Los Hombres Con Bigotes

To keep up my Spanish, I recently started watching Drag Race España, the Spanish version of America’s favorite televised drag queen competition. I’ve watched a few episodes of several local adaptations, and although the format is nearly identical — costume design, dancing, singing, celebrity impersonations, musical theater, pop divas, daytime TV parodies, lip-sync performances, makeovers, roasts and readings — that continuity highlights the regional variation in approach.

In the US, the vibe is showbiz-professional and the budgets are huge. The contestants tend to already be full-time performers, and spend tens of thousands of dollars on costumes in preparation for what can be a career-making moment that leads to national tours and enormous sponsorship deals. Canada is similar but lower-budget and more friendly, with catty jokes that fall lightly, while the contestants in the Australian version seem to be cutthroat and cruel in ways that made me give up after just one or two episodes. In the UK, possibly in response to anti-trans news and legislation, production spends a great deal of time on heart-to-heart conversations about homophobia, transphobia, and the importance of family and community support.

Spain’s version has roots in both American drag and in the Spanish travesti subculture, which in turn is rooted in Spanish traditional dance and costume, especially flamenco and the bullfighter’s glittering traje de luces. The queens also talk incredibly quickly, and often emphasize their use regional dialects, which makes it a challenge for someone with Spanish as rusty as mine. It’s certainly educational, though. I’ve learned tons of new swear words, few of which I feel comfortable repeating.

But what most fascinates me about the Spanish version is how it approaches Spanishness. You can expect local culture in every local reboot, of course, but it’s generally still recognizable as international pop culture: a bubblegum pop song, TV personality, or scandal-ridden politician isn’t that different from one country to the next, even if the details and language vary. But I think only Drag Race España would produce an all-drag-queen musical theater comedy based on Federico García Lorca’s 1936 tragic final play, La Casa de Bernarda Alba.

And while drag everywhere thrives on subverting our expectations of taste and beauty, I think only Drag Race España could produce a performer like Laca Udilla. Laca means hairspray and Udilla means nothing in particular, but spoken aloud the name sounds like “La Caudilla,” a feminized title for the late dictator Francisco Franco.

Laca Udilla, in a military style jacket, miniskirt, blonde wig, and thigh-high leather boots.

She’s a hairspray dictator, with a signature look that’s a mustached and miniskirted take on the Franco-era Guardia Civil uniforms. It’s a rare queen who keeps her facial hair, and Caudilla jokes that los hombres con bigotes, o son maricones o son fachas: men with mustaches are faggots or fascists. (I disagree, but it’s an amusingly outré line).

It’s the most tasteless thing I’ve ever seen on Drag Race, and I love it.

Tech News

At the very beginning of my career, I remember being fascinated by a contest to design a high-quality, ultra-light web page. I don’t remember the details, but I think the requirement was a maximum page size of 50 kilobytes and a prize of one cent per byte, or $500. Maybe it was less. But the overall idea was that a page should work for low-bandwidth connections and slow machinery, because the web should be a universal communication mechanism.

It’s a long piece, but I highly recommend checking out this article about The 49MB Web Page. The phenomenon seems to be universal for ad-supported content, but the author highlights newspapers and in particular the fact that at his last visit the New York Times home page was 49MB, larger than the entire Windows 95 operating system. Why is it that huge, and why does it grind my CPU to a crawl? It turns out that a lot of the burden is code that runs in your browser, conducting real-time auctions that sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder.

If you’ve wondered why trying to read the news is such a terrible experience these days, the collapsing economics of internet ad space are a huge factor. Key stat: the mobile display for some major newspapers devotes 11% of the screen to the news, while the remaining 89% is ads, newsletter subscription requests, and irrelevant notifications. At that point, even your loyal customers must be tempted to use AI summaries. Sure, they aren’t necessarily accurate, but at least they’re not yet filled with modal dialog boxes that block you from seeing the damn news.

And also: It Turns Out That Constantly Telling Workers They’re About to Be Replaced by AI Has Grim Psychological Effects.

Shocker, I know.

I’m Going to Bike to Canada

Last year I completed my first hundred-mile bike ride, an event in support of the American Diabetes Association. For some reason, I have decided that a century is not nearly challenging enough, so this May I will be riding from Boston to Montréal to raise money for the Boston Cyclists Union.

The BCU does great work on several fronts, chiefly improving the safety of bike infrastructure in the city and making cycling more inclusive in a city that’s all too often stratified by race and class. I’ve long had the privilege of choosing to ride and the confidence to do it without fear, so it’s important to me to help make cycling better, more welcoming, and more accessible to everyone in my community.

But I’ll need your help. By which I mean money. Can you spare a few dollars to make this happen?

So far, training has been pretty chilly. Below is a shot from a local bike path last weekend. 25 mm slick road tires, it turns out, do not perform well on ice. I’m third from left, carrying the bike, and this moment is probably where I got this weird bruise on my shoulder, and possibly where I knocked the front gear shift out of alignment (again).

Next up, in addition to the BCU’s scheduled training rides, I’ll be doing the Boston Marathon. Not the running, of course, but the unofficial bike ride the night before. Every year, several thousand people follow the famous course from Hopkinton to Boston, starting around midnight and arriving at the finish line between 2 and 3 am. My plan is to start a lot earlier and be safely in bed before most of them even begin, but I expect I’ll still have plenty of company for my “matinee” ride.

When the Republic fell, I was at work.

An attempt at flash fiction.

When the Republic fell, I was at work. Of course I was at work. Where else would I be? I was at work for all the important events. When the planes hit. When the fires spread out West and the smoke turned our sky orange. When armed men grabbed someone out of the school pickup line and the PTA had to do a fundraiser so their kid could cover that month’s rent. When the kids at the high school walked out of class to protest the government. When the water went out for three weeks because of climate change or terrorism or a stupid pissing match between the mayor and the governor. When a fleeing suspect hid behind our building and Lara’s windows got shot out in the ensuing firefight and a tear gas grenade landed in my kitchen and I had to throw out all my food. When all of those things happened, I was at work. We were all at work. We were always at work.

Every evening I moved from home office to couch and worried, and tried to do my second job and my side hustle, and every morning I went back to work. We all joked about it. “Are we still supposed to go to work during the end of the world?”

But if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done. And maybe my work isn’t that critical, but it still needs to get done. When the health department ran out of marketing budget and we couldn’t pay to put vaccination reminders in people’s feeds, thousands of people died. Maybe it was their fault for not setting their own reminders, but that didn’t stop them from dying. Everyone knew who’d made the cuts, and everyone knows now how it turned out once people experienced the results, but that doesn’t fix anything at all.

“The new world struggles to be born,” they say. It certainly does. There’s screaming and blood and shit and and the tearing of flesh, and then exhaustion and sleeplessness and crying. Nothing really makes sense, or at least it didn’t for me, except that life kept going on, all those responsibilities and obligations and laundry and dirt and work piling up endlessly.

But things don’t actually need to make sense. You just need to get up and go to work.

Longer

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me: This guy says he rejected an AI’s software suggestion, so it wrote a blog post undermining his career in an attempt to pressure him to accept it. The tech press then used AI to write about what happened, adding new plausible-sounding falsehoods to the public record.
Who’s behind the AI? He doesn’t know. Is this real? I don’t know. I do know that someone used an AI to write Reddit posts libeling me last week, which I found unnerving, even though they were rapidly deleted by moderators.

The Myth of the Police State: Beautifully written look at today’s propaganda about South Africa, the real history of what happened and is happening, and how police states harm everyone, including the people they claim to protect.

Joy

Dachshund in a winter coat

Golden on ice

Time Keeps on Slipping Into the Future

A friend recently told me about the term “helium hands,” which describes the phenomenon of repeatedly raising your hand to volunteer for work even when you already have a full plate. It reminded me of how, when I was in school, my peers and I often boasted/complained about all our commitments. We hated it, but we kept adding to our workload, because it was proof that we were doing things, that we were working hard, that we cared.

That’s a convoluted way of saying I’ve been busy, I’ve been overwhelmed, and that’s why I haven’t written to you since October. I will not list off my commitments, because that would be bragging, but they did include an economic development advisory committee for my city’s newly-elected mayor and the publication of a new book.

I’ve written and discarded several drafts of this newsletter in that time. One was about my tangential connection to Louisiana’s disastrous vaccine reluctance campaign. One was about a friend who was the victim of an assault by motor vehicle, and has been charged with a felony for scratching the paint on the way down. I’ve failed to write several more. None of them seem relevant. You know what’s going down. I don’t need to list it off for you.

Interesting

A roundup of times when someone’s first impression of the United States had major geopolitical significance: Islamist scholar Sayyid Qutb, Chinese political theorist Wang Huning, and Boris Yeltsin.

From 2023, a discussion of depression from the perspective of a neuropsych researcher experiencing his research subject first-hand.

Bad

Joy

Level Up: Book Reviews

Over the past couple months I’ve read two very long fantasy/sci-fi series: Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, and Tao Wong’s Thousand Li. Both are video-game/RPG-inspired, both are thousands of pages long, and both were first self-published online.

Their roots in self-publishing and fanfic are obvious. In both cases there’s a single heroic man, a Regular Guy (seriously, like a default character build in a video game that the player hasn’t bothered to customize) who gets swept up into a complex magical adventure. Carl is a Coast Guard veteran and reluctant cat dad who must save the world from alien invasion; Wu Ying is a peasant who gets recruited into the legendary magic societies of Chinese fairy tales. As they gain experience, they gain skill and power, develop insight, learn about themselves and others, and do great deeds. It’s not an especially complicated narrative, but it’s quite enjoyable, full of humor and adventure. Both authors also get noticeably better at writing as they go along. The protagonists and secondary characters develop, grow, take shape and depth. Themes emerge. Interesting themes.

I haven’t read any of Wong’s newer pieces, but Dinniman’s newest novel, Operation Bounce House, shows his progress nicely. As in the Carl series, his protagonist is just a Regular Guy trying to defend his home. But I got the distinct impression that Carl’s backstory was added late in the game, while Bounce House is a more fully developed work from the very beginning. The secondary characters have full personalities from the beginning as well, and even some of the antagonists have a bit of depth to them, real concerns and regrets. In his newer book, the big ideas about xenophobia, capitalism, the nature of humanity, and gamer culture really have room to grow and thrive.

Still, they all pale compared to V. E. Schwab’s Bury our Bones in the Midnight Soil, a masterful work of fantasy shot through with love and loss and hunger. Schwab weaves together the story of several women over the course of 500 years, making each a protagonist and antagonist in turn. Maria escapes the strictures of 16th century Spain by becoming a vampire and eating her husband; Charlotte escapes the strictures of 19th century England by becoming a vampire and eating her suitor; 21st century college student Alice winds up caught in their centuries-long folie a deux and becomes a vampire against her will, struggling to make sense of what it means to live and fight and survive when time wears away everything that makes you human, when you know that eventually all that will be left of you is hunger. It’s an entirely different level of artwork, and it shows off just how great genre fiction can be.

Bad News (Fascism)

Secret police detain journalist for opinions.

Secret police are using cars without plates, or obscured plates, or the wrong plates.

Secret police abducting citizens.

This story about the missing teenager abducted by the secret police reminds me of nothing so much as the scene in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil where the bereaved widow screams “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIS BODY,” and there’s no answer, because of course there isn’t. The secret police disappeared, tortured, and murdered the wrong guy, and he’s not coming back. I’m not alone in making this comparison.

Undercover with the American far right.

Who is Russell Vought and why does it matter? (He’s a Christian nationalist, and he’s trying to destroy the secular state)

The EEOC is now a white grievance machine, which is just dandy.

Bad News (Other)

They’re finally digging up that mass grave from the mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Ireland. I can’t tell why this story has had such a hold on me for so long. There are plenty of horrors closer to home.

Peak 18-year-old presents a problem for college towns.

Joy

Cat and pool table.

Various dogs navigating various stairs (often badly).

PUPPY.

Archival film of a Scottish man in the 1970s going to visit a friend across the moors by bicycle. There are hidden whisky caches along the way.

Consider the college application essay

The college application personal statement is an odd genre, formulated not as an art or a trade but as an academic and administrative test. It begins with a generously flexible choice of prompts, but the other requirements are as strict and procrustean as a sonnet: it must be no more than 650 words, but not much less either. It must illustrate something important about the author, and who they’ll become — something not already shown in their report cards, portfolios, club memberships, sports trophies, reference letters, or supplemental statements. The intended audience will spend perhaps three minutes reading it, and their opinion will heavily influence where the author lives for the next four years. No pressure.

I don’t think it’s an especially good way to determine who gets to go to which college, but I like the way it requires introspection, self examination, revision, and meditation. Those aren’t things that tend to come naturally to most of us, especially at 17 or 18, and they’re not often required in schoolwork. But even when it’s uncomfortable, it’s healthy and useful to take a hard look at ourselves and our goals, to make them concise and explicit.

That’s my pitch to students, anyway. And I decided that if I was going to say things like that, I’d have to to write one for myself. As I expected, I found it hard going myself. I often advise students to write a draft, then set it aside for a few days and come back to it, and see how it looks with fresh eyes. I had the luxury of writing the first paragraph, setting it aside for months, coming back to it, deleting the entire thing, and starting over. I did that several times. I didn’t have a deadline, after all. But I knew it was going to be useful to write, so I kept coming back to it.

I chose the prompt “Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.” These are my 644 words:

The first time I called myself a writer, I was 21 and trying to impress an undergraduate at Wellesley. It didn’t work, and I didn’t say it again for years. I’d say I worked as a technical writer, but never claimed to be a writer with no qualifying adjective — not when my name went on the cover of a reference book, not when my web copy drove millions of page views, not when I ran direct mail campaigns for a billion-dollar student loan portfolio, not when I self-published my own poetry. Calling myself a writer felt like putting on my grandfather’s suit coat and pretending to be a businessman. I knew it was impostor syndrome, but I didn’t feel I’d earned the title. It felt uncomfortable, and I found myself trying to break it in like the pair of hot pink Dr. Martens I bought with my first paycheck as a freelance editor. 

By comparison, I began to describe myself as an activist after a mere decade. That title didn’t begin with a childhood dream and dogged determination, but with coincidence and spite. I’d attended a single community meeting about a daycare center on my street and been perplexed by the sea of opposition. A rival daycare didn’t want to share the local playground; a neighbor worried about traffic; the retailer next door didn’t want to share parking. When I said “a daytime business sounds like a good thing for the neighborhood,” a sea of gray heads turned to me and stared. I hated it. I signed up for newsletters and mailing lists and joined a local political group, and when I moved one city over a few years later, joined a nascent sister group. 

Naturally, I took on the role of writer there. I didn’t say “I’m a writer,” but I wrote: web copy, blog posts, explanations like “what is zoning” and “what is affordable housing,” editorials, and, of course, a newsletter. I’d joke that our unincorporated nonprofit was just a mailing list with opinions, but when we crossed a thousand subscribers I had to force myself to stop. In a city of 85,000, that readership made us a major political force, and false modesty would undermine our work, hold us back from exercising the influence we had so carefully built. Even then, I only admitted that I was an activist and nonprofit leader because it hurt the cause to pretend otherwise. 

There are precious few times in our lives when we say something and it becomes true simply because we’ve acknowledged it. It’s a kind of magic: we say the words, and in saying them, they take concrete reality. College-bound Americans cast the spell in personal statements, when a student says “I am an aspiring marine biologist” and suddenly is. Job-seekers do it with resumes: I am a chef, a marketer, an HR specialist, a project manager. The magic is there in every 12-step meeting where someone speaks the words “I’m an alcoholic” and reaffirms their place in recovery, and at every wedding where an oath transforms two individuals into a couple. I even found it at my father’s bedside in the last days of his life, writing his obituary with him, looking back at his life and deciding which parts of it were a legacy. 

Of course, it takes a long time to prepare that spell, to shape and build an identity, but the declaration makes it feel instant, as though by opening a shell we’re simultaneously creating the egg that pours out. I worked for years before I felt confident enough to say it, and then when I said it, the truth felt sudden, an instant becoming. Simply putting it in words made it real, as though I hadn’t been preparing for it my whole life: Aaron S. Weber is a writer, editor, and activist living in Somerville, Massachusetts. 

A republic, if you can keep it

Labels of generations and eras are simultaneously kind of silly and kind of useful. They’re vague ways of sorting trends, whether it’s as long as the renaissance or as short as The Summer of Love. We all know people aren’t really all that different from year to year, but we also know that Gen X talks like this, and Gen Z stares like that.

The one that always struck me as interesting was Eric Hobsbawm’s description of a “long 19th century” and “short 20th century.” I’ll admit right here that I haven’t actually read the whole book, but the general idea is that the concepts that we think of as representing the 19th century started with the French Revolution in 1789 and lasted more or less until World War I in 1914. After the Great War, the concepts we think of as being truly of the 20th century (the cold war, airplanes, increasingly dominant global trade and mass media) took over, but lasted only until the fall of the Soviet Union. The era we think of as the 21st century, defined for the most part by ever more rapid technological upheavals and multipolar politics, began well before New Year’s Eve 1999.

Of course, these are just different viewpoints and frameworks you can use to look at the world, not actual hard lines. But they are useful for making sense of the deluge of one thing after another that keeps happening to us. And that’s why I love Jamelle Bouie’s recent column about the death of the Fourth American Republic (check the unpaywalled version if you don’t have a Times sub).

The US has had, of course, only a single national government and constitution since its founding, while France has literally had to start from scratch five times since 1789, with the current 5th republic founded in 1958. But while we haven’t had officially new government structures, we’ve had definite eras which you might as well call different Republics. They certainly had different frameworks, major changes to the Constitution and to the overall principles of how the country was run. The first ran from Independence to the Civil War; the second was our brief attempt at Reconstruction; the third was basically Jim Crow, “states’ rights,” and a weak administrative state; the fourth then began with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and is now ending with Donald Trump smearing shit all over the walls.

What next? As Gramsci said (or is alleged to have said, or was mistranslated as saying), “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Or perhaps it’s the time of ICE agents wearing AI goggles, arbitrarily smashing windows. (Wasn’t there a word for this in the middle of the short 20th century? Something about smashing windows at night?)

News

The Rule of Law is Dead in the United States. It’s not an exaggeration, really. Laws have always been a little permeable, but we’ve definitely reached an era when there’s a lot less pretense that laws are universal.

Updated list of books banned from K12 schools on military bases.

Oklahoma implements ideological purity tests for teachers with coastal origins.

Lawful permanent resident detained by ICE; citizen beaten unconscious by ICE.

Arrests follow chalk rainbows.

Mystery surrounds $1.2 billion contract to build a concentration camp in Texas.

Joy

This fully charged cat.

You sure that’s a dog?

Let’s ride bikes!

Windy.

Heresy

In my 9th grade European history class, a classmate of mine had a genuinely difficult time understanding the concept of heresy. “If you follow Christ, you’re a Christian, aren’t you?” he said. “How could they say those other people weren’t Christian?” He simply could not comprehend that the basic ideas of his Sunday school lessons had ever been in question. To him, a thing like that couldn’t even be controversial, much less something people literally died for. It’s just obviously true by definition: Christ, Christ-ian, what more do you need to know?

The answer, of course, is that the Pope and the Inquisition got to define Christianity, and if you disagreed, they would burn you at the stake.

At the time, I thought he was an idiot, but he’d run into something pretty profound there: it’s really hard to discuss things when you don’t agree on the basic premise or definition of the issue in question. Worse, these kinds of ideas are so basic, so fundamental, that it’s hard to even recognize them as assumptions. Of course a Christian is a follower of Christ. What else would it be?

Well, ask the starovery. Or Emo Philips.

I thought about him recently when reading Thomas Zimmer’s recent piece on the nature of America, where he explores Trumpism not as an aberration but as a recurrence of a long-simmering conflict. Is America an idea about unity and freedom and equality, imperfectly executed, bending slowly toward justice? Is it a nation defined by the white Protestant men who founded it, with tentative privileges granted to minority groups only to the extent that they don’t disrupt the natural order? Everyone in that fight says they’re defending truth, justice, and the American way. And not only are they disagreeing about what those things mean, they can’t even comprehend how someone else would disagree.

I thought about him again when I saw a Facebook exchange between a guy who was appalled by ICE disappearances and torture, and a friend of his who said he shouldn’t get so upset about those perfectly normal legal arrests. “It’s not like anyone’s actually being fed to alligators,” he said. “That’s just a harmless joke.” One of them could not understand how anyone could be so cruel, and the other could not understand why anyone would be upset.

Or think about the way some leftists regard America as fundamentally harmful, and have a hard time comprehending that someone like me might actually like it. If I say “America has not always lived up to its ideals, but it can and will do better: look at our progress on labor and human rights and the environment,” they will say “America has always lived up to its ideals: look at slavery and CIA-backed coups and ICE raids.”

Meanwhile, all of us reasonable right-thinking liberals are baffled that a teacher in Idaho had to take down a classroom sign reading “Everyone is Welcome Here.” How, we ask, could a sign like that be forbidden? Who doesn’t want to welcome students in a classroom?

Well, that depends on what we mean by “everyone” and what we mean by “welcome,” doesn’t it? Because, let’s be honest, it doesn’t mean that literally everyone is welcome. It means “We don’t bully LGBT+ students here.” It means “Don’t be racist in this classroom.” Bullies and racists see “everyone is welcome” and read “YOU are not welcome,” and they hate it, and then of course they must ban it.

Point is, the people who now dominate the Republican party recognize that their definitions of words like “American” and “Christian” and “Everyone” and “Welcome” are under threat from people who want to include gays and minorities, but not bigots and fascists. They see that their understanding of the entire world is under attack.

Point is, there are a lot of people whose reality is so completely alien to us that it’s hard to recognize the conceptual country they live in. It’s not just strange, but upsetting that they cannot see same world we do. These basic concepts are foundational, and like a building’s foundation, we often take them for granted until we look at them from a different angle and see how tilted they are.

Nobody likes that feeling. It’s part of why this fight is so bitter and intractable.

News

A few days ago I made a list of things that were worrying and upsetting me.

This is a different list.

Joy

This midlife crisis is working out great actually

In a few weeks, I’ll be doing a hundred-mile bike ride to raise money for diabetes research. And while I have definitely been A Bike Guy for a while now, I didn’t ever really expect that I’d get to this level with it. It’s been a journey, and it didn’t really start with bikes. It started because, just under a year ago, I quit drinking alcohol.

Me, on a bike.
Photo by Scott Istvan

I’d been thinking about quitting for a long time. Especially working as a medical copywriter putting together flyers and web pages about how even moderate alcohol use is correlated with all kinds of bad outcomes, I couldn’t escape that background whisper of “you know that’s not good for you.”

You’ve heard this story before: I ignored that whisper until I couldn’t. It’s an embarrassing cliche, but of the major lessons I’ve learned this year is that life is full of cliches. Everyone’s a unique snowflake, but we all fall to the ground and melt. The point, the only important thing, is that I’m never drinking again. What a cliche.

Another cliche: endurance sports. Some people say that people in recovery are good at endurance sports because we’ve endured. If you can get up and go to work with a hangover, they say, you can grit your teeth through a long, hard workout. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know that when I quit drinking I had a lot of nervous energy, and it kept me up at night. The internet said cardio would help, but running hurt my feet, so I borrowed a road bike, and immediately fell in love. Within a few weeks I’d bought my own, a 2006 Trek Madone in glittery blue-black carbon fiber that, when new, had been top-of-the-line.

I started adding distance, riding fifteen or twenty miles at a go. I snagged a cheap stationary bike from a neighbor and subscribed to an online cycling simulator to train indoors in bad weather. I bought the padded shorts, then threw them out and got the padded shorts with shoulder straps. I started going to organized group rides. Forty miles. I got foul-weather gear so I could ride outdoors in the cold, and ended a fifty-mile ride with my fingers so frozen I had trouble unbuckling my helmet. I got the special shoes that clip into the special pedals, and paid someone to help me adjust my seat and handlebars centimeter by centimeter until the bike fit me perfectly, and now I can spend all day riding without my feet and hands going numb.

At this point, a hundred miles doesn’t seem all that far. It’ll take me all day, but that’s just a day. And I have a lot of days ahead of me.

Also, please send money.

Featured selections of bad news and cute animals will resume with the next post.

It’s like Gloversville out here

Today’s ominous article is by Gabrielle Drolet, who tells us How to Make a Living as a Writer. It’s quite simple, really: lots and lots of tiny projects and strung together into something that pays the rent. Drolet’s gigs include a few cartoons, a bit of choose-your-own-adventure erotica, and a reliable standby of daily morning horse-racing news for a reputation management service monitoring (and trying to downplay) scandal in the horseflesh trade. It’s not at all glamorous, this sort of commercial writing — more a trade than a craft or art. But it’s how a writer pays the bills, the same way a visual artist might do layout or logos or signs. And as devalued as it is, it’s getting worse. As automation nibbles at the edges, writing-as-a-trade becomes easier to automate and harder to respect. Or get paid for.

Coincidentally, my 40 hours a week at what I call the medical paperwork factory became 20 this month. They didn’t replace me with AI, or cut my hours because of the coming Republican war on Medicaid. This is just the regular precarity of the writing life: we finished a project, so now I’m down to half time.

Drolet surely knows this even better than I do, but that regular precarity is getting more precarious. For example, before my hours were cut, I had already seen several projects canceled because certain states no longer recommend vaccination to the poor. Meanwhile, as automation advances, more of that small pool of work will be done by The Machine and less by a human. What human work there is might not add up to a whole job. And what are the odds that a company will need me in particular, with 25 years of experience and a wage demand to match?

Couldn’t you just make ChatGPT do it?

Mystery

Robert Jackson Bennett’s fantasy/mystery A Drop of Corruption is a fun book from several angles. It’s a well-plotted mystery, of course. It’s a fantasy in a complex world of alchemy, of course. It’s a parable about neurodivergence and courage and ability. But it’s also a novel about the virtues of working in an imperfect system. The empire that our protagonists work for is not exactly well-loved by its neighbors, and for good reason. It’s crooked, it’s cruel, it’s unfair, and it’s also full of people working to make it better than it is, to make it worth keeping. To make it worthy of the love of patriots.

In the afterword, the author makes explicit where he’s coming from: he’s been thinking a lot about the danger of dictators, about the dangers of hoping for a quick fix or a single autocrat who can make the right decisions. About how the American empire he lives in is far, far, far from perfect, and yet holds the promise of being, shall we say, a more perfect union than it currently is. He puts that promise, that hope, in the hands of underpaid but dedicated civil servants, and puts them at the heart of his novel. It’s really quite well done.

Further

Joy