Hello Friends,

I’d like to discuss some books at length. Don’t forget you can choose to listen to the audio (located above).

I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize , Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, The Irish Times Best Book of the 21st Century) and wanted to learn more about the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland.

Small Things Like These

If you’re unfamiliar with Small Things Like These, you are in for a beautiful reading experience! Oh to be able to write like Keegan. What a voice. The novella takes place in a small Irish town in the 1980s during the Christmas season. When a coal merchant delivers an order to a Catholic convent that runs a Magdalene Laundry, he discovers a freezing girl who has been locked in the coal shed overnight. In returning her to the convent, he finds a world of abuse and imprisonment for the girls and young women who are pregnant and new mothers. As he questions what his response should be, the frightening political and social power of the nuns and the Church are made clear. This is a tale of a test of moral courage.

The Fallen

So powerful was this little novella that it inspired me to find The Fallen by Louise Brangan, a research-based book on the twentieth-century history of the Laundries told through the stories of six young women and girls who were inmates there. I purchased the audiobook version. Again, the story was powerful and shocking. I decided to get the print version from interlibrary loan to have a closer look. Just as my copy was available, it was announced that The Fallen had made the The 2026 Cundill History Prize Shortlist.

The two epigraphs at the beginning of The Fallen indicate that Brangan plans to bring the truth to light and force a reckoning:

In some instances, one may not talk of forgetfulness, for one cannot forget what one has never attempted to know. —Gordon Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us. —Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie

The Women and Girls of the Laundries

The prologue discusses a fifteen-year-old girl named Eileen who disappeared from her job as a maid at a bed-and-breakfast in Dublin in February 1954. She enjoyed the job. However, one night when her friends were out and she was on her own, two women appeared in the townhouse and decided that Eileen was destined to become a fallen woman. They told her she had to go with them. Like all Irish children, she was raised to unquestioningly obey adults, and so she did. The women dropped her into a Magdalene Laundry, stealing her freedom and ruining her life. She’s given as an example of the kind of girl who ended up in the laundry. She was born in a Mother and Daughter Home, which means that she was considered illegitimate. She lived with relatives who weren’t very kind to her until she finally got away and found her job in the bed and breakfast. She was not pregnant, nor was she an unwed mother. This is one of the important things Brangan clarifies about the Magdalene Laundries. They were not really for ‘fallen women,’ even though people assume that they were and Small Things Like These indicates as much.

In fact, Brangan must also correct the record about information that rolls at the end of the Small Things film, which is based on the novella. It states that there were 56,000 young women who were sent to the Laundries and the children born there were taken from them. The government‘s official calculation of women and girls in the Laundries is 10,012; informed historians consider this an underestimation. However 56,000 seems high. It is, in fact, a figure from an official state investigation into something different—the inmates held in Mother and Baby Homes during the 20th century.

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The Magdalene Laundries

What actually happened in the Laundries belied the serenity of the Irish countryside of the twentieth century, where the general population was considered to be quite moral. From the period of Irish independence in the 1920s, there weren’t very many people in prison. Brangan argues that this doesn’t mean many people, particularly women and girls, weren’t imprisoned. They lived in various “psychiatric hospitals (known then as mental asylums), industrial and reformatory schools for poor orphan children, county homes (formally work houses that were rebranded after Irish independence) and Mother and Baby Homes, where women and girls who were pregnant outside marriage were sequestered. Then there were the Magdalene Laundries.”

Brangan points out that these institutions housed over 1% of the total Irish population, an incredible rate, and that people there became “ensnared rather than supported.”

The Magdalene Laundries were Ireland’s main carceral institution. While they had initially been run by ordinary people both Catholic and Protestant, they eventually became regimented and religious places of punishment. However, the state colluded with the church in running them. There were ten Magdalene Laundries, which circled the island, run by four religious orders of nuns. The inmates there did everyone’s laundry: priestly vestments, prisoners’ uniforms, hotel and restaurant linens, family laundry, everything. They were not allowed to speak to one another—complete silence at all times was the rule—much less form friendships.

Outside of cleaning laundry, what happened there was a dark secret before activists demanded a reckoning in the mid 2000s. Former inmates were interviewed, particularly between 2009-2015. While the Laundries were active, some women managed to escape, but the tales they told at the time were generally not believed. People couldn’t imagine the nuns running the Laundries because they had not had the same kind of experiences with women religious, who might have been very kind to their families, helping them with alms and with their family troubles.

Punishment for Uncommitted Sins

Brangan tracks six women and girls were confined to the Laundries. One was imprisoned for truancy from school; another because strangers considered her pre-delinquent; yet another to save a family’s reputation. While each of their stories is different, all of them were unwanted, homeless, abused, or rejected. Their stories are unique and utterly compelling, deserving the full treatment they receive in the book. After reading about them, I had nightmares about inescapable places.

In 2009, when there had been a period of pronounced hand ringing about the horrors of the past, the author John Banville wrote what remains one of the most eloquent and uncompromising statements on the topic of Irish silence. ‘Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watch word. Everyone knew, but no one said.’”

Immediately upon entrance into the Laundries, inmates’ names were taken away, and they were given pseudonyms. They were not allowed to speak to each other; they were not allowed to form friendships. This meant that girls who were new didn’t know where they were. They started rumors that the women around them were prostitutes or women who had illegitimate babies. Yet they learned this didn’t make sense because there were also much older women there. The others were like them: abandoned, abused, neglected, rejected by their families.

They had to work long hours in very hot and horrible environments. For example, girls who worked in the sorting rooms found it absolutely disgusting. One woman described it as “‘all filthy dirty and the smell of it and everything was awful.’ None of them could adjust to the fetid air. It was ‘wreaking, stinking, bleach, smell of piss, urine, always had that smell, always.’”

The food was also described as a nasty watery swamp of stew. There was no toilet paper, just crumpled up newspapers. Ironically, the girls had to wash their own laundry on their own time, at the sinks in their dormitory. They weren’t even allowed to use the laundry equipment, and so, sometimes, they would bring their “wet underwear into the bed with them and lie on top of it as they slept hoping that the heat of their bodies would wick enough of the wet from them so they could be worn again the next morning.”

The girls and women were insulted and they were told things like “You’re here because no one wants you.” “You’re dirt.” “Your mother didn’t want you.” “Your father won’t come for you.” “No wonder your family doesn’t want you, look at you.” “You are illegitimate; you’ll end up like your mother.” “You are nobody, and you have nobody.”

They were required to say the same prayers that the nuns did as part of their devotional life, but they didn’t have any of the nuns’ social capital, and all their years of devotion didn’t earn it for them.

Disobedience could result in inmates having their hair cut off. Talking might result in a dinnertime punishment of being forced to sit on the floor in front of the group with a bowl, eating their food while saying “I am nobody. I am nobody. I am nobody.”

When these girls and women finally had a chance to venture back into society, they often couldn’t negotiate the world. They have not been well educated or educated at all in the Laundries.

Brangan declares this was only possible because the Irish people gave “unfettered deference” to the church. “Irish people genuflected, lit their candles, muttered their novenas, and undertook their penitential obligations. … the logic of the laundries was the logic of Irish life.”

Twentieth-Century Ireland

To help the reader understand why, she dives into Irish history and politics of the twentieth century.

In 1932, in the heart of the worldwide Great Depression, the government of Ireland was in a bad situation. They had rising income taxes, oil was expensive, they had cut teachers’ and policemen’s wages, and austerity was everything. At the time, a new populist Catholic party was working to take over, and when the country had a snap general election, the government was dissolved. The election brought in this Catholic group. When they gained power, their leader wrote a note to the Pope that their intention was to “maintain with the Holy See that intimate and cordial relation which has become the tradition of the Irish people.”

At this point, the government had extreme protectionist ideas, so they launched a tariff on British goods. Britain retaliated by enacting tariffs of up to forty percent on Irish imports. A secret report called the Carrigan Report concluded that something had to be done about the immorality of the Irish people. Government officials confidentially sent copies to the Catholic hierarchy and asked what they should do next. They wanted to bring the law in line with Catholic teachings and practices, so they ushered in legislation that would do so. They created a censorship bill, and then, in 1935, without any debate, passed into legislation the Criminal Law Amendment Act and the Public Dance Halls Act. They kept people from having too much fun. They decided that in schools, children would not be taught anything that would help them critique or to question, so kids ended up being fed a diet of fear, superstition, self-abnegation, and obedience. They also felt that girls who had ‘a marked tendency towards sexual immorality’ would be better off in Catholic rather than state run institutions. There’s a lot more to this, obviously (thus an entire book, which I highly recommend you read), but this is how the Laundries became prevalent.

The book concludes with the demise of the Laundries, the last of which closed in 1996 and with the 21st century reckoning. Highly recommended!

Like all good books of research, The Fallen has an excellent notes section and index. I noticed that the last work cited was the New Yorker Fiction podcast episode entitled “Andrew O’Hagan reads Edna O’Brien” with Deborah Treisman, December 1st 2015. It’s a great story about a small country village where the people sternly judge one of their neighbors and destroy her life. Since you are a lover of good stories, I recommend you have a listen.

Our thought experiment

How does the story of what happened in twentieth-century Ireland relate to what is happening in the United States today? What could happen to the U.S. in the near future?

This is what happens when you have certain people with certain religious ideas running the country and at the same time promoting the idea that you’re not allowed to resist. What Brangan refers to as “a repressive and censorious atmosphere.” We are regularly told that we don’t have to worry because the religious fundamentalist societies we are familiar with are not Christian. But fundamentalists across religions have much more in common with one another than they do with more liberal practitioners of their own faiths.

I’m betting that someone looking to earn an academic degree could draw some comparisons (conservative Catholics in the Supreme Court, J.D. Vance’s conversion, giving religious leaders political power, high tariffs, new ‘laws’ without debate [Presidential orders], current rates of incarceration in the U.S., etc.).

Speaking of J.D. Vance and His Conversion

I’m not going to buy Communion because I don’t want to fund Vance, but some of what I’ve read in reviews is gobsmacking. If you have any knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church—I was raised in it—the idea that you can just stay at home and have Mass there is ludicrous. The purpose of the Mass is the celebration and partaking of the Eucharist—the body of Christ. This cannot be done at home. It’s a sacrament requiring ritual and an ordained priest. And if you aren’t going to church, why pick a title like Communion? Does he understand a basic definition of the word?

J. D. Vance’s Straussian Moment from Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB)

The US vice president wrote his new book without citing his source—Peter Thiel.

J.D. Vance’s Conversion from London Review of Books

By James Butler

Why would anyone buy this? Vance has been a willing participant in a squalid government sunk in graft which has gutted the agencies that might restrain or regulate private avarice. The labour share of income is at a historic low. The most obvious question is not whether Vance believes what he claims to believe, but why, if he believes it, he acts as he does. Halfway through Communion he quotes, without irony, a recovering addict who passed on some homely advice: show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future. Perhaps Vance has forgotten who he’s been hanging out with.

…

Early in the book, Vance says he believes ‘Jesus Christ’s teachings are true.’ But the programme he outlines is more interested in the social utility of faith as an institution: unlike secularism, which has produced ‘racial conflict and gender division’, Christianity is ‘the most powerful force for cultural cohesion’. Yet Christianity can be ethically difficult and politically unsettling, difficulties Communion mostly seeks to evade. Should it cease to be useful, or if evasion is no longer possible, perhaps Vance will find his way to another conversion.

And one more thing about Vance to clarify his ethic

JD Vance says he’s doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK’ from the Guardian

Vice-president says on evangelical podcast he would feel ‘not shocked if the antichrist was walking among us’

Thanks!

Thanks for reading! Please click like, share, and leave a comment. Next week is our biweekly “Library and Banned Books News.” Until then, be well.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Background

I knew nothing about the novel Theo of Golden, but I wanted to read it because I was heartened by the story of an older writer going viral with a debut after self-publication and then being picked up by Simon & Schuster. I asked for it for my birthday, and I received it (along with several other birthday books; I have a lovely family and friends).

As a general rule, I only discuss books I think are worth reading. If I read something I don’t like, well, I’m a librarian who believes in books for everyone. Though I’m the wrong reader, the book will find the right one. An author, especially one who is published by a small press, can be hurt by criticism, so why engage in it? Better to lift each other up. However, a novel like Theo of Golden and its author, Allen Levi, can’t be harmed by a small voice like mine--and probably not by a booming voice, either. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has been scheduled for a film starring Tom Hanks. So, I want to discuss it because it leaves me wondering about the future of fiction.

Warning: I’m likely to include spoilers because I don’t think you should read the book.

Theo of Golden

Though the prefix ‘Theo’ means god, as a name it means a gift of God, and that is clearly what our protagonist is meant to be. Though he is 86 years old, this mystery man is healthy, wealthy, and wise, ready to solve others’ life problems.

Theo is a curious stranger, making his list and checking it twice. He arrives in Golden just before Easter and departs a year later in my least favorite author ‘Get Me Out of This Book’ trick—defenestration. By which I do not mean that another character tosses Theo off the balcony, but that Levi does it.

One of the first things we learn in this novel is the hours of operation of the local coffee shop, the Chalice. (Get it? Get it? Because we have to have very clear religious metaphors in case the name Theo and the fact that he arrives just before Easter escape us.). So I thought the book would be a murder mystery and the hours would have something to do with solving it. But no, it’s just a beginning writer’s story with all the hallmarks of a self-published book. The excess of useless info dumps continues throughout the book, which would benefit from a good editor.

At the Chalice, Theo finds that the coffee competes with the best of Europe. And he would know because he’s been everywhere, beginning with his native Portugal. The walls of the shop are covered with original pencil portraits of the town’s inhabitants. Masterpieces. This, too, Theo knows. In fact, he’s quite the expert on lots of things. Wine, liquor, art, music--you name it, Theo can birdwalk about it, as the novel roams over diverse topics that don’t drive the plot forward. The one thing that’s not discussed until after Theo’s death is who he really is and what he is doing in Golden. But this city of Golden, Georgia is one of the best he’s ever been to, a quaint, loving community in the God-Blessed American South.

Theo decides to buy the pencil portraits from the Chalice, a few at a time, and then give them to the models. He sends each person a mysterious letter asking them to meet him in the park, tell him their stories, and receive the portraits. And while the town knows little about this man, including his last name, they do know that he has beautiful penmanship and a set of expensive stationery, so they trust him. Well, except one very bad man, who will also be easily dispensed with.

The episodic structure of these meetings affords Levi the opportunity to include stories that are completely disconnected. Instead of incorporating necessary character development into the narrative, Levi often relies on info dumps by making a character read, say, a magazine article. The entirety of its contents is then included in the narrative. By page seventeen (of a grueling 384 pages), I was sorry to see Theo’s first letter to a portrait recipient, fearing that the book would be filled with the letters to all 92 of his beneficiaries. At least I was saved from that fate.

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Eventually Theo will play (unlicensed) psychologist to a number of the town’s inhabitants merely by listening and always knowing the right questions to ask and the right things to say. These inhabitants are as onion skin thin as he is. Levi tries to round out one of them—a Vietnam War veteran—by eventually detailing his trauma and PTSD. The problem is that the episode and its dialogue feel very unnatural and it doesn’t come off. It’s just another info dump. The man, a bookseller, is supposed to be seen as a kindly curmudgeon, but Levi is unable to manage it. The character is mostly irritating, his better nature never surfacing.

Other briefly-appearing characters are cringeworthy. A Black man—other than a Nigerian doctor, he appears to be the single Black person in the novel (in Georgia, remember)—speaks in dialect. Another “little man” who is an “illegal,” causes a car accident that kills a woman. (No worries--everything is forgiven in the end.) Where, oh where, is the editor?

The single three-dimensional character in the novel is Ellen, the self-described homeless woman. We learn about her worries over her bicycle and the chance that it might be stolen, her creative talents and how she employs them, and her grammar policing.

As the novel mercifully ends, there are explicit comparisons between Theo and Jesus, including Theo’s springtime (Easter) death. And this is the deeper reason why I’m repelled by this novel. Here we have a savior who does not embody radical notions of love and sacrifice, never mind one who flips a bird to the religious and political authorities of his day. What Levi gives the reader is a man he finds as a better iteration of a savior: Santa Claus, with limitless resources to bestow just the right gifts to all the childish adults in his sphere.

Ultimately, the publishing industry is not a meritocracy. It’s a business and the purpose is to make money. While I can’t be sure, I suspect Simon & Schuster knew Theo would be a cash cow ‘as is’ and didn’t bother with an editor. Still, I admire any author who is able to make a living from writing. As my mother used to say, when Levi is criticized, I’m sure he’s crying all the way to the bank. I imagine we will hear more from him. I saw this reported in Deadline:

Warner Bros Locking Down Film Rights To Allen Levi Bestseller ‘Theo Of Golden’ With Tom Hanks To Star

“The book was published wide by Simon & Schuster last October and has sold over 3.5 million copies stateside. It has been published in 43 languages and was a No. 1 bestseller in places like the Netherlands, Italy and the UK. Now it will be headed for the big screen, following the trajectory of books like Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County and a few others. Like that novel, Theo of Golden is particularly popular with a mature crowd of readers.”

Hanks is the perfect vehicle for the character of Theo, especially if he can bring off a Portuguese accent. But one thing this article made me consider is that the novel is a worldwide hit. It’s not just Americans, then, who read like children.

I couldn’t find professional reviews of Theo except a commentary published on Slate. Most of the things I had thought about were echoed there. I, too, thought that the vast response to this moralizing and saccharine Christianity could be compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I read Stowe’s novel as an adult already knowing that it wasn’t a great piece of literature. However, Uncle Tom has historical value as a force in the abolitionist movement, having had a profound effect on readers of its time. Theo won’t be driving a political movement for human rights and will not be remembered in the future.

When I thought about Theo being the worst book I’ve read in twenty years, the previous worst was Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, published in 2006 and recommended to me by a coworker and friend. Rebecca Onion, author of the Slate commentary, says the books are not alike because Theo has a plot. However, the plot is resolved in a sort of afterthought to the bloated book. So the two books linked in my mind as plotless. At least Five People was short.

I mentioned a few weeks back that Joe Ponepinto wrote about the fact that people enjoy reading poorly written books. While not suggesting that Theo is an AI-authored book (it isn’t), he briefly suggests that it’s as bad as an AI book. And if that’s what we like, then maybe AI will take over publications.

Reading Theo pushed me to a thought experiment. Let’s all bring forward our recollections of The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner, a novel written over 100 years ago for elementary school readers. I believe just about everyone has read it or has had it read to them. To jog your memory:

Four orphaned kids decide to live in the forest because they are afraid of their grandfather, whom they believe to be cruel. They find an abandoned boxcar that they make into a home. After one of them falls ill, a local doctor figures out that they are his friend’s grandchildren and he gives grandpa, who is actually wealthy and kind, the heads up. The kids then live with gramps. They miss the boxcar, so he has it moved to his backyard. Afterwards, the kids use it as a clubhouse. They live happily ever after with the nice rich guy and have many thrilling adventures.

Now: if the boxcar children were adults, would you read and enjoy the story? Because it seems that is what we are spending our lives doing—reading The Boxcar Children over and over again, looking for that same warm feeling of being cared for by the miraculously appearing rich relative. A particular paragraph in Theo struck me as I thought about this:

“‘It’s hard enough to define what art is, much less “good art.” I wonder if there is such a thing. Maybe there are just good responses. But I guess if a work of art makes us see something familiar in a new way or makes us feel something we ought to have felt all along or shows us our place in the world more clearly, maybe then it qualifies as “good.” If it makes us better somehow, maybe that’s what gives it value.’”

Perhaps Levi workshopped Theo and was given some constructive criticism. Rather than do the hard work of revision, he curated this response, one that readers worldwide appear to wholeheartedly agree with.

What (Else) I’m Reading

Just after I finished Theo, I had the pleasure of reading one of the best books I’ve come across recently, John of John by Douglas Stuart. I read a lovely review by Ron Charles in his Substack that made me run out and buy the book.

What a contrast. The characters are complex, complicated vessels of good and evil, imposing their worldviews on one another. They are very much like the real people we meet and know, our families and friends, our enemies. Every action they take, every thought they have drives the narrative forward. But their community is so small, lonely, and isolated that it compounds their troubles. I wondered how this book could ever resolve when so much about custom, social norms, and traditions imprisoned the characters. And yet it does resolve. Beautifully. Don’t miss this novel, longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Hello Friends,

I’m putting on my librarian hat today and, rather than writing an essay, I’m providing some sources that discuss what’s next for the publishing industry concerning AI. I hope my organization of the articles means that one leads into another. Before I get into today’s topic, I figured we could all use some good news, so I’m linking to a recent article on Reasons to Be Cheerful. (Is there any better creature than a dog?) Lastly, I have some reading recommendations. Please click the title to view the whole article or listen to the audio.

Good News

Meet India’s Four-Legged Wildlife Detectives from Reasons to be Cheerful

“Sniffer dogs are emerging as the secret weapon of Indian wildlife authorities,” says Nitin Desai, director (Central India) at WPSI. “When there are no eyewitnesses, dogs find evidence that no human eye can detect.”

Since 2008, WWF-India … has trained more than 120 wildlife sniffer dog squads … . Deployed across 22 states, they assist forest departments in detecting poaching and wildlife trafficking, helping seize tiger skins, pangolin scales, ivory and live animals while also deterring poachers in vulnerable landscapes.

The Drama and Trauma Caused by AI-generated Writing

I’m going to make some assumptions here, primarily that you have heard of book deals being canceled over suspicions that the author used generative AI to write. Readers and writers have been worried that the bookish culture we love will be replaced with AI texts. Now I’m wondering what we are all going to do about it. So, here are some recent articles that (sort of, kind of) seek answers. As to the articles’ mention that people enjoy crappy writing: I want to explore that soon by diving into a book whose author I can’t harm by commenting (a blockbuster bestseller that will probably get a film deal). I asked for Theo of Golden for my birthday because it’s so wildly popular, and someone I know loved it. And, man, is it a pile of stink.

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Writers Combat AI with Style

More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’ From Wired

Ellena Savage, an Australian novelist and academic … says … “AI has stolen several syntactical conventions I once held dear. I miss over-deploying the em dash. I miss the rule of three, which was so satisfying.”

Across magazines and digital publications, this anti-AI counterstyle is reshaping in-house style and editorial practice too. Richard Fisher, an honorary professor at University College London and editor at online culture magazine Aeon, says AI has prompted him to encourage writers “to be more human” and write more conversationally. “We don’t want to sand out the rough edges, because AI cannot write prose as spiky or idiosyncratic as humans.” …

[R]enewed appreciation for good writing might be one of the unexpected benefits of the AI writing era. Last April, John Warner, a veteran writing teacher, published More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, in which he argued that rather than replacing writers, AI might actually come to reinstate the value of good writing and the style and process therein.

LLMs have introduced a new paranoia about style, and lack thereof, that might, at least in the short term, be a good thing. … it could provide a new incentive to improve in order to avoid being made redundant by LLMs.

But as AI keeps pace with human writing, potentially being trained on a corpus of anti-AI writing styles as they develop, it could soon necessitate the invention of an anti-anti-anti-AI style. “Whatever cosmetic counterstyle is created in response to AI, AI could mimic,” says McGarry. “The only true counterstyle is good writing.”

And Yet…Do People Prefer AI Writing?

AI stories preferred to human-written ones - study from the BBC

The study, published by Cambridge University Press, tested to see whether people aged 18 to 81 could tell the difference between human-written and AI-generated short stories.

Led by researchers at Villanova University (VU), USA, it found that participants could not tell which was which. …

In their first experiment, 1,682 participants read a story and were either correctly or incorrectly told it had been written by AI or a human. They then rated how engaging it was and its quality.

In a second and third experiment, 424 and 481 people received one human-written story and one by AI, and were not told the author. After reading, they were asked to identify them.

Weisberg said: “In our study, participants gave the highest ratings to stories that they had been told were written by humans but which were actually written by AI. … I’d argue that this reveals a bias towards narratives written by real people.” …

“AI writing tends to be clearer, more direct and easier to process,” said Weisberg. “By contrast, human-written stories are often more subtle and complex. … Perhaps people generally prefer predictability, because difficult or subtle material requires more brain power.”

How A.I. Books Sneak Their Way Into Stores from the New York Times (gift link)

A few years into the A.I. era, there is sobering evidence that a significant and growing portion of the novels being sold are written with or by chatbots, and that readers are buying them.

If True, is This the End of Creativity?

If the average person can’t tell the difference between human-created and AI-generated art, then people and companies and corporations will use AI-generated art because it incurs no human costs, for example health or retirement benefits. …

Why bother to write anything truly creative if you can make money just asking AI to churn out a couple hundred pages of garbage and design a cover to match? … [I]t only takes a few greedy abusers to change the system… . Remember, the average reader usually can’t tell the difference. If they could, books like Fifty Shades of Grey and Theo of Golden would never have become popular. And AI has no trouble replicating bad books like that. …

Young people will no longer aspire to be artists, because they’ll know it will not be them producing the art, but the AI assistant that they are forced to work with. Forced? Yes, because corporations will find a way to acquire the AI technology that produces almost all the art in our country, and they will provide most of the jobs in that field. With AI as the standard, more creative artists will be forced to abandon their more adventurous impulses [in order to] to survive.

Preserving the ‘Wholly-Human’ Author

Why is Anthropic destroying books? From The Guardian

The AI company apparently found destructively scanning ‘all the books in the world’ easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training data

Should we destroy all the books in the world?

An answer to this question can be found in the court documents of Bartz v Anthropic PBC. The northern California district court case, decided in late July this year, highlighted the improbably named “Project Panama”, one of the AI company Anthropic’s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. “What is Project Panama?” court exhibit 21 asks, in an internal memo. The answer: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The memo advises discretion: “Why use a codename? … [B]ecause we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Destructive scanning was Anthropic’s solution to a problem: in order to “train” Claude, Anthropic had to procure a large, high-quality language dataset, preferably one created before 2022 and the corrupting influence of generative AI on contemporary text. … As the court’s decision relates, Anthropic hoped that books’ “well-curated facts, well-organized analyses, and captivating fictional narratives” would help “Claude write as accurately and as compellingly as Authors”.

Anthropic had a choice: it could have secured copyright permission to use existing e-books. This would have required the “legal/practice/business slog”, as Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO phrased it, of managing copyright. …

In the context of the court’s decision in Bartz v Anthropic PBC, destructive scanning is an effective mechanism to strip authorial involvement from printed texts, in order to use the content of those works to improve the functions of an LLM. It is both legal and less regulated than strip mining. …

If we take seriously the 2022 threshold, as a moment when AI-generated text began to make significant entry into the textual record, should we start to think of the “wholly human author” as an emergent category of collections preservation and stewardship?

… The risk with generative AI, as this single instance with Anthropic indicates, is that we cede the means of production of our large language lives: that we turn from creators to consumers, and hand the generative promise of our work to large language models and their proprietors.

The Fight Continues in Court

Book Publishers Sue Google Over AI Training, Escalating a Legal Standoff from ADWEEK

The most striking allegation in the suit holds that Google trained its AI models on books that publishers handed over to build Google Books. That agreement permitted Google to display snippets, the complaint argues, not to repurpose the material into training data for a competing business.

An Article Title that Suggests an Answer That Isn’t There

After the Cancellation of ‘Call Me, I’ll Hide The Body,’ What Comes Next? from Publisher’s Weekly

[Nigerian author Jerry Adedayo] Falade, who is currently a graduate student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas working towards a PhD, felt that he had won the literary lottery. His book starred a Nigerian immigrant protagonist, reflecting his research interest in Black masculinity in contemporary African American and African diaspora literature.

All of this came crashing down as a result of the accusation that his book was written with AI. … The book was pulled, and Falade reported that his agents and publishers cut ties with him.

Macmillan’s Minotaur imprint purchased the book in the U.S., and editors had deemed it worthy of being a lead title in a forthcoming publishing season, according to reporting by the Bookseller. The quality of the work was confirmed by Hodgman, who said the book “dazzled” Europa and “top publishing professionals around the world.” [Literary agent Marc] Gerald concurred, telling the Bookseller that “everyone fell in love with” the book, and that “however it came to be drafted, it’s amazing.”

How exactly the book was judged to have been written by AI remains unknown.…

Falade has spoken with a variety of publications, including the Guardian, in which he suggested that the cancellation of his book may have been motivated by racism. …

Others have different theories. In his reporting on the situation for Deadline, Mike Fleming Jr. speculated that the deals were called off because AI-generated texts cannot be copyrighted. …

For its part, the American Association of Literary Agents (AALA) told PW that the responsibility falls on the author to be fully transparent, and when they are not, the agent has the right to terminate the relationship.

Another Article on Solutions that Offers None

Brian Murray Calls for Industrywide Solutions to Issues Around AI Authorship from Publisher’s Weekly

[HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray] called the situation “very murky,” explaining that generative AI differs from other technological innovations, such as e-books, which “didn’t impact the writing process.”

He explained that copyright is the foundation of publishing, but that books written with AI could very well be considered uncopyrightable. …

Murray doesn’t believe there is a technical solution to finding AI-aided books. Rather, he thinks that agents, authors, and publishers need to work together to establish best practices in being able to certify a book is written by humans.

And an Article that Actually Proposes Solutions

We’ve asked three industry professionals and writers—Kathleen Schmidt, Lincoln Michel, and John Paul Brammer—to weigh in on how scandals like these keep erupting, if AI use has any place in writing to begin with, and where publishing might go from here.

* KS: publishers should be conducting LLM training

* JP: [W]e don’t have a robust literary culture. … I don’t think the average person needs to be reading Proust in their spare time …, but the fact that the people in our culture who should be discerning readers are being proven time and again to be undiscerning makes me worried about the future of literature. AI is only accelerating and revealing it.

* LM: They have, perhaps naively, relied on the integrity of the author they work with. You can learn how to spot this stuff … . I expect publishers will be doing LLM training at some point.

* LM: I also think we’ll see people turn to customizable LLM slop, paying OpenAI or whatever directly for stories. So I think literary publishers would be smart to make themselves a home for the people who want human-authored work.

* KS: Authors need their receipts (notes and drafts). … Publishing companies need to form an alliance and create uniform AI policies.

And just for fun, here’s a Teen Magazine-style quiz from Becky Tuch at Lit Mag News.

Reading Recommendations

2026 Booker Prize Longlist: Of the 13 books, I have purchased two on audio that I haven’t gotten to yet.

Abolish the Top Ten Books List from The Walrus

We’re saying the merit of a book is relative to other books, not internal, eternal, but external. We are voiding the work’s intrinsic worth. …

Grading novels the way we do meat thermometers or winter tires erases the incongruence, wildness, and uncountability that define an artwork. …

Next time you talk up a book, experiment with constraining yourself to solely what’s between the covers. Don’t reach for a comparator. You are not a BookExpo catalogue.

What I’m Reading

Print

Theo of Golden by Allen Levi: Ugh. I’ll never get those hours back. I hope to discuss it soon. Both thumbs down!

We are Bridges by Cassandra Lane: creative nonfiction in which Lane reclaims her family’s history through reimagining the lives of her great-grandparents, and particularly, her great-grandfather’s lynching after he refuses to surrender his property to the white mayor of Holmesville, Mississippi. In giving voice to this story, she takes back her American story. Thumbs up.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton: “There was a time when I knew nothing about hares and gave them little thought. The same can be said, I have realized, of the many other aspects of life that have opened to me as a result of this experience. It has been like acquiring a new set of faculties and a greater degree of perceptiveness towards my physical environment.” This story is a balm, a gift. Thumbs up.

Audiobooks

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow: I decided this biography was too long to read right now, so I opted to listen. Forty-four hours! Twain is so interesting. His capacity to change for the better, rejecting the racism of his youth and more, is a quality that feels sadly lacking (even vilified) in people today. However, I was surprised by Twain’s obsession with young girls. Not exactly creepy, but certainly weird. Thumbs up.

Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn: A well-researched book by the son of radical Weather Underground leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. I hope to discuss it soon. Thumbs up.

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Hello Friends,

Today, I’d like to discuss a few banned and often challenged books: Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, a YA multiple award winner and Lucky by Alice Sebold, which should be withdrawn from libraries, but not for the reasons it is being banned.

Before we dive into these books, I want to note that this week Utah banned another book in all of its public schools: Stephen King’s Different Seasons which contains four novellas, two of which were adapted for the films The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me.

Anyone who has read “The Body” or seen Stand By Me will understand why schools were using the collection in the classroom. It’s quite possible that this was the only story in the collection that was assigned. And now the students have lost access to studying it.

When such works are removed, it’s unclear that the goal is to protect the teens or tweens. What is clear is that relatable stories are disappearing from the curriculum.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Over the past few years, I have been discussing banned books most of which were published a decade or more ago. I thought it would be fun to read a more recent one and see what the issues are. I recently picked up Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo because it is so highly regarded and so often vilified. I wanted to know why.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (2021), the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Michael L. Printz Honor, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Wow. And so deserving.

Lily Hu is a Chinese American teen living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s. While she deals with prejudice because of her race, her family is also afraid of the McCarthy-era milieu in which all people of Chinese heritage are suspected of having Communist sympathies. In fact, Lily’s father, a doctor, has been targeted by the FBI for not naming one of his patients as a Communist and his citizenship papers have been confiscated.

As a rising high school senior, Lily is awakening to her sexuality and thrills to an ad for a performance by Tommy Andrews, a male impersonator, at the Telegraph Club. She later learns that a classmate—smart and kind Kath Miller—has been to the lesbian night club. The two strike up a friendship over their common academic interests and later become romantically involved. They sneak out of their houses a few times to go to the Telegraph Club late at night. Eventually, the club is raided and Lily must decide whether to tell her parents the truth and support Kath, or live a lie.

I’m sure the reason Telegraph Club is so often censored is that, at one point, the two girls have a sexual encounter that is briefly described. It’s a natural development of their relationship and only a few paragraphs of the entire novel, which is full of: great character development; a keen perception of the racial prejudice and Communist hysteria of the 1950s; and a very moving first-love story.

After reading Telegraph Club, it’s hard to say how sorry I am that this novel is so often banned. It’s not only a great book, but its emotional pull will benefit all readers. I want to say that it’s very dear, but I’m not sure that conveys my sense of the book. The main characters are sweet, kind to one another, and fumbling through adolescence in the most real way. We love them and root for their happiness. All of which is to say that the novel has an uncommon tenderness. It’s just nuts to keep this excellent work of YA fiction away from teens.

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Utah Banning of Alice Sebold’s Lucky.

Apparently, Utah’s school districts are working backward in time to ban books. The recently banned Lucky by Alice Sebold was published way back in 1999. It’s the author’s story about an extremely violent rape and what followed—the arrest and conviction of a Black man for the assault. While the rape in fact did happen, the man convicted was innocent. This was only proven long after the memoir was published, long after Sebold became a bestselling author with her novel The Lovely Bones. When the alleged rapist was exonerated, the publisher, Scribner, pulled the memoir from distribution.

Back in the day, I used to ‘booktalk’ Lucky to high school classes who came in looking for memoirs. I also posted a review on School Library Lady, discussing why I thought the book was a good choice for high school students. Once the convicted man was exonerated, I removed the review from public view. So the banning of the book in all public schools in Utah (along with 36 other titles) has me thinking about how book curation and weeding in school libraries actually works.

Librarians remove books all the time. Otherwise, there would be no room for new ones. Common reasons for removal are the physical condition of the book (falling apart), lack of interest as shown by checkout stats, and outdated information. The outdated information usually pertains to the sciences (Someday, man will go to the moon!), but it can also be that the information in the book proves to be incorrect.

The easiest example I can give of books with bad info, one that everyone will understand, is memoirs and biographies by or about Lance Armstrong. Think of it—in my high school library, we had LOTS of Lance. Since our population included ESL students, we had biographies beginning at the third grade reading level and going through adult level. Lots of companies that published books specifically for schools sold Lance. He was included in all sorts of series—American heroes, top athletes, role models for our time, etc. And again, these were written at various reading and lexile levels. We talked these books up; they circulated well. And then we had to weed them all. Our role model into the recycle bin.

Lucky is a book with the same fate. Not because Sebold was a liar as was Armstrong—her story of being raped at knifepoint and beaten and the aftermath is true and horrifying. But the book is inaccurate because it tells us that the rapist was caught and imprisoned. So it belongs in the recycle bin. Even though Utah schools had the book in the last 25 years, if it was still in the collection, I’d be surprised. Maybe the schools don’t have a level of staffing that allows time for weeding. (This is a very common problem and was true of my job as a teacher librarian.)

The story surrounding Sebold’s rape and the conviction and later exoneration of Anthony Broadwater, is tragic. Broadwater was wrongfully imprisoned for 16 years and spent 22 years as a registered sexual offender. There are so many missteps and genuinely bad police work.

If read together, two articles give us a solid overview of the situation. One was published in the New Yorker in May 2023 “The Tortured Bond of Alice Sebold and the Man Wrongfully Convicted of Her Rape” by Rachel Aviv. A second came out a few weeks ago (June 30, 2026), That Guy is Still Out There by Joaquin Sapien in ProPublica.

The New Yorker article may be password protected (no gift link available to me, sorry.) The ProPublica article is free to all readers. They are pretty long, but I highly recommend reading them. Meanwhile, below I paraphrase and quote from each. These are only a few of the points the articles make, but they will give you a sense of what happened.

From the New Yorker

* During a police lineup, Sebold identified a different man—not Broadwater. After signing a form that confirmed her decision, she felt a wave of nausea. She sensed that she’d made the wrong choice.

* The assistant district attorney, Gail Uebelhoer, was a thirty-one-year-old pregnant woman whom Sebold saw as a role model, her guide through a court system dominated by men. Considering the terrible track record of the Syracuse (New York) PD in solving rape crimes, Uebelhoer was looking for a win and for a chance to help a young girl. She told Sebold that the reason she’d picked the young man in the lineup was that Broadwater had asked “an almost identical-looking friend from jail to stand in the No. 5 spot and stare at her, to scare and fluster her. (In fact, Broadwater was not friends with the man in the No. 5 spot, and they did not look the same.)”

* On the stand in a grand jury trial, Sebold said she wasn’t sure she picked the right man.

* Police and prosecutors pushed forward with the charges against Broadwater anyway, and Sebold ultimately identified him as her attacker in the 1982 trial.

* Broadwater was convicted primarily based on Sebold’s testimony and microscopic hair analysis. The hair analysis was a forensic technique that the U.S. Department of Justice later debunked as “junk science.”

* Following tireless efforts by his lawyers and the discovery of serious prosecutorial flaws, Broadwater’s conviction was officially vacated by Judge Gordon Cuffy in November 2021. He concluded that the conviction rested on a debunked hair analysis and a tainted lineup.

* Sebold released a public statement expressing deep remorse. She stated, “I will forever be sorry for what was done to him” and expressed regret that her pursuit of justice resulted in an innocent young man being brutalized by a flawed legal system.

* In March 2023, the State of New York reached a $5.5 million settlement with Broadwater for his wrongful conviction.

From ProPublica

The article “That Guy is Still Out There,” includes more recent discoveries, including the facts that there was at least one serial rapist operating in and around Syracuse University at the time Sebold was assaulted and that the police and the university attempted to hide this fact.

“What’s clear is that no part of the system in Syracuse at the time could be depended on. Police brushed off rapes. Prosecutors bungled confessions or were defeated at trial. Judges overlooked irregularities. And one of the most powerful institutions in the city, Syracuse University, seemed more interested in suppressing news of a rape epidemic than solving it. There were police reports of sexual assaults near the campus marked “no press.” A former detective testified that the files were marked that way at the university’s request.”

* At least one serial rapist was on the streets — and sexual assaults resembling Sebold’s continued for years, even while Broadwater was behind bars. There were at least three other sexual attacks in the immediate area in the same year.

“One woman had told police that a man dragged her into a wooded section of the park. When she resisted, the report stated, he “began to punch her in the face” and “ordered her to remove her pants.”

“As with Sebold’s case, the police report was dismissive. One officer asserted that the victim was “retarded” and had run away from a nearby halfway house. The staff there said that she had complained of a similar incident two weeks prior and that she was having “difficulty adjusting.” The case was put on ice just hours after it had been reported.”

* There was no indication in the police reports that these attacks might have been connected. The reporter found no articles about any of these assaults in newspaper archives.

* More than a dozen women reported being raped or attacked by strangers within half a square mile over four years.

“Women were being sexually assaulted in their dorm rooms and in student apartments, walking out of grocery stores or on their way to the library. A nursing student was attacked at the same spot as Sebold, on the same day that her roommate was raped in their shared apartment. A freshman was raped in a sorority house by a man who broke in through a window. The descriptions of the perpetrators were often eerily similar. They frequently carried a knife. And several were roughly the same height, weight and race.”

* In the 1980s and ’90s, a prosecutor would get into a scuffle, on live TV, with a candidate who had just won the race for DA. The police crime lab lost its accreditation. “The doctor who led the county medical examiner’s office resigned after an investigation found he had routinely removed organs from corpses without consent from the victims’ families. His employees had posed playfully for photos over the body of a woman who had died by suicide.”

* Former Syracuse detective Paul Clapper wondered whether the wrong man had been sent to prison. After he left the force, he raised the name of a confessed and convicted rapist with a lengthy and violent record who closely matched the physical description of Sebold’s assailant.

* “‘No press,’ Clapper testified in 2025, ‘means that Syracuse University put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary … in the area of Syracuse University.’”

* When Sebold picked the man standing next to Broadwater in the lineup, the case should have ended then and there, in the view of the DA today. “You know, she didn’t pick out the wrong guy. She picked out the guy. She picked out the guy that she thought had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony,” Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick told ProPublica. “Case is over. Stop.”

* At one point in the 1980s, a local news article reported that the district attorney’s office had suffered nine trial defeats in a row. Uebelhoer was quoted saying “juries are looking for a perfect victim, but they don’t exist.” She saw Sebold as a standout, writing in a memo as the case was transferred to Mastine: “Good luck. Victim is excellent witness.”

“The trial was peppered with irregularities. Broadwater and his lawyer had opted for a bench trial, hoping that a judge would see the paucity of evidence and wouldn’t be swayed by emotion. But the judge seemed to have a soft spot for Sebold. During a break in the proceedings, he spoke to Sebold privately, according to her memoir, expressing concern about how she was holding up and asking about her family. Had a juror done such a thing, they would likely have been kicked off the jury and a mistrial might’ve been declared. (The judge died in 2009.)”

A police report of a rape soon after Broadwater had been convicted sounded a lot like Sebold’s rape. This, I believe, is the most important addition the ProPublica article makes to the New Yorker article.

A young woman was jogging through a wooded section of the park when she heard someone behind her.

“Suddenly she was in the grip of a man dragging her by the neck behind a cluster of trees. He forced her to perform oral sex, then pulled her sweatpants down and raped her. She reported that her assailant was Black, about 5’9”, 140 pounds, muscular and around 16 years old.

“Those details did not draw a lot of notice at the time. But they fit the description of a rapist who would soon become well-known to the Syracuse police. Only four months after Broadwater was found guilty, a high schooler named Thomas Weakfall admitted raping five women. The crimes had begun in late 1981, he said in a statement taken by Clapper. Four of them occurred less than a mile from Thornden Park. Weakfall, according to police reports, had provided “certain facts only the perpetrator would have known.”

“There’s no evidence that Weakfall assaulted Sebold, but there’s no denying he matched key elements of the description she gave. Sebold had told police her rapist was Black, 16 to 18 years of age, about 5’7” and 150 pounds. Weakfall was Black, 16 years old, 5’9” and 140 pounds, according to police reports.”

DNA evidence wasn’t a possibility in 1982. It could have been used in the 2020s when the case was reviewed, but the physical evidence from her case was gone. And the statute of limitations on these rapes expired decades ago. What would be great right now is a book about Anthony Broadwater. His story has been in the works, at least as a movie, but has fallen through. But there is still the possibility.

The Job of the Library is Correction and Weeding

So, as to library books: yes, there is incorrect information in them from time to time. The librarian can’t know what is unknown. (She is not, after all, Donald Rumsfeld.) When she finds an error, she corrects. This is how weeding should be executed.

The fate of a library book shouldn’t rest on a scene where a couple of girls make out in a locked classroom, as is true of Telegraph Club.

Thanks!

Thanks for hanging with me on this one! Next week will be our ‘Library and Banned Books News’ roundup. After that, I hope to have a look at a project I completed last week, one I am very proud of—and one that tells a story in fabric.

On a personal note, I was found to have a melanoma but it was successfully removed and I am cancer-free! Yay!

If you’d like to read about a time when I decided to remove a book after a student complaint about sexual content (what my reasoning was):

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Hello Friends,

While this is not our “Library and Banned Books News” week, (that’s next week), I do want to mention that the Knox County, TN schools reversed the banning of Alex Haley’s Roots. And that was because of community and national blow back. Fighting back matters! Good job, book ‘freadom’ fighters!

I had another cataract surgery last week, and wasn’t seeing clearly again, so I had the chance to listen to several audiobooks. One of them was Daniel Kraus’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Angel Down. I read some remarks about the book questioning whether the Pulitzer committee was biased toward experimental work. Apparently, some critics found all the finalists to be similar in their approach. I don’t know—I haven’t read most of the books up for the award. However, Angel Down is unusual (I wouldn’t go so far as to say experimental) in that it is a single sentence. But, at least in audiobook form, it flows well. Pauses can be felt; there are chapter breaks (each starts with the word “and”).

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Angel Down

Angel is easy to follow and reminded me—in form, not in content— of the Academy Award winning film 1917 (Directed by Sam Mendes) which feels like it was filmed in one continuous shot. I haven’t read any interviews with Kraus, so I don’t know whether he was influenced by the film.

Angel is the story of a group of five American soldiers trying to stay alive during the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I. A weird lamentation is coming from the No Man’s Land between them and the Germans. The pitch and endlessness of the cry is driving the men mad. Their commanding officer—Major General Reis, a very bad guy—commands them to take care of the man, who is probably caught in barbed wire. He means they are to kill the sufferer.

No one wants to risk their life in No Man’s Land. Private Cyril Bagger, a con man and draft dodger who only landed in the war because he was caught in an illegal scheme, knows he can con his way out of being chosen for the risky mission. However, when the task falls to a teenage soldier named Arno, a mere boy who lied about his age in order to join the army, Bagger decides to accompany him. He has a soft spot for the poor kid after reading “The Son of Tarzan” to him. For a while, he believes he can make sure that Arno makes it home alive.

When the two venture out to find the suffering soldier, they are surprised to find instead what they think is an angel, a woman who is unable to walk but who emanates a beam of heavenly light. It seems she protects them as they rescue her. But once they arrive back with the others, the angel brings out both the worst impulses of each of them as well as their illusory dreams. Bagger and Arno make it their mission to protect the angel and deliver her to safety.

The story is full of vivid descriptions of the gore and horror of war—severed limbs, erupting guts, rotting teeth, pus and infections, burnt flesh—one atop the other, giving the reader a sense of the futility and darkness of the enterprise.

As a high school teacher librarian, I read many YA books that I would later ‘book talk’ to students. The way the horror and gore were described in Angel were familiar to me. Is this the Daniel Kraus who wrote YA novels that I used to book talk? I checked—and yes, he is the same man.

This Pulitzer winning novel has much in common with two novels I read for book talks—Rotters and Scowler. Perhaps this will lead some readers to think ‘how did Angel win the Pulitzer, then?’ But maybe another way to look at it is that some YA books are very good, and Kraus’s are among them. Maybe he was building the skills that landed that Pulitzer.

If you enjoy horror, you might enjoy those novels. You could recommend them to teens you know. Teens could impress their teachers with the fact that they’ve read books by Kraus. Here are some thoughts I had when I read the YA books.

Scowler

My thoughts in October 2013:

Scowler is a great October read, one in a YA branch of the true horror family. So—this is NOT your love triangle with some supernatural creatures thrown in ala Twilight and its progeny.

Scowler is Dark.

Scowler is Disturbing.

After nine years in prison, a psychopath returns to the family farm with one thing on his mind—revenge against his son, now nineteen years old, for having him locked up all those years ago. That father, Marvin Burke, has escaped when meteorites fall throughout the county. One hits the prison and chaos ensues. Though Burke is supposed to be in a more distant lock-up, another escaped prisoner comes to the farm and warns Ry that his father is out for his blood.

Ry had bested his father nine years earlier after climbing through a window and discovering his mother locked in her room, unable to flee. Her immobility is due to the twisted torture that her husband had devised for her in response to the fact that she has secretly done work to support the failing farm. (I can’t tell you—don’t want to kill the creep factor when you read it.)

Though the family—Ry, his mom and his little sister Sarah—nearly escape, Marvin Burke catches them. It is up to ten-year-old Ry to be a decoy, to risk himself through a freezing night. He has no jacket, none of the right clothing, in fact. No light. No nothing, except three toys that fall from his pockets. As his mental state breaks under pressure of his father stalking him in order to murder him, these toys come to life and direct him through his living hell.

One of Ry’s toys—Scowler—is an old cast-off, homemade from pipes, husks and shells. Hideously ugly.

It may prove his salvation more than once.

High school housekeeping: I think any teen might enjoy Scowler for a Halloween fright. Though there are several flashbacks, it takes place over a few days, just before the meteorite hits and then just after. Here, the reader finds himself in the mind of a sadistic psychopath as well as in the mind of his son, who, having suffered beyond ordinary human endurance, may well become a psychopath himself. The language is colorful, so if cursing offends you, you might take a pass. But this gives a sense of reality both to the brother-sister relationship and to the dire situation of the family. It’s a book of average length and average difficulty that will give you a taste of what adult horror fans read in the lengthier works of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and their ilk.

Rotters

My thoughts in June 2013:

Such a weird story! The combination of bullying and horror story compelled me to finish the book, and I think it will appeal to anyone who likes really quirky stuff.

Joey Crouch has lived with his mother all of his life in Chicago. They don’t go out much and he’s never been over the Illinois state line. But when his mother is hit by a bus and killed, Joey is removed to a small town in Iowa to live with a father he’s never known.

Things are very bad from the start. Ken Harnett, Joey’s dad, doesn’t bother to pick him up at the depot. He immediately leaves the house upon Joey’s arrival and doesn’t return for three days. Meanwhile, Joey sleeps on the floor, has nothing to eat and notices a strange, nasty odor in the shack that he can’t identify.

Dressed poorly, hungry and stinking, Joey immediately becomes a target of bullying in his new high school—not only by jocks but by a sadistic biology teacher as well, one who daily makes Joey stand in front of the class and then uses him to point out body parts and their functions. (Just a note here from the teacher in me: I had a hard time believing that any teacher anywhere could get away with treating a student the way Joey was treated—but if one tried, I would hope that someone in the class would speak up and tell outsiders.)

The situation only gets worse when we discover what that terrific stink is: Ken is a modern-day grave robber. With nothing to lose at school, Joey decides to learn the trade, and we enter the bizarre brotherhood of this underworld. They are criminals with a strange code of honor, and the one of them who has broken the code is terrorizing all the others. He may have the power to use Joey to get at the whole group.

Rotters are people—because all people will die, and then they will rot if they are not cremated. The descriptions of grave robbing, of disintegrating corpses, are the stuff of nightmares. (So beware.) Yet the story is oddly original and well-written. There are a lot of interesting facts about the history of grave robbing and the ‘resurrection men’ who dug up corpses for scientists and professors to use in study. (Remember Jerry Cruncher in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities?) When Joey has been bullied beyond endurance and he seeks revenge—well, imagine what a grave robber could do.

Reading

15 Essential Works of American Literature from Publishers Weekly

The most vital books published in the U.S. since 1776 as voted on by critics.

Of these 15 books, I’ve read 13. Which of them have you read?

AI and Writing Awards

‘Obvious markers of AI’: doubts raised over winner of short story prize from the Guardian

Granta publisher says ‘perhaps we never will know’ true authorship of work that won Commonwealth prize

A few syntactical tics – and the verdict of an AI detection platform – have sparked a furore over the possibility that a short story given a prestigious literary award was written by AI.

The foundation that awarded the prize and Granta, the magazine that published the winning story, said they had considered the allegations but had not reached a conclusion as to whether they were true. …

The Commonwealth Foundation and Granta have said there is a limit to their ability to detect whether the allegations around Nazir’s possible use of AI are true.

The foundation said it did not use AI checkers in its judging process because supplying unpublished work to them “would raise significant concerns surrounding consent and artistic ownership”.

It said all entrants to the prize had avowed that their submissions were their own work and “personally stated that no AI was used”, something it confirmed with “further consultation”. It added that AI checkers were “not unfailing and infallible”.

ands this article in Wired adds:

Besides Nazir, two more winning authors have drawn allegations of using AI in their work. Pangram finds that “The Bastion’s Shadow,” by Maltese writer John Edward DeMicoli, winner for the Canada and Europe region, is fully AI-generated; it scans “Mehendi Nights,” by Indian writer Sharon Aruparayil, winner for the Asia region, as partly AI-generated. Neither DeMicoli nor Aruparayil immediately returned requests for comment when reached through their respective social media accounts.

The other two short-listed stories, by Holly Ann Miller of New Zealand and Lisa-Anne Julien of South Africa, deliver “fully human-written” results from Pangram.

In a further twist, the Jamaican author Sharma Taylor, a judge for this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize, has been accused of using AI to craft her descriptive blurb that accompanied the listing of “The Serpent in the Grove” as a regional winner. Pangram evaluates Taylor’s text as “AI-assisted.” She did not immediately return a request for comment.

For fun, check out “The Prehistory of A.I. Slop” in the New Yorker

Before ChatGPT, there was the Plot Robot, Auto-Beatnik, and a century’s worth of schemes for automating authorship.

Writers

I saw this cross-posted on Narratively —a great list.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Hello Friends,

I hope you are feeling and doing well. I have several bookish things going on lately that I hope you’ll find interesting. But first, because life is rough, here’s something I found very hopeful on Reasons to Be Cheerful.

Endangered Butterflies Are Thriving Behind Bars

In the tender, methodical work of rescuing an imperiled butterfly species, incarcerated women are finding a sense of purpose.

My pandemic pups turned six years old.

Hard to believe, but here they are thriving, and this is another thing that soothes these challenging days. I was moving into a period of despair when they came into my life and helped me rally. I wrote about it in my chapbook The Mortality of Dogs and Humans. I promised on my ‘About’ page to post about the dogs once in a while, so here are a few nap time photos.

On Mother’s Day night, I decided to watch The Maltese Falcon because, somehow, I’d neither seen it nor read the book. This post from DocTalk, Allan N Schwartz PhD steered me to it:

As a retired psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, I cannot help but view this film through the lens of symbolism and human motivation. The black bird itself, the Maltese Falcon, is not merely an object. It becomes almost mythical. Everyone in the story is obsessed with possessing it. Men and women lie, betray, manipulate, and kill in pursuit of it. Yet what fascinates me most is that the falcon has power not because of what it truly is, but because of what people imagine it to be.

That is one of the great truths about human psychology.

People often chase symbols rather than realities.

Books

I had the chance to talk to Marla Miller about how my work as a teacher and librarian influenced my novel Keep Sweet. So much depends on what happens away from the desk!

Sci-Fi Authors and Latino/Latine Writers

I’m reading speculative fiction for a special (extra) issue of the Inlandia Journal right now. Submissions are open through May 31. (Side note: Submissions are also open through June 14 for their Eliud Martínez Prize. If you are a Latine writer seeking publication of a full-length manuscript [150-300 pages], have a look.)

Review of Scouts’ Honor

And I wrote a book review for the teen issue of Inlandia, “A Vow to Hide the Truth,” about Scouts’ Honor by Carlos Cortés. In general, the teen issue is all teens except the managing editor—the readers, the editors, the submitters/writers/artists. If you know a teen writer, have them look for the next submission period next winter.

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Books on My TBR List

How the Fanatical Legion of Mary Secreted Young Girls Away to Toil in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries

LOUISE BRANGAN ON THE GIRLS WHO DISAPPEARED IN 20TH-CENTURY IRELAND

Excerpted from The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence by Louise Brangan

I read the above linked excerpt on LitHub, and now I need to read the book. Or at least listen to the audiobook. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was my introduction to the Magdalene Laundries. The power of this slim book/novella cannot be overstated. If you haven’t read it, you must. It’s the best thing I’ve read in the last several years.

I’ve been checking out some recent ‘Best Of’ lists. I’m always hoping that I’ve read many of the books, maybe because it’ll make me feel like I have fine sensibilities. But honestly, there are many excellent books that critics, cuddled up in their sleeping bags in the Big Five tent, are wholly unaware of.

25 Books That Capture This American Moment Time Magazine

Of these, one that I haven’t read and look forward to is The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. I read and enjoyed (so to speak—I mean I found it powerful) her novel Kindred.

100 Best Novels The Guardian

The Guardian is posting “a countdown of the greatest literature ever published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide.” They add 20 books per week. So far they have posted 100-61. Another 20 will post on Thursday. No unexpected titles, but I have to say, I’m surprised that Pedro Páramo is only # 96. I think it might belong in the top 50.

What I’m Reading

I just finished Michael Pollan’s A World Appears, a nonfiction exploration of consciousness. I thought my kids might also want to read it, but they have a point: the final outcome of all books about consciousness is that we don’t understand it. Nevertheless, Pollan’s exploration is very interesting and wide-ranging. He interviews many scientists, philosophers, writers, and spiritual seekers and also incorporates his own experiences with consciousness-altering psychedelics.

“When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.”

I also just finished Here’s to You, Jesusa! which is a translation of the testimonial novel Hasta no verte Jesús Mío by Elena Poniatowska. The original Spanish was published in 1969. I was interested in reading Jesusa because I’m trying to get a sense of Mexico during the Cristero Wars. (Research for my own writing.) I can’t say it helped me much, but it is a strange book with a frustrating protagonist who is nonetheless admirable for her insights into politics and her ability to survive a variety of hells, including desperate poverty. If you want to read about a woman who fought in the Mexican Revolution and also survived the Cristero Wars, this is it.

“Jesusa is a tough, fiery character based on a real working-class Mexican woman whose life spanned some of the seminal events of early twentieth-century Mexican history. Having joined a cavalry unit during the Mexican Revolution, she finds herself at the Revolution’s end in Mexico City, far from her native Oaxaca, abandoned by her husband and working menial jobs. So begins Jesusa’s long history of encounters with the police and struggles against authority. Mystical yet practical, undaunted by hardship, Jesusa faces the obstacles in her path with gritty determination.”

Although No Way Home by T. C. Boyle is very good, I stopped reading it because I had to finish my library books and return them. I hope to get back to No Way soon.

What are you reading? Anything you’d like to recommend?

Please like and share. Thanks! I hope you have a good week.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Hello Friends,

There are some things I wanted to discuss about this crazy week, so I’ll put off the final discussion of Enshittification. Next week we’re starting the new schedule of alternating the “Library and Banned Books News” with these review posts rather than having both within one week. So—next Sunday is about libraries and censorship.

¡Sí, se puede! Yes, we can!

I read in two newspapers that California is changing its Cesar Chavez holiday to “Farmworker Day/El Día del Campesino.” I’m glad my state is continuing with the honor. I’m over being heartbroken over the loss of idols. I think it’s best to celebrate ideas and movements that have helped people rather than any particular man. If you need some helpful reading on the Chavez abuse news, these may be useful:

This guest post on the Contrarian by Maria Cardona.

Let us be absolutely clear: none of these horrific revelations erase the very real gains made in farmworkers’ rights through years of grueling, backbreaking organizing. Those victories belong to an entire movement. Yes, Chávez was a leader — but so much of the unacknowledged credit belongs to Dolores Huerta and to the women who powered that movement from behind the curtain.

And this:

However, the farmworkers movement is not defined by an individual — and never has been. As Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi noted, “A movement is about the people — not any one person — and its strength lies in the values it upholds. We can honor the farmworker movement — and the generations who sacrificed to build it — while also confronting painful truths. No legacy is above accountability.” While we are shaken to our core, we continue to honor the tens of thousands of farm labor activists.

Anne Lamott gives us hope, as always.

Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

And here’s some good news from this week’s Reasons to be Cheerful because it’s important to remember that everyday people work to correct past mistakes, even devastating ones.

The Native Seed Farm Safeguarding California’s Future

At Heritage Growers, every acre is being cultivated to repair ecosystems and help the Golden State meet its ambitious conservation goals.

California is widely recognized as one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, supporting thousands of endemic plant and animal species, more than any other US state. However, California’s Biodiversity Initiative notes that its wetlands, riparian woodlands and forests have “suffered extensive losses,” with “an estimated 80–90 percent” of its biologically diverse landscapes altered or lost in the past 150 years. Development, agriculture, invasive species, climate change and increasingly intense wildfires are among the culprits. Reestablishing native vegetation is crucial to reversing those trends.

Right after I posted Friday’s “Library and Banned Books News,” the librarian in Rutherford, TN said she will not move those 190 YA (mostly LGBTQIA) books out of the teen section because it violates the First Amendment Rights of the teens. We’ll see what ensues, but it’s a reminder that good people are out there fighting.

Iran and Its People

I read a couple of articles this week about the choices Iranians are now having to make.

Iranians Weigh Tough Choice: Stay or Flee from the LA Times

What the War Has Done to Iranians from the New Yorker

And one closer and more personal, a text convo between the New Yorker Journalist Cora Engelbrecht and “Hadi” in Tehran. There’s Hadi’s early sense of hope about the war, the fulfillment of a lifelong wish for the death of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which later turns to despair when the regime itself stays in place. I’m not sure whether you can access the article if you’re not a subscriber, but it’s very worthwhile. Here.

“As for me, my situation is clear,” he added. “I want to remain close to what’s happening. I’m staying here in the middle of the war until the very end, until my home, what I consider my home, is taken away from me.”

After reading these, I thought of a wonderful memoir about Iranian culture and history, about leaving Iran after the 1979-80 revolution. Exit Prohibited deals with the same question: should we stay or should we go? I know the author, Ellen Estilai, through the Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit.

Opening the Door on Iranian Culture

Exit Prohibited by Ellen Estilai

At the end of July 1980, Ellen Estilai, her husband, and their two daughters are leaving Iran. The decision isn’t easy. Ellen met and married her husband, Ali, in Davis, California, a decade earlier when they both attended university. Ali always planned to return to his homeland after earning his PhD in genetics. As a “first student,” his foreign education was paid for by the Iranian government on the promise to return and with his father’s house as collateral. After Ali graduates, Ellen goes with him, later giving birth to their children. Though she plans to spend her life in Iran, the 1979 revolution and its repressions make staying impossible. And while all four members of the family have permission to leave, Ali is detained at the airport. His passport is confiscated, and he is told he’s on the mamnou’ol khorudj — exit prohibited — list.Ellen and her daughters take off for Switzerland with plans to continue on to the United States. But they’ve no idea when they will see Ali again. She wonders: “Who would want to prevent Ali from leaving Iran? Which officious bureaucrat, which backbiting colleague, which sly neighbor could have written the letter or made the phone call? And just what is Ali being accused of? Having an American wife? Not being Islamic enough? Working on saffron?”The author moves from these thoughts to an examination of her life in Iran. Though hijab is not required under the shah’s rule, many Iranian women continue to wear headscarves, knee-length coats with long sleeves, and pants underneath. Those that don’t are eyed suspiciously as too westernized. As one of them, and a foreigner to boot, the author is sometimes distrusted. Yet she immerses herself in the culture and learns Persian. Her in-laws are a large, happy group who welcome her without hesitation. Their open-heartedness and gatherings, “a celebration of connectedness, of old roots and new growth,” satisfy a need that is not met in her small family of origin. Unlike her mother’s anxiety over hosting gatherings or guests, Iranians believe that a guest is God’s gift.Life in Iran is far different from what the author is used to. With few convenience foods available, she finds herself cooking much of the day. Itinerant street vendors call through the neighborhood selling coats and pants, watermelon, crystal dishes, and more. Though she is not convalescing, Ellen feels like Jimmy Stewart’s character in Rear Window. As she watches the drama in the courtyard and on the balconies, she discovers a good deal about her neighbors’ lives.

The author also learns cultural norms. Taarof is the necessary offering of compliments and ceremonial courtesies (“these endless streams of pleasantries took so much valuable time”). The fatalistic worldview that everyone has their own ghesmat (kismet) prevails. Nonetheless, this view allows for a tradition of warding off the evil eye by preparing hot coals in a brazier and tossing in esfand (wild rye) seeds. And, of course, there is the ever-present samovar because tea is a part of all interactions, business or pleasure.Ali lands his dream position as a professor in the Biology Department at the University of Tehran. He secures funds to create a new department, the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology, and to purchase new equipment. Though his hopes of improving Iranian education appear to be coming true, some people are envious of him.Meanwhile, Ellen completes her education in English Language and Literature and begins working at the new Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as Manager of Education. The author’s discussion of the museum — architecturally, it’s a paean to Iranian culture, but the artwork has dual foci in Iranian and western art — peeks into, and is a harbinger of, the cultural conflict that comes to consume Iran a few years later.As the author learns about Iranian culture, readers do as well. They are immersed in the beauty of Isfahan, its art and its “exquisite, sublime, and ethereal” interlocking patterns. The friendliness of Kerman, Ali’s hometown, is on display as is the routine of daily life, of being a working mother and being part of “a large, boisterous family that was endlessly interested in one another’s business.”

The narrative is infused with humor. (“As dull as it was, Days of Our Lives provided me with many random but potentially useful phrases, such as ‘Mickey aqim-e?’ [Mickey is sterile?]”) Like most Westerners, Ellen knew little about the modern political situation in Iran. Along the way, she unearthed historical imperialism. During the previous century, both Britain and Russia/the USSR had meddled in Iranian politics. The CIA led a coup in 1953 that overthrew a democratically elected prime minister. After moving to Iran, the author hears stories of the SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, and its engagement in political repression. With her newfound knowledge, she wonders — along with everyone she knows — how life under Khomeini could be any worse.During Ali’s sabbatical of 1978–79, Ellen and Ali travel back to the home of their alma mater and their meeting place, Davis, California. Thus, they are out of the country during the fall of the shah and the installation of Khomeini. Uncertain of the reality of daily life in Iran, they choose to return to Iran at the end of the sabbatical.Still, overall, readers understand the melancholy of Ellen’s departure from Iran. While she has enriched her life in a new landscape, with a new language and new traditions, and with a large, loving family, there’s no doubt she must exit. She’s worried about the future of women with talent and energy in the Islamic Republic, including her own daughters. “I knew what I wanted for them. I wanted them to know their foremothers. I wanted their voices to be heard. I wanted them to have a place at the table.”With their dreams no longer attainable, the Estilais have a new challenge in negotiating Ali’s exit. The complexity of the author’s experience and her relationship to Iran before and after the revolution makes a compelling memoir. Readers learn not only about a culture and its history but also about the dual immigrant experiences of Ellen and Ali and their inspirational ability to restart their lives.

Writer Issues, Reader Issues

AI

The NYT posted a little quiz with five sets of two paragraphs. The object is to pick the one of the two paragraphs in each set that you think is better. One is AI-generated. One is from a fairly well-known writer. It’s interesting to see how good AI paragraphs are—keeping in mind that they are generated from a vast store of real human writing. But I wonder if AI generation could sustain a complete short story, an essay, a novel, memoir, or any nonfiction book. What’s the cumulative effect?

Apparently Hachette found a horror novel worthy of publication which it has now canceled after reports that parts were AI-generated. The author claims that someone she hired to edit the self-published version used AI. She is pursuing legal action.

Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use from NYT (Gift link)

On Thursday, a day after The New York Times approached Hachette citing evidence that the novel appeared to be A.I.-generated, the company said it was pulling the book from publication. By Thursday afternoon, the novel was removed from Amazon and the Hachette website.

And Here’s the quiz if you’d like to try it. (Gift link)

Great literature may not strike us as the best reading in a single paragraph:

Thanks for reading! Take heart. I believe the old ‘darkest before the dawn’ proverb. We’ll see you out on the streets on Saturday.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Hello Friends,

While the frightening and exhausting aspects of life seem to overtake us, let’s not forget that good people do good work and we should keep up with that, too. Remember, every Sunday, Jess Craven posts lots of good things happening.

Here’s a little thanks I got for giving blood in 2025. That felt good.

 Although I am still mostly reading research books for a novel I’m working on, I’ve had a chance to listen to a few wonderful novels. I finished A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. It’s that story of Nomi Nickel, whose life in the Mennonite colony of East Village, Manitoba is without fun and without prospects (unless slaughtering chickens as a job counts). Both her sister and her mother were excommunicated and left three years earlier. Full of grief for her missing family members, Nomi breaks all the rules, numbs herself to pain, and longs for escape.

I also listened to Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb thanks to a recommendation by Beth Peyton. It’s a realistic look at farmworkers’ lives in the Great Depression. The characters in this novel flee the Dust Bowl and find an equally difficult situation on California. While the novel I’m working on has characters coming from Mexico during the same time period, they share some of the same issues with an abusive labor system. Sadly for Babb, her book was scheduled to be published, but just before, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath launched and was a runaway best seller. Babb’s book was finally published in 2004.

Enshittification Part Two

For Part One, check last week’s post.

Let’s look at Cory Doctorow’s discussion of how we ended up in the internet platform mess. There are obvious issues with companies that can act as monopolies with no serious oversight (lax government regulation). But additionally, various companies figured out how to override the interoperability of computers at the same time that their work force became less valuable to them.

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Getting Past the Interoperability of Computers

Pretty much every computer in existence is capable of running every computer program that people know how to write. This has been beneficial to industries and customers with computer technology becoming faster. Computer chips also became faster and cheaper. Great stuff until companies started planting chips in everything including your car, your thermostat, your medical implant, even in the ink that goes into your printer. Suddenly, they can control your options in relation to that product. An example: You can’t buy a third-party ink cartridge that’s safe for an HP printer because it has a computer chip installed that will only read its own cartridges. Doctorow says that this allows HP to charge $10,000 a gallon for ink. While this sounds like hyperbole, he appears to be serious about that cost.

Changes in the Work Force

When companies like Google and Facebook were new, tech workers had a lot of power because if they quit, they could easily find a job elsewhere. This is no longer true. These workers had a sense of mission and were spending all of their time at work, dedicating their lives to companies whose mottos were “Don’t be evil” (Google) and “Connect every person in the world” (Facebook). Today workers don’t feel any sense of ownership over the products. They are more likely to feel betrayed.

Enough Money to Acquire Everything

The root of the problem goes back further than these companies to the 1970s when Democrats and Republicans both declined to enforce antitrust laws. (Joe Biden embraced the ‘consumer welfare standards theory’ of antitrust law, but then he was out of office.) Unregulated, companies like Amazon are able to create monopolies in many areas. For example, diapers.com was an e-commerce leader. To put them out of business, Amazon sold diapers significantly below cost, losing $200 million over a single month on these products. Diapers.com went bankrupt. Amazon picked it up and then shut it down. So now they exercise a great deal of control over the diaper market. This takeover also sent a message to companies: if Amazon makes you an offer, you have to sell or else you’ll go broke.

While Google has only made one great product (a search engine), they have been able to acquire many other people’s inventions. So Google Docs, Google Maps, their navigation system, their satellite images, their server management, and their customer service were all other people’s or other companies’ inventions that Google bought and integrated into their own company.

Enshittifying That One Great Product

The great product that Google created, its search engine, has been enshittified.

According to Google internal documents displayed by lawyer Megan Gray in the Google DOJ trial in October 2023, Google uses a semantics-matching technology to invisibly append brand names to queries. An example Doctorow gives is a search for kids’ snow pants. The customer query is “kids’ snow pants.” Google would add the words “North Face,” unseen by the customer. Ads for North Face come up first. North Face pays Google a lot of money to have their ads triggered when their name is searched. Google gets paid. “Depending on your point of view, this is either merely very sleazy, or it’s actual fraud.” (79) Google claims that this is not true and that Gray misunderstood what was going on; however, they refused to explain themselves any further.

Google also makes a lot of money by selling its search engines to other companies. This matters if you are an Apple user who believes you are not being tracked when you use Apple products. If you search using Safari, you’re actually using Google search. “Google has a non-consensual dossier on the behavior, social ties, purchases, economic status, employment history, and physical location of virtually every Internet user.” (81-82) Google gets $20 billion a year for this service.

“It turned out that ‘If you are not paying for the product, you’re the product’ was wishful thinking. It is true to say, ‘Even if you pay for the product, you’re the product if the company can get away with treating you as the product. ‘” (83)

There’s no end to bad actors running similar scams. Apple requires app makers to exclusively process payments through Apple’s system which takes a 30 percent commission on every purchase. (To place this in context, that’s ten times as high as the fees credit card companies charge merchants, which are already “sky-high.”) (84)

Adobe planned to train AI on the work people create on it until creators rebelled en masse and moved to smaller company’s products.

“The ability of purveyors of cloud-based products to alter their terms, prices, and features at will enables one of the most beloved Enshittification tactics of tech business leaders: bait and switch.” (100)

Use an App; Do as You Please

The most common tactic tech companies use to flout regulation is to break the law with an app, and then insist that the law hasn’t been broken at all, because the crime was committed with an app. (111)

One of the best examples would be Uber’s argument that it’s not an employer because it directs workers with an app. Companies can also say that they’re not committing wage theft if they do it with an app. Again Uber is an example with their algorithmic wage discrimination. When they offer jobs to all the drivers in the neighborhood, they calculate a different wage for each driver based on the driver’s recent behavior.

Uber can raise the cost of a taxi for riders if their phones are about to run out of batteries. That’s called twiddling, the process of changing the price (recommendation weights, search rankings, etc.) through automated or semi-automated means. Like ‘We’ll just twiddle all of these knobs in order to make more money.’ Offline companies can’t do these kinds of things. Doctorow imagines a gas station owner seeing someone leaving a vehicle that’s stranded in the snow and coming toward the station to get some snow chains. He doesn’t have the opportunity to change the prices on all of those before the customer walks through the door. In digital business, they can change everything all the time instantly and do that based on their surveillance data and other information.

Amazon takes the app scam to a whole other level. Since it uses delivery service partner (DSP) companies for its vans, it has fired the companies when their drivers unionize. If those workers were employees of Amazon that would be illegal, but Amazon can claim that it exerts control over the drivers through an app. So it’s an intermediary.

Amazon surveils delivery drivers with sensors in the vans that record the traffic around a vehicle. Inside the van cameras monitor the drivers down to the motion of their eyeballs and mouth. So if they’re singing along with the radio, Amazon can tell them they’re not paying attention to driving. They tell the drivers what route to drive and set crazy quotas for deliveries. Since they demand the dismissal of drivers who don’t live up to the standards it sets, Amazon drivers end up urinating in bottles. The fix? They get in trouble if they come back to the depot with bottles full of urine, so they throw them out the window and then you have roads leading to Amazon depots that are littered with sealed bottles of human urine.

Twisting Intellectual Property Law

When big tech companies say it’s impossible to run code of your choosing on their computers, what they’re really saying is it’s illegal to run code of your choosing on that computer. Now, there isn’t a law that would make it illegal for you to install non-company approved software on your computer. That, according to Doctorow would be like saying you had to put Nike approved laces into your air Jordans. Once you buy them, they’re your shoes and then it’s none of Nike‘s business what laces you put in them. Everything you buy that uses digital technology is also your property. So what’s the issue with tech?

The issue lies in intellectual property (IP) law.

Companies can design their products in such a way that they have a legal right to reach beyond the things themselves to control the conduct of their competitors, their critics and their customers.

There’s one section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or the DMCA that receives a lot of discussion in Enshittification: section 1201. It’s an anti-circumvention law, and it regulates bypassing access control for copyrighted work. It prevents you from breaking a digital lock. Think of the HP printer cartridges discussed above. The ink isn’t copyrighted. But you can’t fill the cartridge with your own ink because the printer cartridge has a chip in it that runs a copyrighted program. That program authenticates with a printer to verify that you bought HP ink. If you have the computer know-how to defeat that program on the chip, then you have gotten access to a copyrighted work illegally. Which is a felony. This may be the reason why more devices are becoming ‘smart.’ They can only be used in ways the manufacturer approves.

I haven’t had a baby in the house in decades, so I’d never heard of the SNOO smart sleeper, but it is a great example of this ploy. For those like me who are not in the know: the SNOO smart sleeper is a bassinet with a high-tech self-rocking cradle. When the baby cries, the cradle goes into rocking mode (back to sleep, dear little one!) while playing some sounds. It’s wildly expensive, about $1700. And like most expensive baby products, people reuse it—on second and third children, lent out to friends and family who are expecting.

The parent company 😊wanted to extract new revenue from owners after the purchase. Bait and switch—suddenly you’re going to lose the advanced features unless you pay $20 a month (not in the original bargain). Value moves away from the end users and back to the shareholders. Well, lots of companies would like to make money off of old things that they’ve already sold. The reason why SNOO can do it is because the product has a continuous internet connection that they simply downgrade if you don’t pay (for the thing you’ve already paid for—feels like mob protection, doesn’t it?) Again, if you try to make an alternative app that restores the features, then you are breaking the IP laws/committing a felony.

Are We Now Serfs to Techno Overlords?

Doctorow has an in-depth discussion of his belief that we have moved away from capitalism to something he calls technofeudalism. Technofeudalism’s understanding of ‘free markets’ is not that they are free from regulation but that they are free from rents. And now we are serfs in the digital environment, renting our space from the overlord. The argument requires a review of Econ 101. It’s more than I can get into here, but it’s worthwhile reading. As a quite incomplete summary of the idea:

In the years after the great financial crisis of 2008, tech was transformed from a primarily profit-seeking enterprise to a primarily rent-seeking enterprise and the things that make the giants powerful is that they control the factors of production that they rent to actual productive businesses.

We work in a monopsony, an economic system where markets are dominated by powerful buyers like Apple, Amazon, etc. These platforms (rentiers) have enormous control over software authors and anyone who wants to place their products for sale on these platforms (the actual productive businesses). The law comes down on the side of the rentier over the capitalist via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 1201.

In our next discussion of Enshittification, we’ll look at what we can do to change things. (There must be some kind of way out of here…)

The Jimi Hendrix Experience - All Along The Watchtower (Official Audio)

Writers

Publishers Charge Anna’s Archive with Copyright Infringement from Publishers Weekly

A group of publishers including the Big Five is taking legal action to prevent the pirate website Anna’s Archive from illegally copying and selling their copyrighted material.

In a filing made March 6 in the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 13 book and journal publishers filed suit seeking a permanent injunction to stop Anna’s Archive from copying and distributing millions of infringing files. The suit highlights the magnitude of the material Anna’s Archive has stolen and the unorthodox methods it uses to monetize the material. …

The lawsuit also asserts that Anna’s Archive “publicly claims to have given ‘high-speed access’ to its illegal collection of more than 140 million copyrighted texts to companies in China, Russia, and elsewhere, many of them LLMs. One court in the Northern District of California recently found that Meta Platforms torrented the contents of Anna’s Archive for use in developing its LLM model Llama.”

In an e-mail exchange with a researcher inquiring about the cost of the collection for AI training, Anna’s Archive offered premium access for $200,000 and suggested payment be made using cryptocurrency, the complaint states.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Hello Friends,

Tonight, I’m picking the winners for the book giveaway and will be sending the books out ASAP (hopefully tomorrow). Thanks to those who participated.

Today, I’m discussing Enshittification by Cory Doctorow and then following up with some links for writers. This is a ‘Part One’ because there are many issues Doctorow illuminates, and then he concludes with some ideas for changing online culture. These deserve a discussion as well.

Also—I mentioned this in Friday’s “Library and Banned Books News,” but if you only read Sunday’s book discussions: I will be changing the schedule in a week or two so that there is only one post per week, on Sunday. The Library/Banned Books News will alternate with the book discussions. Two reasons for this:

* I feel the world is just so much right now and people are dealing with an onslaught of information.

* I want more time to work on a novel that I have finally started! (Yay!)

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow

I’d like to explore Enshittification in depth because I think the story it tells is important for all of us. There may be three parts to the discussion (not sure). I encourage you to get your hands on the book ASAP and read along. If you want to borrow it from the library, it probably has a hold list, so put your name in now. 😊

“You Are Not Just an Ambulatory Wallet”

“It’s not just you. The Internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of s**t, all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck.” (3)

Doctorow notes that he is an Internet activist who’s been working for digital human rights for decades. He calls our era the Enshittocene, which has been caused by specific policy decisions at ‘middlemen’ platforms that connect business customers to end users or connect workers with their customers. Some of the bad actors he discusses are eBay, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Google (connects publishers and advertisers to searchers) and Facebook (connects people who want to socialize rather than search).

So, what is enshittification?

Doctorow names it in four steps:

* First, platforms are good to their users.

* Then they use their users to make things better for their business customers.

* Next, they abuse those business customers to clawback all the value for themselves.

* Finally, they have become a giant pile of s**t.

Why Do We Stick Around if the Platform is So Bad?

There’s a cost for leaving these spaces even though it’s become a hassle to be there. For example, if you leave Facebook, it’s likely the people you hang out with will not be available to you on another platform—it’s hard to get other people to switch. So when Facebook realized that it could make money from advertisers and publishers, they did so by spying on the users and then using an algorithm to target advertising based on what the users were interested in. Eventually, Facebook stopped being good for business customers as well by increasing the price of targeted ads and, at the same time, not showing the ads to the users that the advertisers had selected.

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Is It Truly Evil?

All the platforms discussed have engaged in downright evil behavior, but Amazon is among the most egregious in that their policies affect everyone, including people who have never used their platform. Let’s look at their story. Other platforms are variations on the Amazon theme.

Amazon also started out as good for users. It had a lot of investors with a lot of money which it used to subsidize goods (sometimes selling them below cost) and shipping. It had a generous ‘no questions asked, postage paid’ return policy.

Early on, Amazon couldn’t lock people into using it the way Facebook could. So it came up with the idea of Prime membership, which creates lock-in because customers are paying for shipping a year in advance. Quite the incentive to shop on Amazon. In addition when you buy audiobooks, movies, and most e-books and e-magazines from Amazon, you’re permanently locked into Amazon‘s platform because the projects are sold with digital rights management. There’s a form of encryption that will force you to view or to listen to those products using apps that Amazon controls. If you leave Amazon and delete those apps, you lose all the media you’ve bought from their platform—an incredibly high cost of switching.

Amazon was good to its business customers until it wasn’t. Because Amazon tracks so many users and people stop there for almost anything, Amazon has been able to extract higher discounts from the merchants who sell there. This brings in more users, which, again, makes the platform even more indispensable for the merchants. They have to go there—allowing Amazon to keep requiring deeper discounts, and on and on.

It finally comes to stage three, the pile of s**t stage: Amazon using tactics to shift value from the business customers to itself. It started tracking merchants’ best-selling items and cloning them and, at the same time, moving the original seller’s items far down on the search results. The original product doesn’t show when a person searches for it specifically. It shows the Amazon clone instead. Amazon also charges merchants a lot of junk fees that are pitched as optional, but in effect, they’re mandatory. Prime is an example. If a merchant doesn’t include prime shipping, then people won’t pick them. They are pushed so far down in the search results that they’re basically nonexistent. Yet another thing merchants must do: Use fulfillment by Amazon, a service where the merchant sends items to Amazon’s warehouse, where they’re packed and then delivered. It’s more expensive than comparable or even superior shipping services from other shipping companies, but if a merchant ships through a third-party company, then it gets dropped down in the search and ceases to exist. Amazon is gouging its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods (which compete directly with those merchants’ goods).

All this turns into higher prices for customers. Merchants pay Amazon “through the nose.” Amazon junk fees add up to 45 to 51 percent of what it earns on the platform. So merchants raise prices on their products, not just for Amazon customers, but as a whole. For reasons that are unclear to me (seem like a loophole and a cheat at the same time), this is necessary for Amazon to stay clear of the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against them. So, we’re all paying the ‘Amazon tax’ no matter where we shop.

Doctorow makes similar enshittification arguments for Apple, for its iPhone, and for Twitter. (However, many people were able to leave Twitter when Musk came along and turned into the Nazi platform it is.) Enshittification is well worth reading to see how Apple and Google are in cahoots. (Don’t believe Apple when they say they are not tracking you.) But, wait! There’s more!

How Did We Get Here

Doctorow shows why this Enshittocene spread so far and so fast by looking at the world that companies operate in.

Any company would want to charge as much as possible for goods and services while they spend as little as possible, paying the lowest possible wages, giving customers the lowest quality products, and selling them with the highest prices. What stops them is if workers could quit over low pay; if their suppliers would stop shipping products when their invoices are unpaid; and if the customers would turn away because of the high prices. But our enshittifiers are effectively monopolies, so the markets and the competition to stop them don’t exist. Add to this that they’re not regulated by the government.

Part Two will discuss how all this happened: how competition, regulation, interoperability of computers, and worker power all slipped away. Meanwhile, repeat reminder: I recommend you get your hands on the book. If you want to borrow it from the library, it probably has a hold list, so put your name in ASAP.

A Few Links of Interest for Writers

What is AI Voice?

Authors and Money (or Lack Thereof)

Authors Hoping to be Published

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com

Hello Friends,

I decided to celebrate, dive into gratitude, and relax this weekend rather than write an essay. And read a bit of a book about Mexicans in the 1920s fleeing the Cristero War as research from the novel I’m just starting.

I want to celebrate that we here on Be a Cactus are now a group of over 500 subscribers, a thing I am very grateful for! So—I’m having a book giveaway for U.S. subscribers. (I once gave away a book that went to Europe, and I paid $38 for the shipping. Yikes!)

I’d like to send out two copies each of Acts of Contrition and Keep Sweet along with fabric bookmarks that I handmade. Read the descriptions below, and if you are interested, click the link to message me, indicating which book you would prefer. If there are more than two people who are interested for either, I’ll put names in a hat and draw.

Keep Sweet (Crossover Novel)

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Acts of Contrition (Feminist Literary Short Fiction)

The women in Acts of Contrition face society’s devaluation, from parents, from elders, from all who assume authority over them. They battle oppressions as simple as gender stereotyping, as complex as prerequisites to friendship or love. Some can look back and laugh, some find luck in their escape from harm, some engineer their own good fortune, all the while riding a wave of dark humor. What all the characters come to understand is that silence places them at greater risk than speaking out. They progress toward freedom through the telling of their stories.

Gratitude

It’s great seeing books of poetry coming from friends I’ve met through various literary organizations and writers support groups. I truly loved Here to Be Remade by Lavina Blossom (Bamboo Dart Press), who is also an artist. Just arrived is Anna Gasaway’s My Mother’s Husbands from Finishing Line Press.

I’m also grateful for lifelong friends. One sent me a ‘blind date with a book’ surprise this week. The wrapping was so beautiful, I waited a day to open it. Part of my relaxing this weekend will be doing literary word searches. (I think I’ll start with Margaret Atwood.) Thanks, Kathy!

A deeper dive into The Little Magazine for those interested:

The Little Magazine That Defied American Censorship

Margaret Anderson’s Little Review fought to bring the great works of modernist literature to the United States.

Writers

Writers, did you read this? If not, you should.

Thank you for reading, for being here, and for subscribing!

Jo Scott-Coe Jo’s Substack

Mary Camarillo Life With Riley

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com