The first three chapters of my latest book are on the Amazon webpage. (Click on the ‘Look inside’ link.) The publisher’s webpage is here and you can also buy it from any major retailer. (Note: This will be the new top post for a while. Later posts are below.)
I am becoming increasingly concerned whenever I see the word ‘influencer’ associated with someone on the internet. It is a vaguely defined terms and a brief search yields examples such as “one who exerts influence : a person who inspires or guides the actions of others” or “a person who is able to generate interest in something (such as a consumer product) by posting about it on social media” or “a person who has become well known through regular social media posts and is able to promote a product or service by recommending or using it online.”
I would like to add a further definition as “someone who has no real expertise or credentials about whatever they are talking about but are using their own experience or those of a few others to make sweeping claims that others should follow their advice even when that can be dangerous”.
I don’t really care about influencers who advise people about restaurants or hotels or vacation spots or what cleaning and cooking utensils to buy. Sure, the advice may be useless and they are likely being paid to shill for those things. But those are usually harmless and only result in a loss of money for the gullible. I am more concerned about those who give medical advice about treating ailments or who promote diets that can be harmful if continued for a long time.
One of the more dangerous influencers that I read about recently was in an investigative series by reporters from the Guardian newspaper promoting something called ‘free births’. To be clear, these are not so-called natural or unassisted births where women choose to give birth at home under the guidance of midwives and doulas who are able to quickly summon medical help if something goes seriously wrong with the delivery. (A midwife is a trained medical professional who knows how to deliver babies while a doula is someone who has no medical training but provides non-medical emotional and moral support.)
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Much has been written in tribute about Rob Reiner after the brutal murder of him and his wife Michele. Rob was the son of actor and writer Carl Reiner and became well known playing the liberal Michael Stivic as a counterpoint to the bigoted Archie Bunker in the groundbreaking TV series All in the Family, a show that broached many social issues and taboos.
Much to Archie’s displeasure, Stivic is the boyfriend (and later husband) of Bunker’s daughter Gloria. In this clip we see the first meeting of Stivic and Archie and Edith (his wife) and hear the first time that he is called ‘Meathead’, the name that stuck forever after.
There was an interesting article in the August 11, 2025 issue of The New Yorker about the pain that can be caused by being a perfectionist, in that it can lead to depression, eating disorders, and even suicide. To understand why, we need to distinguish perfectionism from the mere desire to excel or be the best at something. While those latter characteristics can skirt close to the boundary of perfectionism, they are not the same thing. What characterizes perfectionism is the feeling that whatever one does or achieves, it is never good enough and requires more work. This can lead to not completing projects because one is constantly making changes without moving on or holding back and not submitting articles or papers because of the need to do more research, more experiments, or explore obscure side issues, and so on. This can lead to a sense of frustration because of the loss of productivity. Perhaps the most dangerous issue is with eating disorders such as anorexia where however thin someone gets, they feel they are not thin enough.
The article focuses on the work of two psychologists Gordon Flett and Paul Hewitt who have spent decades studying this and produced a model that describes three types: “self-oriented perfectionism (requiring perfection of oneself), other-oriented perfectionism (railing against the imperfections of others), and socially prescribed perfectionism (believing that others require one to be perfect).”
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I am fascinated by the evolution of language but had never given much thought to punctuation. If I gave it any consideration at all, I tended to think of punctuation marks such as the period, the comma, and the apostrophe as somehow having been there from the beginning of writing, appearing somewhat organically along with writing. But according to Florence Hazrat at the University of Sheffield, the origin of punctuation marks can be dated quite precisely.
In the broad sense, punctuation is any glyph or sign in a text that isn’t an alphabet letter. This includes spaces, whose inclusion wasn’t always a given: in classical times stone inscriptions as well as handwritten texts WOULDLOOKLIKETHIS – written on scrolls, potentially unrolling forever. Reasons for continuous script aren’t entirely clear, but might be connected to a conception of writing as record of speech rather than a practice in itself, and since we’re hardly aware of the minuscule pauses we make between words when speaking, it isn’t obvious to register something we do and perceive unconsciously with a designated sign that is a non-sign: blank space.
Writing without punctuation lasted for many hundreds of years, in spite of individual efforts such as those of Aristophanes, the librarian at Alexandria. Around 200 BCE, Aristophanes of Alexandria wished to ease pronunciation of Greek for foreigners by suggesting small circles at different levels of the line for pauses of different lengths, emphasising the rhythm of the sentence though not yet its grammatical shape.
Although I do not always comment on breaking news, that news is on my mind and these last two days it has just been too awful to ignore, while to write about it just makes me feel even worse.
I am talking about the terrible succession of events. First we had the shooting at Brown University, then we had the horrific massacre of Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Australia, and then we had the brutal murder of Rob and Michele Reiner in their home, allegedly by their son.
And if all that wasn’t bad enough, we have Trump positively gloating over the deaths of the Reiners. The depths of sociopathology to which that man can sink never cease to amaze me.
So take this post as an open thread, to comment on what you will.
The writer and digital rights activist coined the term ‘enshittifcation’ to describe the deterioration of the internet and it caught on. I wrote about it a couple of times (see here and here). He now has a book with that title that I will get and read soon.
In this interview with Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show Doctorow explains succinctly how enshittification comes about and what can be done about it. It is an excellent informative interview.
In an earlier post, I wrote about how I enjoyed sleeping. But clearly I am a mere piker in this regard. This article about a Hollywood director convicted of scamming Netflix out of $11 million shows that he must love sleeping much more than me.
Then came the lavish purchases, prosecutors said, with Rinsch buying five Rolls-Royces and one Ferrari, along with $652,000 on watches and clothes. He also bought two mattresses for about $638,000 and spent another $295,000 on luxury bedding and linens. In addition, he used some of the money to pay off about $1.8m in credit card bills, prosecutors said.
What? Two mattresses for $638,000? How can that be possible?
Rich people can be so strange. The fact that his purchase of five Rolls Royces was not the most ridiculous thing about him says something about the level of weirdness on display.
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani upset the political establishment by winning the mayoralty of New York City but now comes along another upset, this time in the city of Miami in deep-red Florida.
Miami’s new mayor, Eileen Higgins, hailed it as “a new day” for the city after the Democrat ended three decades of Republican rule on Tuesday night in a stunning election triumph.
In reality, the result is more of a seismic shifting of sands given the magnitude of her victory over the Donald Trump-backed Republican candidate, Emilio González, in the most populous city in Miami-Dade county, which the president won in 2024 by 12%.
Higgins won the run-off with almost 60% of the vote, according to preliminary results reported Wednesday by the Miami Herald. More than just further evidence of a growing national backlash against Trump’s policies on the national stage, particularly immigration, her win has reset Miami’s political landscape in a manner not seen in some ways in 28 years, and in others not at all.
Higgins is the first woman to hold the office; the first Democrat to win it in 28 years; and the first non-Hispanic candidate since the 1990s. As if to bookend neatly the passing back of the Republican torch, the outgoing incumbent, Francis Suarez, is the son of the most recent Democratic Miami mayor, Xavier Suarez, who was elected in 1997.
…The swing back towards Democrats was notable given that Hispanic voters contributed to the red wave that last year saw Trump become the first Republican presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade county since 1988.
Commenter Dunc pointed me to a long but fascinating article by Edward Zitron titled The Era Of The Business Idiot where he brutally analyzes how US businesses seem to have been taken over by owners and a managerial class that he calls Business Idiots who have become alienated from the actual manufacturing process of whatever their company produces, and make decisions that tend to work against actual productivity and quality in favor of things that advance their own careers and income. (The thrust of the article is similar to Cory Doctorow’s evisceration of the internet that he calls enshittification and the extension of that idea more broadly to American power.)
The Business Idiot thrives on alienation — on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about.
They’re building products for other people that don’t interact with the real world. We are no longer their customers, and so, we’re worth even less than before — which, as is the case in a world dominated by shareholder supremacy, not all that much.
They do not exist to make us better — the Business Idiot doesn’t really care about the real world, or what you do, or who you are, or anything other than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the Musks and Altmans of the world, because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian, someone above work, and thinking, and knowledge.
