This was a very uncomfortable read. I tried very hard to keep the episode light but I am not sure I succeeded.

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica shows how quickly humanity can normalize previously unacceptable beliefs. It also shows how easy it is to oppress and exploit a group of people once you decide they are different from you.

This book is set in a fictional future where mankind has annihilated all animals and turned towards his fellow man as a source of protein. Cannibalism is legal. But because we live in a society, we cannot hunt each other like animals. So man has to come up with the group of humans, yes, but lower on the food chain. After all, man has always preyed on the weaker man. This just makes it literal.

And to others, it's 232.78 Degree Celsius (erupts in laughter, pats myself on the back.)

'It was a pleasure to burn.' Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451.

Fahrenheit 451 - the temperature at which book paper starts to burn.

I was deeply concerned by the recent reports of AI companies destroying copies of books to scan them for their models. Then keeping the copies, some of them very rare, in their privately owned databases, basically hoarding the knowledge. I was really mad. At first, I thought everyone else was as angry about it as me and my reading friends were. Then I realized, people were not as pissed as they should have been, because this is a very big deal.

In this book, Ray Bradbury presents this society where reading has been outlawed. Firemen set books on fire and most people are okay with it. In fact, they turn each other in for having books in the first place.

So, how does a society get to this? Disregard any form of intelligence? At first you think, the government obviously, Big Brother. But you would be wrong in this case. Sometimes it is the people who slowly permit these things. Who turn what used to be normal and useful into something unlawful. After all, people make a society and whatever they agree on goes.

Is this happening to our society? Are we slowly losing our reading culture and treating it as normal. With book summaries everywhere, bots helping you read and write, what does the future look like?

P.S My continued apologies for the ghost that continues to haunt this podcast, the editing team promises to take exorcism lessons.

Have you ever thought about what hell would feel like? You do not have to believe in any religion to imagine what your worst experience would be. Hell surpasses religion. Real hell is unimaginable because eternity is not something our minds can understand. Eternal suffering is scary as a concept but can we really comprehend it?

While reading A Short Stay in Hell by Stephen L. Peck, I tried to understand what eternal suffering would really feel like through the main character. In the end, I decided it would be very miserable, and yet, I did not completely understand it. It escaped my imagination, and I have a very vivid one. I failed to understand eternity, but I vaguely got the idea of eternal suffering. Suffering is unfortunately easy to relate to.

Try to imagine this version hell presented, maybe you will understand the concept of eternal suffering.

P.S I apologise for the ghost haunting this audio. It's definitely not the producer's fault.

This is a collection of thoughts, opinions, and the occasional fangirling.

This episode is supposed to serve as a kind of bridge between the last episode (Severance by Ling Ma) and the next episode (A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck). The two books are not connected in any way, they just happen to be next to each other on my nonexistent reading list.

I had some thoughts related to Severance that I needed to share before closing that chapter and I have some thoughts to share before starting the chapter on A Short Stay in Hell, hence this break.

For Severance; I engage with The Stand by Stephen King (finally checked the publishing date on this, it was 1978) and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

For A Short Stay in Hell, I checked the short story that inspired it, and as luck would have it, I got it as a short story collection: The Library of Babel and Other Short Stories by Jorge Luis Borges. I decided to talk about these stories in this episode and set the stage for my next episode using The Library of Babel.

I would like to say that this is where it ended, but, I went off topic, talked about other books, and let out my obsession with The Sandman. It got weird. I had to cut out a lot but I decided to release this. Here you go, indulge me.

This book was a total surprise. The first time I heard about it, I assumed it was the inspiration for the TV show Severance. It isn't, but it's every bit as gripping and satisfying. It captures the quiet beginning of the end in a full-blown epidemic world; imagine COVID-19, but with a brutal mortality rate.

One of the most eerie things about this book is that it was released in 2018, well before the pandemic, and the parallels between this imagined universe and the world we actually lived through are chilling.

What I loved most was the intimacy of it: we follow one character, her interior life, her behaviors, as everything around her unravels. The book never reaches for some grand, profound meaning about humanity at the end. It stays on one woman, dealing with catastrophe in her own way. I didn't see myself in her, didn't even fully identify with her, but I found myself rooting for her anyway, the way you'd cheer on and support a friend.

And the story was steady, unhurried, almost meditative. I enjoyed reading it.

This is a love story.

Imagine a world where corporations have conquered the solar system. Mars is where you go for fun. The moon, for parties. Saturn? I vacationed there last month. Venus is for honeymoons.

Now imagine those same corporations have conquered something else: your mind. Feednet is the internet, wired straight into your brain, stitched in before you're even born. It's how you think, how you talk, how you reach the rest of the universe.

This is the world of Feed by M.T. Anderson: corporate greed, consumerism, environmental collapse on a literally planetary scale, total surveillance. Sounds bleak, right?

But even here, some things survive. Envy survives. Jealousy survives. And yes, falling in love survives.

This is a love story about two young people who meet on the moon, and try to hold onto each other while everything around them, them included, is falling apart.

This is a love story.

I sat down to talk about a book. I ended up on a 30-minute rant about the end of human intelligence. Sorry not sorry.

This week's pick is The Feed by Nick Clark Windo, and yes, I do actually talk about it, for about ten minutes, promise. But then two real-world quotes hijacked the episode entirely:

Sam Altman on intelligence becoming a utility, metered out like electricity or water. And a (fabricated, but eerily plausible) Jeff Bezos quote about AI getting priority over humans for water access.

Here's the thing that got me: The Feed imagines a horrifying future. But what Altman said isn't fiction. And the fear behind that fake Bezos quote isn't fiction either; data centers really are drinking our water dry, right now, today.

That's scarier than anything a novelist can dream up. Because the people writing this future actually have the power to build it.

So the book became a jumping-off point for the question I couldn't shake: can humanity actually self-correct? Can we stop stripping the planet bare before we hit rock bottom? Or will we only learn how to stop once we're already on the floor, organs failing, too late to matter?

I don't have the answer. But I needed to ask it out loud.

Book talk: minutes 0–10. Existential spiral: the rest. Come spiral with me.

PS. The article I mentioned in the book: The Commodification of Intelligence: Jensen Huang on the Future of Human Value.

Have you ever found something and felt, "this was meant for me"? That's how I felt reading The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey.

You have to go in blind on this one. It's that good. I don't have the words to describe it without giving anything away, so I won't try. This is a literary sci-fi thriller about identity, and that's all I'll tell you about the plot. Read it before you listen to my take on this pathetic 30-minute summary that does not do it justice.

When I read this book, I was like, I get it. It's amazing. I love it. I understand it. Then during recording, I had moments like, "holy shit, this actually means this, this relates to that, this is a new understanding." Then I sat with it during editing and thought, oh my god, I missed so much. Could I rerecord? How did I not see this? It's so obvious. If I were a different person, I'd go back and do it all over again.

This book felt like the universe telling me: life's shitty right now, but enjoy this.

This is a book I could do another episode with new insights. I could dissect it like we used to in lit class. I'll keep coming back to it, time and time again.

So read it first. Then come back and tell me what you caught that I missed.

What if every single moment of your life; every word, every choice, every heartbreak, every mistake, is being recorded? This data is not just tracked but is used. It is fed into a system designed to optimize your entire existence.

That's the world Ryan David Ginsburg builds in In the Algorithm We Trust. From the moment you're born, your life becomes data. Your relationships aren't just memories, they're experiments. Your career isn't a passion you discover, it's a conclusion the algorithm already reached. Even the person you end up with? The system picked them. Every date, every experience, every pattern you couldn't see in yourself, collected to improve your life.

Sounds perfect, right? That's exactly the point.

In this episode, I was a little harsh and deeply criticized this novel after my first read and during recording. But after sitting with it for a while, I actually get what Ginsburg was going for. Because here's the thing: our lives already are a little redundant. We repeat the same patterns, chase the same happiness, make the same mistakes. Maybe the algorithm isn't so far-fetched after all. (I still hold some of the views and criticisms in the episode, but not all. I have not edited or rerecorded it to reflect my new understanding because I really don't want to.)

Trust the algorithm. It knows best.

...Or does it?

This is a sequel to Episode 4. We continue the journey of several black women trying to find their spaces.

This episode contains a lot of swearing. I have never realized how much I use the F word in my daily register. I record the same way I speak, and I am not an excellent editor, so I could not take them out, and if I did, it would distort the flow. Which reminds me, there are several mistakes in word choices; I could not take them out, and I am too lazy to rerecord, so there you have it. Enjoy!!!