My dog has diarrhoea, and it’s driving me mad. It is a particular kind of diarrhoea reserved, I am convinced, for the moments in our lives when things are just starting to ease off: when my university semester ends, when we’re finally home after weeks away, when a big work project has at last been delivered. I say it is a particular kind of diarrhoea because it is nocturnal: it only appears at night. Every hour, from sundown to sunrise, our little bundle of nervous energy begins to scream (and it is truly a scream) and must be let out into the yard to eke out a teaspoon or so of shapeless slop. In the morning, with the sun risen and her digestive tract apparently all dried up, she will settle down to sleep and won’t have any trouble until sundown.

The first time it came on, we were unprepared. Assuming the first few screams were simply one-offs, we would send her back to her crate and head back to bed. It soon became clear that sleeping in the crate, with the screaming it required to get our attention, was no match for hourly bathroom trips. We relented and allowed her to sleep in the bed with us, taking turns letting her out when she stirred.

This solution worked as well as it could until, re-entering the bedroom in the dark one night at about 3 am, I smelled something concerning. I am particularly sensitive to and alarmed by bad smells, and never more so than in my bedroom in the dead of night. I flicked on the light and discovered the source: she had stepped in her own mess out in the yard, traipsed it all through the house, and into our bedsheets.

Hot wash, new sheets, dog in the bath, back to bed for twenty minutes until the next run. After that, paws are washed in the tub upon re-entering the house. Each morning, we rise in a daze, unsure how exactly we will make it through the day or whether we will ever think about anything other than our dog’s diarrhoea.

If I dare to mention it to friends, the obvious comparison is never far from the conversation. How will you go with a baby? they ask, concerned that I seem unfit to go even a handful of nights sleeping in 45-minute increments. I can practically mouth the words as they are spoken, so predictable is the question. I laugh it off but secretly wonder the same thing.

Does my fatigue after even a single night of interrupted sleep mean I am unfit for parenthood? Does my frustration with her dysfunctional digestive system — something entirely outside of her control — reveal an incapacity for unconditional love?

I have been waiting years for motherhood and I am still not ready for it. I’m not writing enough. Not cooking enough. Not able to go more than twenty-four hours without the kitchen counter clogging up with dishes.

I spend too much money, mostly on books. I am an inconsistent presence at the gym. The latest technological innovation is threatening my only source of income. My pile of books to be read — and in reality it is several piles, a bookcase, and an online shopping cart — only grows.

And maybe these are the inconsequential things. There are other things that concern me even more. I am sure that I am not learned enough. Not journeyed enough. Most definitely not patient enough, not lighthearted enough. I am tight-fisted with praise but quick to criticise. I am, most of the time, not outgoing enough, relaxed enough, assertive enough.

Of all the reasons I am unfit for motherhood, my inability to cope with a dog with an upset stomach is perhaps the least of them.

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The late luteal phase is the last week of the menstrual cycle. For me, it is the week that offers the last few remnants of hope that I might indeed be pregnant this time, before it delivers the cramping, agitation, and entirely unreasonable sense of despair that is my clue that I am, once again, not pregnant. One of my special late-luteal-phase symptoms is what is called sleep maintenance insomnia. If, during this last week of my cycle, something wakes me from my sleep, I will not sleep again for at least several hours. Before I discovered the hormonal cause of this disorder, it frequently drove me mad. Now, despite the fatigue that follows, I have learned to embrace these quiet hours of night wakefulness.

Last Christmas, for instance, I spent several witching hours in front of the Christmas tree lights, a mince pie and a glass of almond milk and a book illuminated by my clip-on light. So far, my dog’s curious night-time diarrhoea appears to only visit during the late luteal, which means each trip outside for her leads to several hours of wakefulness for me. Since there are no Christmas lights in July, my nighttime indulgence at the moment is Don Quixote — the gift that keeps on giving. I am reading this tale of the delusional knight errant in the yellow rocking chair I bought from Marketplace. A comfortable spot to nurse the baby, I had figured, though of course there is no baby yet, and I, like Don Quixote de la Mancha, surely have no reason to be as hopeful about the future as I am. Like the misguided knight, I have read too many books and thought for too long about pursuing the very path many people say ruins them. It may well be a delusion, but beneath all the anxiety and self-doubt, something inside me is convinced not only that it will someday happen, but that I may even be alright at it when it does.

And perhaps, unlike Don Quixote, I do have some evidence to offer up for my delusions.

When the nocturnal diarrhoea visits us, our lives become oriented around the evasive and unpredictable movements of a tiny creature’s digestive tract. We have a night-time diarrhoea system in place now, sleeping in shifts with the help of the spare bedroom. I am in the kitchen — a rare sighting — cooking appropriately bland fish (no chicken; it doesn’t sit well with her) and rice (brown or white? Does it need more flavour?). I am at the chemist buying unflavoured fibre supplements to bulk out her stools. I am scouring the internet, investigating safe options for restoring her electrolytes (her skin is a little slow to snap back when pinched, her gums a little tacky), sourcing probiotics, calculating dog-safe doses of human medications.

I am keeping a detailed record of where we’ve been and what she may have been exposed to. I am noting the timings, texture, and colour of her bowel movements — photographing them for posterity. I’m peppering my poor sister, a fourth-year veterinary student, with questions.

The nocturnal diarrhoea, when it arrives, takes over our lives. Perhaps this is because we want it to end, but perhaps it is also because we love her. Yes, I am frustrated — I couldn’t look the vet in the eye when he refused to prescribe her antibiotics today. I am exhausted. I occasionally pretend I haven’t heard her stir in the night, just to see if my partner will get to her first. But I will take her outside every hour and cook her meals and return to the vet, more assertive this time, until we get to the bottom of this.

Despite the incessant chatter in my head about all the reasons I am unfit to bring a human life into the world, I will, at least this time, resist adding my dog’s night-time diarrhoea to the list. This latest instalment of the diarrhoea in the night-time has, especially in the wee hours, made me question my fitness for parenting. On the other hand, it has proven to me that I can be exhausted, frustrated, confused, even a little delusional — and carry on anyway.

In recent years, the sense that my online interactions — on social media, in my work inbox, even Zoom calls — constituted genuine human-to-human interactions has become increasingly tenuous. Now, with AI infiltrating seemingly every article, post, and email (and, apparently, even video calls), the very idea of finding a sense of humanity online has effectively disappeared.

Being as I am happily self-employed, I spend an unfortunate amount of time on LinkedIn (one must earn one’s freedom somehow). If AI has ruined any platform, it is undoubtedly LinkedIn. Virtually every post is now dripping with AI’s signature over-dramatic and underwhelming style.

The slopfest that is LinkedIn has gotten so bad that even a post (mine) breaking down AI’s uninspiring style is met with comments like this one:

Yep, AI. (This guy subsequently sent me a connection request, with a fully AI-generated message that made zero sense. What exactly he was hoping to gain, I can’t fathom.)

So yeah, at this point, as someone who actually rather enjoys my little writing job and is particularly sensitive to the shitty written content clogging up our shared spaces, I’d certainly be happy to never hear about AI ever again, or at least until it cures cancer. As a person who likes to make things and believes the process is kind of, well, the whole point, the propaganda around AI is so uninspiring that it borders on terrifying, and has sent people like me burrowing further into the ground.

There are so many things we want more than AI right now — a house, maybe; an atmosphere not breaching 430 ppm; bees and glaciers and enough time in the day to feel human.

Some months ago I wrote about William Zinsser’s four principles of good non-fiction writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, humanity. Briefly:

• Clarity: What are you actually trying to say? This should win out over everything else, including the principles below.

• Brevity: Keep it as short as possible (but no shorter — more on that below).

• Simplicity: Over-complicating obscures the truth.

• Humanity: Be, like, a real person, if possible.

I also keep coming back to Derek Thompson’s summary of Neil Postman’s arguments about television’s communication style: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In Everything is Television, Thompson maps these characteristics neatly onto the rise of algorithmic media, which he contends is converging from all sides into a river of short-form video. Let’s unpack these in contrast to Zinsser’s principles:

• Immediacy: Quick, fast, no time to think. Everything is urgent.

• Emotion: Extreme emotional responses = higher engagement.

• Spectacle: The Mr Beast principle. If you’re not over the top, you’re not getting seen.

• Brevity: Shorter than Zinsser would want. So short that it oversimplifies; that it keeps us from asking deeper questions.

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And yet I think television, in all its insidious permutations, is no longer our only source of confusing and uninspiring content — especially not at work. Today we are also dealing with, yes, those great big hulking LLMs.

Inspired by Zinsser and Postman and Thompson, I have identified four key characteristics of the universal LLM communication style (and for some reason it is universal): ambiguity, verbosity, complexity, and homogeneity. Yes, these are Zinsser’s principles flipped for the worse.

• Ambiguity: Reach no real conclusions, take no real risks, leave the reader with no groundbreaking takeaways.

• Verbosity: This is part of what makes LLM outputs so ambiguous, but it’s also truly exhausting. LLMs don’t get tired like we do. They’ll go for days, or until the tokens run out.

• Complexity: Also part of what makes it so verbose. With too much material to work with, it will either go deep into the weeds and immediately overcomplicate the topic at hand, or, when asked to simplify, revert back to surface-level ambiguity.

• Homogeneity: It simply cannot sound original. No matter which of the platforms you use or creative prompts you feed it, there is an AI odour that surrounds even the briefest of AI-created copy.

I think it’s worth recognising the gap between the principles of good communication and the general style of what AI tends to produce. I’m not saying AI can’t be helpful in meeting one or many of Zinsser’s criteria. Sometimes it does produce a handy analogy or a simple way of thinking about or communicating something that might genuinely make your communications better.

But for the most part, AI is being used injudiciously in the corporate world, and the platforms are now drowning in content that is ambiguous, verbose, complex, and homogeneous. And really, really dull.

Most of the AI-generated content out there is designed to pursue commercial ends. Now that AI is available to the men in suits, we’re seeing an even greater divide between work produced for business purposes and work produced for the pleasure of calling it art. The divide was always apparent thanks to the takeover of corporate communications by weasel words and legal-team-approved word salad, but it’s about to explode.

What a fatal dichotomy this is: the idea that commerce and art must remain in separate domains. I contend that, in the face of growing brand voice homogenisation (every company now sounds like ChatGPT) and the ease of having simple questions answered by an AI overview rather than navigating to individual webpages and piecing together a research puzzle, the only sane strategy for a company to take to differentiate (at least in the world of content and educational marketing) is to embrace marketing as art. This has long been the winning ticket in advertising, but now other modes of marketing, particularly those designed primarily to educate, will need to adopt this approach.

This means the content marketer’s job in the age of AI overload may no longer be to inform or educate but rather to inspire and to encourage and to entertain. To make content that promises more than a simple transactional experience of search and query. To make something beautiful; something that stays with people long after they’ve closed the tab (or left it to dwell in multi-tab purgatory).

All of this really belongs inside Zinsser’s fourth principle: humanity. This is the realm of inspiration, passion, honesty, vulnerability, magic. This is the realm of art. So permit me one final list of four — a list I think businesses should keep in mind if they wish to gain traction in the age of machines:

• Inspire: Why create anything — marketing or not — if it doesn’t inspire? It doesn’t even have to be hopeful; a lot of great art is not particularly hopeful, but it should at least spark something a little deeper in your audience.

• Entertain: Many ways to do this: high-stakes tension, humour, vulnerability, personal anecdotes. Whatever makes for a good story.

• Authenticate: I’m taking some serious license with this verb. By authenticate, I mean letting a human voice come through unmistakably. With so much slop out there, you’ll probably need two-factor authentication: being doubly personal so that your audience immediately grasps that this is not slop.

• Connect: The flipside of authenticating yourself is reaching out to your audience. Acknowledge they exist, acknowledge who they are, acknowledge the context in which they’re operating. On the Internet we have a tendency to shout into the void, but the best art knows its audience (as it happens, so does the best marketing).

The takeaway here is that the divide between commerce and art is a false one. If businesses want to stand out in a world where everything is AI, the best bet is to avoid the most efficient, corporate route to production (the Adam Smith pin factory model) and instead embrace the only thing worth fighting for: art.

I am becoming increasingly suspicious of claims that new technologies will make our lives easier. I don’t deny that they can make certain tasks easier. But recent history shows that many of us will attempt, in our own time, to make up for what our machines propose to do for us during the day.

We’ve all heard about the dangers of cognitive offloading in the context of generative AI. (Yes, I’m sorry, this is an article about AI.) I contend that what is offloaded will eventually need to be reloaded if we are to have any sense of meaning in our lives.

Many people, I’m sure, will embrace AI with few questions. If the now-famous MIT study is anything to go by, their cognitive capacities will decline. Others — the ones, for better or worse, hell-bent on not letting this technology destroy their minds, their sense of personhood — will need to carve out additional time in their already packed schedules in order to rewrite what AI is threatening to overwrite.

I heard this idea some months ago on Cal Newport’s podcast. People who wish to safeguard their cognitive capacities under the onslaught of AI, Newport says, will have to get highly intentional about using their brains in other settings. Reading, writing, Sudoku — any activity that requires sitting down to take your brain seriously. He compares this to the way many of us now spend our mornings or evenings in the gym to combat days spent at the desk.

It is a classically Newportian thing to say and may get some of us fired up and ready to train our brains. But we need to put this in context. Any cognitive re-loading we plan out for ourselves will need to be added to the exhausting list of to-dos already weighing down our lives, which are there largely to counteract the things technology has made easier for us.

In this context, AI is not the first but rather the latest step in a series of innovations that would seem to make things easier for us, but end up asking much more of us if we are determined to live a meaningful life. Like the Red Queen, we will have to run faster and faster simply to stay in place. Try harder and harder to offset the corrosive effects of the technologies we have willingly or unwillingly introduced in our lives.

The modern world, for better and worse, invites us to offload. Once, we ploughed fields and melted widgets in furnaces, and now machines do it. Once, we made our own bread and butter and vegetable soup, and now companies like Nestlé make our food for us. We’ve seen what this combination has led to. Fighting with a food system designed to exploit our basic biology, many of us now set some kinds of rules around what we eat, count the components, tally up the protein. Where our grandparents may have eaten what was available simply because it was available, many of us now eat with intention. Similarly, now that many of us put our brains to work rather than our bodies, we carve out time in the schedule for cardio, strength training, mobility, you name it. We have workout schedules and personal trainers and 12-week goals for improving on this or that.

And now, the rise of AI, at home but especially in the workplace, means that, if things play out the way Sam Altman and his buddies want them to, we will no longer be using our brains at work, either. Those who say, “well, just don’t use it”, have either not experienced the reality of working for a corporation in 2026, where AI usage itself has become a KPI, or considered AI in the context of other addictive technologies like social media, where “just don’t use it” is a daily battle.

Lest I be taken for another delusional millennial, let me be clear. There is no era I would rather live in. I am beyond grateful for my computer job, my instant oats, my effortless access to antibiotics. The painting at the top of this essay is called Monday Morning; I saw it recently in a gallery and was breathless with gratitude that my Monday mornings look nothing like it.

So I am not claiming that we should reject all technology and innovation, Yesteryear-style. What I am hoping to do through this essay is not to complain but to explain; to put resisting the effects of cognitive offloading in its context. To give a voice to the feeling that many of us feel guilty for having: our lives have been made so much easier for us, so much better, and yet somehow we are more exhausted than ever.

Not everything in the past was better, but not everything new technology promises is necessarily an improvement. Amid the LinkedIn-bro hype of what we stand to gain, it is worth understanding what we may lose when we adopt a new technology. That is, if we wish to move forward with any sense of sanity, or, rather, humanity.

What has so far gone unacknowledged in the discussions of ‘brain gyms’ and ‘exercises for the mind’ is that having to bring intention to everything we do in life — to have to schedule friend hangouts, block out time for the gym, track or our protein intake, carve out activities to keep our brains active — is nothing short of exhausting. It is not the effort itself that is so tiring (though it is, of course), but the intention behind it. To have to think so much and so constantly about all the ways in which our daily lives make us deficient and to schedule time and pluck energy from somewhere to attempt to fortify what is being eroded by powers beyond our control. Eve Rodsky claims that a task is not just its execution but also its conception and planning — two largely invisible elements, often shouldered by women in domestic settings, with very real consequences. The age of intention adds another layer to conception and planning: a sense of having to harness dwindling willpower to work on something that feels like it shouldn’t be this hard.

Yes, there is a fatigue that comes from work that requires physical labour, social interaction, or cognitive demand; but there is perhaps an even greater fatigue in clicking around for eight hours at a time while the technology executes our to-do list, in order to rush home at the end of the day to squeeze back in all the capacities the technology has taken from us.

Perhaps some of us really don’t mind automating our brains at work. Perhaps we felt close to an automaton already, and the introduction of AI has somehow made it easier and more bearable. Perhaps there is a fraction of people who really won’t mind automating their work brains and tuning up their cognitive abilities in their own time with things that interest them. But I sense that, for most of us, the art of engaging intellectually with our work is often the only thing that makes it bearable. (This is a subject for another essay.)

To take us back to the start: I admire Newport’s thinking on the subject. I think he’s technically correct that combatting AI-driven cognitive erosion would require significant skill-building or skill-maintaining in our off-time. I think it’s probably the best advice we can give when so many people now have no choice but to use AI at work. And I know that Newport would prefer knowledge workers not to use AI, or at least not to use it in such a way that outsources their thinking and eventually melts their mental capacities. But I want to put this concept of intentionally training your brain to offset AI’s effects into the broader context of our already busy, tiring, highly intentional lives.

Do we really need another destructive social technology whose corrosive effects, we are told, will require personal responsibility and intention to combat?

Whatever productivity gains AI might offer at a global level, we must think hard about whether, as individuals, the benefits of removing something that must then, later that day or week or lifetime, be added back.

I read this book in the cool dark mornings and eternally bright evenings of the New Zealand summer while on a three-day hike with my family. I was immediately hooked by the premise: What do we mean when we advocate for ‘freedom’, and what happens when one person’s freedom comes at the expense of another’s?

After sixteen consecutive years of declining freedoms, Stiglitz reports, it’s time for progressives to take back the cause. Stiglitz’s understanding of freedom is closely aligned with that of Timothy Snyder, whose book, On Freedom, was the best book I read in 2025. Stiglitz believes that the enhancement of one person’s freedom often comes at the expense of another’s. The Left, Stiglitz argues, needs to reclaim the freedom agenda from the Right, whose understanding of it is narrow and leads to a world in which the expanding freedoms of the few curtail the basic freedoms of the many.

But if progressives want to reclaim freedom, they will need to be able to define it — in the positive sense that Snyder champions, and not the negative sense the Right has so effectively drilled into our minds.

For Stiglitz, true freedom is freedom to live up to one’s potential. His attempt with this book is to define a future political, economic, and social vision for the US and the world — one where strong democratic states work alongside healthy, regulated capital markets to bring prosperity and opportunity to all. Stiglitz calls this progressive capitalism or, for non-American audiences (funny that), social democracy. To that end, Stiglitz focuses on untangling the toxic cocktail of wealth and political power that leads to decisions made to benefit the elites at the expense of the rest.

This book is an attempt to envision a successful post-neoliberal world — a future progressives can get behind. I find Stiglitz’s vision compelling. It aligns well with my own vision for the future. I worry, though, that it doesn’t have a clear hook or boil down to a four-word slogan for the purposes of, say, a national election campaign. Perhaps I underestimate the public appetite for complexity, but previous elections tell another story. We do need a new vision though, and I don’t believe degrowth will do it for the majority. I think this book has what we need — it just needs a better wrapper. (Is it freedom? I’m skeptical.)

“Nature is far from unlimited,” writes acclaimed British broadcaster and biologist David Attenborough. “The wild is finite. It needs protecting.”

I picked up this book on a road trip in New Zealand and thought it would be a good fit for an outdoorsy kind of holiday. I quickly realised that if any book deserved to be enjoyed in audio format, this was the one, so I downloaded it and listened as we sped through the New Zealand countryside.

Attenborough is a formidable writer, though it’s unclear how much his writing partner had over the final prose. What makes this book is Attenborough’s retelling of moments from his own wildly adventurous life, including coming across a previously uncontacted human tribe, making the first underwater documentary, and standing face to face with an enormous female gorilla while she inspects his bottom lip.

I had hoped the book would offer more of these, but they are few and far between. The majority of the book is devoted to Attenborough’s analysis of the current environmental dilemmas and solutions, much of which is well-trodden territory and offers little in the way of new ideas to someone like me, who works in the field of climate solutions.

What did fascinate me was Attenborough’s brief analysis of the impact of a changing media landscape — particularly television — on the way humans relate to nature and both understand and care about environmental issues.

Attenborough writes movingly about the Apollo 8 mission to circle and photograph the moon, and what it was like to broadcast a feed from the astronauts, on live television, using 1960s technology. The biggest surprise of that mission, Attenborough reveals, was not discovering the moon up close but rather the fact that the Earth saw itself for the first time. “We came all this way to discover the Moon,” Attenborough writes, quoting Bill Anders, one of the three astronauts on board the mission, “and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” Not just the earth, but how our “small, isolated, and vulnerable” this perfect blue planet really was.

Attenborough also writes about how the recording and release of whale sounds on vinyl discs in the 1970s changed the public perception of whales and led to the rise of influential anti-whaling campaigns.

At almost 100 years old, Attenborough has witnessed a devastating decline in the natural world. Wild animal populations have more than halved since the 1950s, while marine ecosystems have rapidly disappeared, forests have been felled, and plastic waste is found in every corner of the globe.

“We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet,” Attenborough declares. “We have forgotten that once there were temperate forests that would take days to traverse, herds of bison that would take four hours to pass, and flocks of birds so vast and dense that they darkened the skies. Those things were normal only a few lifetimes ago. Not any more.”

Attenborough’s exploration of environmental solutions is cursory and not as interesting as his observations and recollections of his time in the natural world. Attenborough is a prominent de-growther, and makes an interesting comparison here to the natural world, noting that nothing in nature experiences perpetual growth. Species grow as far as they can within their environment, and eventually plateau. If managed well, plateaus last indefinitely — but the growth phase cannot.

Yet although the second half of the book (dedicated to the future and possible solutions) is far less interesting, Attenborough’s voice is a critical one for the environmental movement. The task of moving forward and addressing our multiple environmental crises collectively seems more difficult than ever in our polarised times. “We are all culpable, but, it has to be said, through no fault of our own,” Attenborough writes. Correct.

“Of course, I’m concerned about profits and losses. I just don’t give them top priority. That’s why I say, “P&L means people and love.” — Mary Kay Ash

I love a good multi-level-marketing takedown, and this book delivered the goods. Read has done extensive research on the birth, evolution, and pervasive reach of pyramid schemes in America, tracing scams like Amway, Herbalife and Mary Kay all the way back to their insidiously scammy foundings.

What’s fascinating is not just how these companies continually reinvent themselves, shape-shifting under new labels and sales hooks depending on the zeitgeist, but just how far the MLM tentacles spread — all the way down to the poorest of the poor who buy $100 starter kits with credit cards, and all the way up to American presidents (Reagan, Trump). The founding families of the largest American MLM schemes are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, and their influence runs deep.

This is what this book does best: reveal that MLM schemes are in fact not “one of our many freaky sideshows, falling somewhere between a cult, a crime, and a joke. Something to gawk at, or ignore” but rather an active participant in shaping American culture and politics. MLMs have shaped the modern conservative movement, convinced people that government regulation would turn them into slaves, and that unbridled capitalism was the only way forward. Just as it has, millions of times, convinced everyday people to spend what little they have (and even what they don’t have) on something almost guaranteed not to generate a return, it has also undoubtedly swayed voters towards voting against their own interests under the guise of ‘freedom’.

The irresistible pull of the MLM dream — freedom, autonomy, abundance — is so closely tied with the American dream and spirit that it may never lose its appeal. In an age of unchecked misinformation, as long as the country is run by leaders who fear long-overdue regulation, they will no doubt continue to flourish. On the rise of MLMs in the late 20th Century, Read writes: “Eventually it could be found all over the world — anywhere the American Dream needs a public relations boost — which is still needed, always, in America too.”

You know one thing you rarely heard about in the good old U.S.A. anymore? Monsieur Frog? A young fellow dying of appendicitis. At twenty-eight. Like Grandpa’s brother had. Because a road got washed out. And the horse-drawn cart couldn’t make it through. Imagine you go back in time and drop that young guy into the backseat of a big old SUV, fly him over a perfect four-lane to some gleaming modern hospital, save his life…

Dying in the back of a horse cart stuck in the mid? Or zinging toward help, air-con blasting?

Anyone with a lick of sense would choose the latter.

We had.

The world had.

Herein lies the tension in this simultaneously funny and grave novel: the world is undoubtedly the better for its discovery of fossil fuels. But what now?

On his deathbed, oil tycoon K. J. Boone is visited by a series of angels or ghosts — former living humans who have not yet passed into a further realm — and must grapple with his legacy. Was rising out of poverty and bringing oil to the people enough to leave him in good standing on Earth? Or will his decades-long manipulation of truth and science be what defines him?

Although the moralising is a little overcooked in parts, and the style, though fascinating, can be a little tiring to read (this is my first Saunders novel so I have no baseline for this), on the whole, this was a thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking book, exploring complicated dichotomies of good and bad, life and legacy, and ultimately, destiny and free will.

I can’t imagine anyone on the denial side of the climate debate will bother picking up this book, let alone enjoy it, but I think it will be an important read, especially for younger people who may lack the context to grasp just how transformational these ‘dirty’ energy sources were — and not all that long ago.

The book asks of its protagonist, and others: Who could he have been if not himself? Given what we are born with and what we are exposed to, do we really have much choice as to how we behave, how we turn out? We can apply this question of free will beyond the individual. Given who humanity was when the power of fossil fuels were discovered, what else could we have done but exactly what we did?

Fossil fuels and the technological and scientific breakthroughs they enabled changed the world hundreds of times over. Many of us today would not be alive without them. But the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Fossil fuels solved many problems and created others. It’s time to bid them goodbye.

After devouring Seed (Bri Lee) I was ready for more dystopian climate fiction. I’ve seen this one doing the rounds for at least a year now, so I finally went for it. This book was surprising in so many ways — the concepts, the language, the narrator’s own two-faced-ness — and, for the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Bradley seems to be a true original, and this book is in a league and category of its own.

I was underwhelmed at how the characters from the past were portrayed; their language and behaviour often seemed incongruent with their circumstances (or perhaps simply under-researched). The book suffered from a typical lagging middle, and it appears I wasn’t as surprised by the inevitable plot twists and revelations as some readers were.

My biggest gripe with this book was twofold: there were the inevitable plot holes that time travel stories always have, but the ending, on which much rested, was so rushed and confusing that I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was happening. I found myself on Reddit, one of many readers asking the same bundle of questions to try to get to the bottom of it. As I reflect on it now, the narrator didn’t get a particularly satisfying narrative arc, either.

Despite some frustrations, I genuinely enjoyed this book and look forward to more from Bradley.

I didn’t want to be another person just turning away from it. Another person keeping a dog but eating a lamb. Another person with a recycling bin and a brand-new car. Another person creating another person to look just like them when so many were already alive and starving.

A quick review for a quick read. I tore through this very tense, very dense little book about two scientists, alone in Antarctica, grappling with climate change, mysterious enemies, and their own moral convictions. The narrator is endlessly complex and desperately needs a therapist. Trapped in a cabin in a secret location at the end of the world, his ego’s highly rational ideals go head-to-head with his very human desire for love and companionship. Lee’s writing hits all the right notes — crisp, poetic, and powerful.

What did it mean for a man to be opposed to the conditions necessary for his own survival? Was man so truly apart from the rest of nature that some destruction, some damage, could not be forgiven?

“No one ever wants to migrate. The whole thing is a fight not to become invisible.” These are the words of an immigrant who lost an arm and a leg trying to enter the promised land.

Making the invisible suffering of migrants visible is this book’s ultimate triumph. Blitzer does a masterful job at capturing the harrowing stories of individual migrants making their way from Central America to the US’s southern border, setting them against a backdrop of clear and compelling historical explainers that bring the region and its serial political, economic, and humanitarian crises to life.

Focusing mostly on the ‘Northern Triangle’ — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — Blitzer covers multiple decades, regions, and dilemmas, ultimately revealing just how much the US, with its covert involvement in these corrupt regimes, is responsible for the homegrown crises that led to the long lines of desperate migrants at its own border.

This is the kind of book and these are the kind of stories we need to bring more compassion to the conversation around ‘illegal’ immigrants. Though it is by no means a simple issue, there are many who would benefit from an understanding that ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ entry is a meaningless distinction when one is fleeing for one’s life or economic future. Asylum laws simply cannot cope with the rapidly changing and expanding nature of global humanitarian crises. It would be beneficial, too, if we could start to see the immigration crisis not as an isolated dilemma but as a symptom of a much deeper problem — one that the US could play a key role in improving. Yet something must be done, because right across the Global North, immigration — or the perception of unchecked immigration — is fuelling deeply concerning Right-wing populist movements.

The US would look nothing like it does today without the contributions of immigrants from all places. At the same time, many of these places these people left behind remain problems. No matter what Trump or subsequent administrations do about the southern border, no amount of domestic policymaking will solve the true problem — especially as economic and climate-related catastrophes continue to unravel. Though much has changed over the years, Central America is still a precarious place to make a life, and as long as human beings retain the capacity for hope, I believe we will still see people making the journey in a last-ditch attempt at building a better life.

Ugh. Here we go. The main thing to say here is that this was my first Murakami, and will very likely be my last. I am not a fan.

I’ll admit, I made the mistake of not doing any research into Murakami’s work (I had technically read his non-fiction book about running many years ago), so I spent the entire novel completely confused as to what was going on. I couldn’t grasp how much of this weird magical town was supposed to be actually real in this world, or how much of it was simply the protagonist’s own mental constructions.

Even if I could look past that (which I couldn’t, because the whole thing left me incredibly confused), I just could not follow whatever pathetic wisps of plot there were, nor could I make sense of how each world or each chronological sequence related to the others. The structure was incredibly bizarre and repetitive, and the story was excruciatingly drawn out.

And of the supernatural elements? I like a dose of magic realism, but there has to be some sense of what’s real and what’s not, and this book just blew right on past that. My pile of confusions and unanswered questions just kept growing throughout the book, and never found satisfying resolutions. The supposed plot resolutions came far too late and were so absurd that I laughed out loud. The symbolism was frequently clumsy and heavy-handed, and I rolled my eyes several times.

Add to my criticisms the simple reality that Murakami is not a master craftsman of words. Maybe it’s a translation thing, but the sentences were incredibly lazy — filled with unnecessary adverbs, constructed in consistently underwhelming ways. So I did not even have beautiful sentences to keep me going.

Nor did I get incredible depth or insight into the characters’ inner lives. Most characters are two-dimensional, with little complex emotion. The protagonist is the biggest problem here; we never once get to understand what he is actually feeling. One review I read claimed that the protagonist was simply heartbroken and traumatised after his girlfriend left him (another fact which was never made clear); and yet none of that supposed heartbreak or trauma ever seems to make it onto the page. I suppose the reader is meant to infer it, but from what, I don’t know. So much is missing here, to the point where it falls prey to all the clichéd criticisms that written by a man encompasses. The total lack of introspection on behalf of the protagonist is supplanted by an uncomfortable amount of yearning for a sixteen-year-old girl in a school uniform with a swelling chest. Even in his forties, the protagonist still yearns for this girl.

I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone, and I won’t be picking up any more Murakami for now. As I mentioned in my review of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, one thing a lot of Japanese fiction does well — and this book is no exception — is create that comforting sense of routine, of a cosy place that never changes, of days going by in calm and ordinary ways. There is certainly comfort in this, especially in times like these. The vibes are strong in this book, but they were certainly not enough to keep me going.

I found Chris Kohler on one of the identical algorithmic short-form video platforms (Facebook, maybe?) and fell in love with his videos. He was highlighting the very absurdities of corporate power and government inadequacy that I was reading about in many of my books, but with a humour and a subtlety of facial expression that I found irresistible.

In that vein, this book was a fun even if not deeply insightful, highlighting many of the daily absurdities and indignities that Australians (or most citizens of the developed world) are subject to, often without even realising it. Kohler covers everything from the quotidian (insurance, mortgages, petrol prices) to the obvious (gambling, crypto, making the biggest purchase of your life at a public action — yep, that’s how Aussies buy houses).

As funny as the book manages to be, it largely fails to be optimistic in a broader sense. The mostly unwritten conclusion feels like a shrug of the shoulders — this is just how it is, so we’ll have to learn to live with it, and keep one eye out for the biggest scams.

I think this reflects a broader feeling among Australians and our English-speaking counterparts that there is no alternative. This line of thinking is one of the many ‘successes’ (or rather, toxic byproducts) of the neoliberal age — an age which most of us have overwhelmingly outgrown, but one for which we can’t seem to conjure up a replacement.

Well well well. Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now changed my life several years ago — converted me from pessimist to optimist, gave me the historical context I needed to understand just how miraculous the post-Enlightenment world really is. I read Rationality shortly after, which I devoured, given my love for mental models and metacognition.

I wish I could say the same for this book. In fairness, I only bought this book because Pinker was coming to Brisbane (I’m as shocked as you are) to talk about it. The topic held little interest for me — I could see what the big deal was. I hoped, though, that the book would unfold in such a way that does reveal why this seemingly obscure topic actually matters.

It does not, and I have to conclude that’s because it, ultimately, doesn’t.

The book is about common knowledge — that is, when everyone knows something, and everyone knows that everyone knows it, ad infinitum. Pinker makes the important point that common knowledge is really the foundation for human progress and flourishing, since it enables the kind of large-scale coordination and cooperation that is necessary to advance humanity. But that’s a subject fit for an article, maybe — not a whole book. He brushes over it in the first chapter, and then the reader spends the rest of the book wondering what the point is.

The first half of or more of the book is just Pinker rehashing different variations of the same inane situations in which I know that you know something, and you know that I know that you know it, and I know that you know that I know that you know it…. until your brain explodes. One of these would have been interesting and funny, but I could not count how many times Pinker went over this idea. It was truly excruciating to read, as was his attempt to explain the Friends episode (which Pinker calls an American television situational comedy, as if he had never even encountered a TV before) where the group learns about Monica and Chandler’s secret relationship (which he calls their clandestine affair). Truly painful stuff.

The second part of the book is Pinker taking the opportunity to rail against cancel culture, as if that were the most logical or important follow-on. Though there are a few points where common knowledge provided an interesting lens from which to view cancel culture, on the whole, this feels like a stretch, as if Pinker was looking for some kind of scientific basis from which to launch into his anti-cancel-culture rantings.

I slogged through this book, hoping that the event would be more interesting. Alas, it was not, and Pinker simply repeated the same explanations and examples from the book. The only interesting part came when some audience members asked genuinely insightful questions, and Pinker had characteristically elegant replies.

Unfortunately, it appears the entire audience was just as bored as I was, and stood up to leave before the host had finished his concluding remarks.

Pinker is an interesting independent thinker, but I’m still missing the So what? on this one. As one online review put it (and I’m paraphrasing here): “I love Pinker’s books, but this one needed more time in the oven.”

Japanese fiction seems to be having a moment, so I figured I’d participate. I got what I was expecting: not a particularly deep or moving novel, but a quiet, ambient experience. What many Japanese authors do well is this idea of the place that never changes, the constant routine, the comfort it all brings. The idea of a hot cup of coffee in an old cafe, waitresses swishing about, regular customers in their regular seats — it’s all very evocative, comforting, and quintessentially Japanese.

Was I moved to tears? No. Will I read more in this style? Probably only if I am craving a sense of order and calm (so, yes, more than likely — but only when the mood strikes).

How smart is it to trust ‘smart’ technologies?

That’s the question at the heart of this book, which I picked up at Salted Books in Lisbon, Portugal (book-lovers, you will love Lisbon), where I also got this amazing tote bag. It was the first physical book I purchased in 2025, but in my typical fashion, I’ve only just read it.

I thought this book would be about keeping your attention span and critical faculties in the age of digital slop, but it turned out to be far more about the limitations of the technologies we think of as all-knowing and all-powerful. It doesn’t give strategies for guarding against tech-related cognitive decline in the way I thought it would, but it gave me something even better: an appreciation for the human experience.

Gigerenzer effectively asserts that the more we buy into the hype of AI and algorithms and big data and how ‘smart’ everything is, the more we lose faith in our own intelligence and ways of knowing and even our experience. At that point, he claims, “AI will tell us what to do, and [we believe] we should listen and follow.”

Rather than get down on ourselves for not being as fast or well-read as an AI, we must instead focus on the intelligence we do bring to bear. This may have nothing to do with ones and zeros and everything to do with how it feels to be a human being alive in the world from moment to moment. The author notes the impressiveness of computers that can beat humans at chess, albeit while consuming enormous amounts of energy and having to perform thousands of calculations at each turn. Humans, meanwhile, can play chess just using our brains (which only require a slice of pizza or two to power up). More importantly, we can have fun while doing it. Does much else matter?

The era of computers and big data has seen the brain regularly compared to a computer, and intelligence reduced to the ability to calculate. But Gigerenzer distinguishes between simple calculation — which is all computers can actually do — and the wide range of intelligence available to humans: judgment, intelligence, intuition — even courage.

We are trained to believe that ‘algorithms’ or AI can know far more than we can ever know, because of the complexity and opacity of their workings. In believing the hype, we put faith in this complexity and opacity, the author says, assuming it translates to intelligence. Yet neither is justification for ability.

Indeed, the author explores a wide range of scenarios (advertising algorithms, dating algorithms, criminal-identifying algorithms, etc.) where the supposedly all-knowing algorithms fail to perform in real-world conditions. What looks like a perfect profile match on a dating app can fizzle out in two minutes on a date, because the profile is not the person, and attraction is not a calculation. Humans have far more interesting, far more complicated ways of knowing — the way someone looks past you while speaking, the pitch of their voice, the smell of their cologne — than a computer can hope to understand.

We desperately need to understand the limits of these technologies — what they’re good at, and what they’re terrible at — to ensure we don’t trust them with decisions they aren’t capable of handling in real-world conditions.

This matters not just because we need to understand the dynamics at stake when we trade privacy for the sake of convenience or safety (read: surveillance), but because we need to know what we’re actually getting out of the bargain. If surveillance tech is no more effective at identifying criminals than old-fashioned policework is, or if an algorithm is no better at finding us love than the local bar is, why give up so much of our humanity — our privacy, our dignity, our humanity — for so little in return?

The author urges us to be wise not to the ways these powerful technologies take advantage of us, but the ways in which these technologies are simply not that powerful at all.

Facebook is said to know everything about you — but does it, really? It might know enough to sell ads to you, or help a surveillance state flag you, but does it know what it feels like to be you at 1 am on a winter’s morning, or under a tree on an autumn day? Does it know what it’s like to love you, to fight with you, to laugh with you? Of course not. But Facebook doesn’t want to know this — can’t know this. But in our obsession with optimising for what algorithms can know (putting more and more of our data online in exchange for ‘personalisation’ and convenience), we can’t lose the part of ourselves that these machines can never know.

Ultimately, this book might be less about staying ‘smart’ and more about staying human. — about remembering what it means to be human, and why it matters. Just because a machine can compute at a faster rate or ingest more data than we can, this does not make it better at making decisions for our lives.

I am naive.

I bought this book imagining it had something to do with Gessen’s time growing up in the Soviet Union. I was wrong; it was a book written towards the end and shortly after the first Trump term — an attempt to reckon with that brief but irreversible period in American life.

This is ironic on two levels: first, that I assumed a Russian-born author writing about surviving autocratic regimes was writing about Russia, not the U.S.; and second, that I was reading it in the second year of the second Trump term, when it appears that the entire established world order is tipping over, a milk cup in the grasp of an unsteady toddler. What Gessen chronicles as abuses of power in the first Trump term are both resoundingly similar and also far tamer than what we are seeing today. If the first term was Trump testing the waters, the second term is him pushing everyone into the deep end.

Particularly interesting to me are Gessen’s insights on language — how it is abused by autocrats, how its absence or lack of shared definition erodes power and cohesion among those without political power. “So much of our lives depended on words that meant so little to the man who said them,” says Gessen, referring to Trump’s callous and careless manner of speech during his first term.

It is amplified by the media, which often unquestioningly accepts the foundational language or frameworks underlying Trump’s assertions, even as it tries to rebut them. Most anti-Trump rhetoric stoops to his level, debating him with his own assumptions, rather than redirecting the conversation towards higher ground.

Gessen speaks of the political ambition of autocrats, noting that it is far removed from political aspiration. Ambitious tyrants like Trump want everything, and they want it now — but theirs is not a moral calling. It is simply greed.

Many people, institutions, and traditions failed to uphold an acceptable standard of dialogue and restrain his power during the first term — to say nothing of the second term.

Writing of the former, Gessen says: “the first three years have shown that an autocratic attempt in the United States has a credible attempt of succeeding. Worse than that, they have shown that an autocratic attempt builds logically on the structures and norms of American government: on the concentration of power in the executive branch, and on the marriage of money and politics.”

This is the biggest long-term danger of both Trump presidencies. Even if free and fair elections are called in 2028, the seed has been planted. Power-hungry people on all sides have seen what can be done by a bully who knows no bounds. The box has been opened.

Perhaps it’s a byproduct of growing up with the Internet, but I distinctly remember the day it dawned on me that ‘the cloud’ was in fact just a bunch of servers sitting in data centres, connected to the rest of the world via — very real — cables. What appeared to me as virtual did, in fact, have a physical form — I just couldn’t see it.

Fast-forward to the AI buzz of today. In the excitement of texting with LLMs that sound human, or watching robots kick footballs, we have mostly turned a blind eye to the fact that it is humans who ‘feed’ the AI machine, whether it’s writers ‘and artists’ work being used to train models, or exploited workers in the Global South forced to view and tag all softs of images, footage, and text in order to teach the AI.

“Contrary to what the Ancient Greeks believed, technology is not a gift from the gods. It is forged by human hands and indelibly marked by its creators’ world.”

We are exploiting people to create a machine that does, for the most part, what humans can already do.

“Today… Machines create art, compose music and write poetry, while countless humans are forced to work like robots, toiling in monotonous low-paid jobs just to make such remarkable machines possible.”

This is the basis of Feeding the Machine, which I picked up mid-way through last year but only got to reading last week. It presents a compelling profile of the various types of people at the different stages of the AI supply chain — content moderators, data annotators, data centre technicians, artists whose work is stolen, Amazon workers whose daily work schedules are dictated and monitored by AI, software engineers, venture capital investors.

I had thought the book would focus more on the exploitation of people earlier in the funnel, but I thought this structure was still an effective way to show how the sausage is made. The most shocking profiles are, of course, those of the workers in the Global South, whose jobs as content moderators or data annotators are impossibly gruelling and incredibly traumatising — they are either bored to the point of breakdown by the endless tagging of street scenes or basic images; or, they are traumatised beyond repair by the constant barrage of violent rape and bloody murder videos they are forced to watch in rapid succession.

“If AI is understood as an extraction machine, then we are the raw material.”

“We, human beings, are the often-hidden force that powers AI — both physically with our labour but also intellectually through AI ingesting and synthesising our collective intelligence… Without us, AI ceases to function. It is only through the constant supply of human labour — annotating datasets, coding software, repairing serves, creating new paintings and literature and keeping supply chains functioning — that AI continues to exist.”

No matter how much they try to evade it, these workers’ exploitation is squarely the responsibility of the new breed of AI companies taking over the tech world. The authors paint an insightful picture of the new dynamics of the tech scene, making it clear that this new generation of AI companies is nothing like the last generation of tech companies. The latter were scrappy startups launched out of garages and university bedrooms. The former are huge capital-guzzlers that need shocking amounts of ‘compute’ (computing resources — basically, energy and water) to function.

Where software defined the previous era of value creation, hardware defines this one. And hardware is expensive. That’s why these new companies can only exist with the help of big backers who own the computing hardware that can accommodate the sheer scale of these models. These backers happen to be (surprise, surprise) the previous generation of big tech companies. If tech wasn’t a monopoly already, it certainly is now. The power of tech companies is consolidating further.

Beyond market monopolies and the way they harm consumers, there are also the human implications of the final AI product. As the authors note, “AI has become the focal point of competing ideas for how our future will develop.” Only those with power and resources currently have a say in the way AI gets developed, and it’s not looking good. “Corporations see dollars signs,” the authors say. “States see military hardware and competitive economic advantage. What seems unlikely is that these interests will lead to AI being developed in ways that benefit humanity.”

Depressing, yes, but it is important to understand the human agency at play here. “AI is often viewed as an inevitable force that we must adapt to,” say the authors, “rather than a tool that we can consciously shape through our own actions.”

The authors believe the present-day social and environmental consequences of AI make a more compelling argument for better regulation than fear-mongering about superintelligence or eventual robot takeovers. I tend to agree. Indeed, the doomerism often propagated by industry leaders themselves is itself a distraction from the very real harms that current AI models are causing today.

These days more than ever I am turning to people who speak with reverence about the books they have read; about the the ways in which the books that line their shelves have changed them. This feels particularly important to me at a time when the cultural conversation has been flattened by algorithms, and a time when almost no one in my actual life shares my particular appetite for books.

I don’t mean nobody around me reads, but nobody I know reads like I do. My few conversations about books these days almost inevitably end with “But how long is it?” (fiction) or “Does it have sex in it?”, or “Is there a video instead?” (nonfiction). People ask me for book recommendations to help them escape, or build wealth in an impossible economy, or live vicariously; never has anyone asked me for a book recommendation to shape their mind.

Today, as in my adolescence, books (and the Internet) have become the way I find my people. Between book blogs, podcasts, and the occasional YouTube video, I have found people who like books the way I do. But there’s nothing like a book about books.

When I unwrapped Bookish on Christmas Day (I had, of course, requested it), I was particularly excited to fluff up a few cushions and burrow down into the couch with it. While the rest of the family were pouring cocktails and whipping up cheese boards and cracking open board game boxes, I was sinking into my only true comfort.

Immediately, I feel a unique kinship with the author, who draws me in by declaring “I am never happier than when I am in a bookshop,” and other such winks to the bookish reader (“you will know this by the annual accusation that you are taking ‘too many books’ on holiday”).

I enjoyed the structure of Bookish: Mangan is clearly at home with the feature-length article, and each chapter becomes a kind of self-contained essay, with the book adding up to an easy chronological journey through the bigger moments in Mangan’s life and the books that built her inner world along the way.

There is much insight here into Mangan’s own relationship with books, and book lovers will find little to disagree with. What I didn’t get (but had thought I would), was a a broader, perhaps even more scientific analysis in keeping with the title of the book: how, exactly, reading shapes a life. Perhaps this is too much to expect. After all, there are surely few university departments investigating the effect of reading Harry Potter as a child or Nietzsche as a teen.

Still, as a memoir of sorts, this book was interesting enough, even if I did find Mangan exasperating at times, in a way that was not compensated for by beautiful sentences (Mangan is often funny, but is not a particularly lyrical writer).

I did, however, appreciate Mangan’s heroic efforts to house and organise her 10,000-strong book collection (the mind boggles). I do not have 10,000 books, but that same urge to safeguard and categorise is what has led me here, to document my own reading life rather than letting it gush in and, inevitably, flow out. I am slowly beginning to identify with Mangan’s dawning realisation that there is such a thing as too many books (10,000, it appears, is the number), and that what really furnishes a mind is engagement rather than efficiency. There is no luxury like re-reading a favourite book, or of engaging at length with a text (taking notes, writing reviews, talking to friends) rather than devouring them and moving on. “Reading a book, after years apart, is the bibliographic equivalent of never stepping in the same river twice,” says Mangan. Like Mangan, re-reading was something I did constantly in my youth. These days, I re-read only a select few books, and only in times of acute crisis as a comfort mechanism.

Bookish may not make it to my re-read list, but as far as books about books go, it was a fun read.

There is probably nothing original left to say about The Handmaid’s Tale, a classic dystopian novel by a writer with a habit of seeing and labelling the cruelty and injustice that others would rather look away from; who understands the preciousness of freedom and was warning about it even when much of the the world, in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, saw nothing but liberal democracy and ever-growing progress on its horizons.

I recently listened to Atwood on Kara Swisher’s podcast. At 86, Atwood was sharp, perceptive, and her usual no-nonsense, down-to-earth self. I can’t quote this part exactly, but at one point, Swisher asks why Atwood made Gilead (the world of The Handmaid’s Tale) a religious state. “Well,” says Atwood, “the future looks like the past.” Nations and their people, Atwood believes, tend to fall back into familiar patterns. If you want to see where a country is going, try looking at where they’ve been. The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in 1985, and now look where we are.

Anyway, back to the book. Atwood takes us into the world of a repressive totalitarian regime not at the level of the village, or even the family unit, but right inside the white head wings of a single human being. Her writing is so authentic, the focal points so small (an itch, a glance, a slight movement of a finger), that you feel precisely what it means to be Offred, white wings in your peripheral vision, head down, vigilant always. You can feel the weight of the million eyes on your, of your restrained movements under the red gown, of the relief and oppression of getting to your tiny room at the end of the day. Through these tiny moments and sensations, Atwood tells a much larger story.

Under constant surveillance, Offred is afforded almost no privacy. And yet, at the same time, she is achingly lonely. She finds the tiniest of freedoms and indulgences; micro-movements and moments with which to save what is left of her dignity. Under the state’s dehumanising forces, she desperately clings to her humanity.

“I’ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.”

Part of what makes The Handmaid’s Tale so all-encompassing is not just the fact that Atwood is a masterful world-builder and storyteller, but the simple fact that she is a writer’s writer. Every sentence is crafted with care, refined with the ear of a writer whose foremost influence was poetry. Atwood understands the power of the humble Anglo-Saxon noun, the satisfaction of the tangible verb. Her sentences are disciplined, her descriptions, precise. Here’s a taste.

“Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure. In the upper reaches of the atmosphere you’d come apart, you’d vaporize, there would be no pressure holding you together.

The book is ripe — perhaps overly so — with symbol and colour. There’s a whole lot of birds and the bees going on, and we are clued in to Offred’s physical loneliness with her heightened awareness of flowers, and bees, and eggs, and even Scrabble tiles.

“The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg.”

Yet each of the book’s symbols of life and fertility is inseparable from those of bloodshed and violence. As a symbol of fertility herself, Offred is also the object of violence.

Once cannot miss the influence of Rachel Carson and the uprising of environmental sentiment that form the real-world backdrop to the writing of this book. Atwood is a longtime champion of progressive causes, although she refutes the ‘P’ word, claiming that the universe does not simply march forward toward justice).

Yet what is fascinating about The Handmaid’s Tale in particular is its exploration of the brutal consequences of a future without science and technology, rather than, as many in the progressive and environmental camps are wont to do, a world overrun by it. The Handmaid’s Tale is a reminder that it is not our mobile phones or algorithms that threaten our future so much as it is the people behind them. Technology arrives in fits and starts, but human cruelty has not had a break yet.

Sometimes I buy books based on colour alone. My copy of Never Let Me Go all but called out to me from a lone stand in a bookstore I had only just discovered in the middle of Brisbane suburbia. The deep ultramarine blue was so captivating that I bought it and took it to the beach with me to read over Christmas.

I had a vague idea of the premise — human clones are raised in an English-style boarding school — but not much else. This is also, as the Bookstagrammers may be horrified to learn, my first Ishiguro book.

Knowing what I did about the clone situation, I opened the book waiting for the moment when the characters decide to rebel — to escape their fates, to slip out of whatever system was holding them captive.

But a natural consequence of following the characters on their journey is the realisation that the ties that bind these people to their world and their fate are not physical but psychological. This becomes particularly obvious when they move into the ‘Cottages’ and have the ability — even access to a car at some points — to go wherever they wish. Yet over the course of a year (don’t quote me on that) at the Cottages, the characters venture out only once (for a particularly uneventful day in town). It was only when I imagined these characters existing in a public space with other people that I realised just how shy, sheltered, scared, and almost *not-*human they are as a result of the extreme isolation of their upbringing.

But while these characters are certainly unusual when contrast against ‘normal’ people, the way Ishiguro chronicles their experience is not about the unusualness of being a clone about the very ordinariness of human mortality. The way the donors sit around at the medical centres in semi-circles of chairs, or are tended to by their carers, is really just a snapshot of old age, acted out by the 20- and 30-year-old bodies of these particular characters. But life is short no matter how long you get. Aging is painful and isolating, whether brought forward by circumstance or occurring naturally via the passage of time.

The dark underside of the world this novel builds remains a relevant social critique today. We get glimpses of what the ‘other’ world is like — the world in the same country where people are thriving in a world free of cancer and other suffering, but the tradeoff is the point. The underworld fuels the shiny happy world, much as today’s sweatshops, Amazon factories, factory farms, and so on, have become the misery that fuels our purchasable happiness.

Every element of this book, for me, added up to a heavy feeling of inevitability, of coming to terms with what lies ahead, such that in the end, it was no surprise that there were no grand escape plans. Not escaping is the point. I still wondered about this, though, even after I had finished the book. What, technically, was stopping them?

I Googled it, and sure enough, found plenty of people asking the same question. The director of the movie adaptation had spoken about this at length thanks to the incessant asking by audiences.

Here was his response:

“Maybe it’s a failing of the film that the question comes up as often as it does – I don’t know… Kazuo’s answer, in brief, is that there have been many films with stories about the kind of anomaly of brave slaves rebelling against an oppressive or immoral system, and he just isn’t as interested in telling that story as he was in the ways that we tend not to and the ways that we tend to accept our fates and the ways that we tend to lack the necessary wider perspective that would make that an option.”

When you reach the end of the book, you really do feel what Ishiguro was aiming for. But I found this even more interesting:

“When I have shown the film to Russian audiences the question doesn’t come up. When I show the film to Japanese audiences, in Tokyo, the question doesn’t come up. There are societies where the process of that society and the reality of the atmosphere of that society is so pervasive, since birth, that people are raised to believe that it’s noble to, be a cog, really, and fulfil your destiny and your responsibility to the greater society. It’s just how these characters think. It’s a very western idea and a very American idea that a movie story is somehow broken if it’s not about a character who fights.”

There it was: my Americanness, despite not being American at all. (Although, does Canadian count?) I am conditioned in the Joseph Campbell school of the hero’s journey — looking for the fight, the struggle for freedom, the escape from the system. Instead, these characters seem to find freedom through acceptance rather than through escape, which is, ultimately, how most of us live. The systems we both relish in and rail against are far too big for any one of us to meaningfully escape. Instead, we find our own ways of coping, succumbing to some version of the Serenity prayer in the quest to enjoy what precious little time we are allotted.