Spread Me by Sarah Gailey is a horror novella about a contagious outbreak in a remote desert research facility, weird and funny and gross and so delightfully horny that I laughed out loud more than once–in a good way! It’s fun!
Writers & Lovers by Lily King. I put a hold on this after I read the author’s more recent novel, Heart the Lover, in a day. I took several days to read this one–not least because September was so busy–but it was similarly readable, satisfying, familiar yet insightful. This book follows the same main character as Heart the Lover at an intermediary time of her life, taking place between the college romance and later loss explored in Heart. The Casey of Writers & Lovers is in an all-too-recognizeable stage of her thirties, trying and often failing to write, trying and often failing to get her head above water financially, trying and often failing to forget a recent heartbreak by going on dates with other writers. (No, Casey! Don’t date writers!) These ups and downs could be tedious in anyone else’s hands, but this novel both takes them seriously and holds them lightly.
Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth is a moody, terse speculative novel. It took me a little time to find my footing in it–actually, what helped was seeing a stage production of Endgame by Samuel Beckett, and seeing Earth 7‘s early chapters as thought experiments: what happens when you put a mother and daughter in a bubble under the sea? what happens when a charismatic leader takes her followers into the desert?
Tilt by Emma Pattee. This was a pageturner, trotting swiftly between scenes of the narrator and her husband stumbling through adulthood, trying to eke out a creative life amid soaring cost of living on the West Coast, and scenes of the narrator stumbling through Portland in the wake of the The Big One, the major earthquake that is predicted to one day impact the Cascadia Subduction Zone. I’m not sure I enjoyed the story, per se–her vision of looting and self-interest in the earthquake aftermath doesn’t really align with sociological research of how people behave in the wake of disaster–but the writing was immersive and propulsive, and I rather like the structure of a very long walk through a city.
I DNFed a stack of books this month: The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink by Kory Stamper, and Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future by Alan Weisman. They’re not bad books, I don’t think! I was curious about them and interested in them, and in each case read 50-100 pages before I gave up, so I can attest that they are by no means poorly written or confusingly structured or boring. They just didn’t hold my attention in a summer when my attention was admittedly pulled in many directions. September just happened to be the month when I gave myself permission to give them all back to their respective libraries and start reading something that gave me more pleasure.
Some poems and short prose I loved:
Self Esteem by Grace Alvino [content note: sitting in subway pee]
For You Who Have Loved Old Dogs by Silas House [content note: old dogs]
Missed Time by Ha Jin
Elsewhere
Here’s Just a List of Every Restaurant We Know With Private Equity Investors
AI in the news:
AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find (The Conversation, August 30, 2026)
New York City Public Schools banning AI use through middle school starting this year (ABC News, September 2, 2026)
MIT Report Finds That AI Is Leading to “Cognitive Surrender” Among Students (Futurism, September 19, 2026)
From laptop bans to new tech courses, US law schools grapple with AI (Reuters, September 21, 2026)
The Data Center Backlash Should Also Be a Climate Reckoning. It Isn’t Yet (WIRED, September 27, 2026)
Legal bid to stop underwater AI data centre in endangered whale habitat launched (Oceanographic, September 28, 2026)
This month, the AI news cycle was flooded with current and former AI company employees warning about this technology’s threat to humanity. Having read The Empire of AI by Karen Hao, I know a bit about this weird religious undercurrent of AI tech: founders both terrified of a true machine intelligence that will destroy humanity and simultaneously trying to rush toward that future by hooking more and more computers together. I highly recommend that book for many reasons, not just this, but in the meantime here are some articles to talk you down from any AI doomer anxiety you may be feeling.
What To Read To Stay Grounded Amidst AI Doomerism (Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, September 17, 2026)
Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype (MIT Technology Review, September 22, 2026)
The AI safety debate is confusing. Here’s our guide to the different factions (NPR, September 26, 2026)
Minutiae
The carousel starts spinning in September and there’s no time to step off. It is one of the months of Walk Around Philadelphia, so I set out for four more day-long walks along the city perimeter. I co-facilitated one of them, which was a first for me. I struggled more than usual, perhaps because of my sedentery thesis-writing summer, perhaps because of the humidty, who knows; in any case, I sweated and got dehydrated and felt my hands swell up like Cabbage Patch doll nubs. It turns out that electrolytes are real? Not just something made up to sell me Vitamin Water? So on my final day of walking, I pounded Liquid IV and used trekking poles, and felt significantly better afterward although still wiped out. But I am proud to have walked around the entire 100 mile border of the city, and I saw and experienced some amazing things along the way. An abandoned coal plant on the Delaware River, surrounded by decayed piers that had gone green with weeds. Creeks, high and fast from all the rain. A backyard turkey farm. A wide open field in northeast Philly, just acres of chest-high weeds and bees, gleaming in the late afternoon sun like a host of Renaissance angels, and a man-made pond on which half a dozen cormorants were drowsing. (I looked it up later, and it seems this million-square-foot lot was slated to become a UPS fulfillment center, but the neighborhood protested and for now it is a gorgeous meadow.)
September is also Fringe Festival month, and I saw some shows. One night I was late for a 1-woman show about sled dogs and the theater wouldn’t let me in, but directed me to a nearby 2-person show about dorky dads going camping. The latter show featured some truly beautiful acrobatics, go figure, and ended with a dance party. Between shows, other performers would ply you with flyers for their own shows, and we went to one of these: a 1-man performance of Queen Margot of Valois, magnetic and funny. On the way home, the local train unexpectedly turned express and I found myself at the end of the line with a number of other nonconsenting passengers. This, too, felt like Fringe. On another weekend, I went to see Beckett’s Endgame, performed with warmth and precision as I’ve come to expect from the local Absurdist troupe, and archy and mehitabel, a little-known Mel Brooks musical adapted from a book of free verse about a cockroach who writes poems. I joined some friends for a fabulous gluten-free dim sum dinner and went to see a very homespun but rather hilarious performance that modernized three plays by a medieval nun, Hrotsvitha.
And in mid-September, we had our first class session with Buried Creek Collective. From the moment everyone started to arrive at the Discovery Center for our first in-person meeting, it felt warm and friendly and like we all already knew one another. The group has amazing chemistry, and they asked great questions and had a lot to say to one another. I am so humbled and happy to have helped bring them together, and can’t wait to see what all we do.
Although it has been such a rich and rewarding month, I’ve been tired and fretful, and in my free time I have been plunging into video game worlds now that I have a game pass again. I played a frightening amount of Skyrim. I played The Outer Worlds for the first time, and found it pleasantly absorbing; I leaned on persuasion and tech skills and lied my face off through space stations, space prisons, and space bureaucracies.
I picked up Dredge, a fishing game, without knowing much about it, which I highly recommend. It’s a short game, unrolling slowly and then all at once, but those first few in-game days will remain one of my all-time favorite gaming experiences. Cheerfully doing my fishing chores and collecting resources…. occasionally pulling up not-quite-right fish from the murky sea. Nightfall crashing down suddenly and having to navigate back to port in the dark, seeing not-quite-there shapes in the fog. The creeping dread of realizing something is out there and having no idea what. Delicious.
And I started Disco Elysium, also without knowing much about it other than that it is beloved by many writers. Now that is a game that aligns perfectly with my stumblethrough play style, for plot reasons–although I did decided to reroll my character and stumble through a little differently after my first detective died of a heart attack on day 1. I was delighted by this game’s gleefully unhinged narration and trope-breaking dialogue options, and wished I could have explored the whole world of Insulinde.
