI sales points like “this technology is inevitable”–a key point of the book is that there’s nothing inevitable about this technology, it has required trillions of dollars and years of intense research and intensive mineral mining and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and other resources that exploit already vulnerable populations.
And not one but two friends started reading Gideon the Ninth for their first times recently. I reread that last fall, so I enjoyed their experience vicariously, but when one of them went on to start Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, I borrowed a copy and reread it in just a couple of days, gulping it down like a too-sweet summer cocktail. A couple of weeks later I borrowed Nona the Ninth and inhaled that too. It felt new, revisiting these stories while thinking of readers encountering them for the first time. Also, it was kind of wild alternating Nona, with John Gaius’s flashbacks to their hail mary project pre-apocalypse, and The Empire of AI: the closed door meetings, the idolatry, the sweaty startup pressure to compete with larger and richer entities, the belief that you are going to save the world, the subsequent rise of a death cult. Woof.
Elsewhere
Book Prizes Don’t Work How You Think
A lovely tribute to the late Jane Yolen, whose book Wizard’s Hall was one of my best beloved as a child.
Misery And Memory In Two Van Goghs
Looking For A Job Has Become An Alienating Humiliation Ritual
Wired posted a fairly positive article about Delete Me, a service that aims to remove your personal information from data brokers. I’ve been using it for years, ever since I had a slightly scary encounter with someone who I definitely did not want to find my address online. Reading this article, I realized that I haven’t been receiving as many spam calls as I used to. Occasionally one will come through, but nowhere near the onslaught of notices about my nonexistent automobile warranty.
AI in the news:
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious (The Atlantic, June 2026) [This is Ted Chiang, clear-eyed and persuasive as usual, and archive.ph is your friend.)
If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II (arXiv, June 11, 2026)
‘This might actually force some actual brain cells to fire’: Norway is banning younger school kids from using generative AI (Techradar, June 20, 2026)
Just 16% of Americans Believe AI Will Positively Impact Society, Pew Poll Finds (Gizmodo, June 17, 2026)
Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good (Nature, June 18, 2026)
People training new AI models admit they just get chatbots to do it (New Scientist, June 22, 2026)
Hundreds of Artists Ask NYC Mayor to Ban AI in Schools (Hyperallergic, June 23, 2026)
Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs (WIRED, June 29, 2026)
Data centers remain at the forefront of the conversation lately:
How Pennsylvania towns are protecting themselves from the noise, heat and utility costs of massive data centers (The Conversation, June 11, 2026)
Locals affected by Ireland’s AI data centre boom share ‘cautionary tales’ (ABC News, June 14, 2026)
People Living Near xAI’s Dirty Data Centers Are Pissed About the SpaceX IPO (WIRED, June 11, 2026)
Not new, but of interest: The making of critical data center studies (Impact Factor, January 23, 2024)
New resource! The AI Resist List
Minutiae
I took two days off of work to help out at a mass deployment coordinated by an organization that brought volunteers from all over the country to complete beautification projects in Philadelphia parks. It was a strange couple of days, a very different method and ethos than the volunteer groups I’m used to, and it gave me a lot to think about for my thesis. But it was also a pleasant change from my regular life, spending hours at physical work like removing ivy from trees or slicing the top layer of soil from a tree pit to lay down mulch. At night I was too spent for screens, and spent a few hours pleasurably devouring Harrow the Ninth before an early bedtime.
One weekend I was supposed to travel to NJ with some friends, but we didn’t due to car failure, so instead we went out for a boozy brunch and checked out the World Cup-related shenanigans downtown. But my life wasn’t too impacted by the World Cup… I went to my dance classes, went out for drinks and dinner now and then. One night a partner and I lounged on a grassy slope under the open sky as the city orchestra played along with The Lion King on a big screen; it was cool enough in the park that we huddled under our picnic blanket by the end. I went by myself to NJ to see my college BFF and his daughter in a musical; they were great, the musical was moving (Fun Home, rather heartwrenching), and it was nice to spend a quiet morning together after.
It was a quiet month, all things considered. I took a lot of time to myself to rest and stay cool and work on my various projects.
Sara Davis 