Hello all, A newsletter post today! Kind of. I’ll offer a few quick ideas, because today these thoughts are pecking at me like woodpeckers working on a big tree. Subscribe now TOP OF MIND I’m closing in on the final draft of my second novel, the sequel to Surrender. It’s called … read more

Station identification! I’m Lee Schneider, a writer-producer. I am finishing my second novel, which will be published this year. I produce podcasts and coach podcast hosts. I teach a course in media in the School of Architecture at USC. Married to a goddess. Co-founder of three children. My goals this week include reading more books and drinking more water. My youngest son has track and field tryouts today. Wish him luck and speed.

At last, I feel seen by LinkedIn. They have selected me to contribute to one of their AI-generated articles. They want me to weigh in on what it’s like to be a rowing instructor! Well, here goes: Being a rowing instructor is like when you sit in the back of the boat with one of those megaphone thingies, right? And you go, like, “row, row, row!” Or do you go, like, “paddle”–? Something like that. [Narrator’s voice:] He isn’t a rowing instructor. LinkedIn must be desperate to populate their AI-driven articles with human content if they’re asking anyone with the word “instructor” in their profile.

Is anyone still posting to Medium? And do you get any benefit from it?

About 500 Words and its job as a memex.

I am not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

• Dune

Our best bandwidth is behind us, and yet we only want more.

From a series of stories published in 2050 and accidentally leaked to the past.

War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength

Here is the headline for Meta’s ad for its version of Google Glass:

Stay in the present.

Orwell could have written that headline, and really, the entire ad, and included it in 1984. When the lie is big enough, it can transcend the truth, exist outside of the truth, and create its own reality to which we are forced to conform or else we just have to break out of the reality that they’re forcing for us.

A tech company’s goal is to get you to use their tech all the time. What better way than to convince you to wear the tech strapped on your face?

Novels are amazing machines, and R.F. Kuang operates Babel very well. #writing #novels 📚

Late to this party, but The Holdovers was a really good movie.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

Francis Bacon

Writing with a Tombow Mono100 F today. #pencils

Back in 2009, when I joined Twitter and Facebook, started a blog, and signed on to The Huffington Post as an unpaid contributor, the online world was much happier. Total strangers commented on my blog, often thoughtfully. Blog comments now are mostly for scammy marketers or angry trolls, or bots, … read more

Misplaced Ingenuity

To stop our planet from warming, scientists are proposing deploying sun shields in space, scattering dust in space, and getting asteroids involved.

But what about simply stopping burning fossil fuels as a first step? Can some of this magnificent scientific ingenuity be directed in that direction?

A recent study led by the University of Utah explored scattering dust deep into space, while a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is looking into creating a shield made of “space bubbles.” Last summer, Istvan Szapudi, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, published a paper that suggested tethering a big solar shield to a repurposed asteroid.

ICYMI Reposting this essay about how dystopia is easy, but utopia is hard. True in life and also writing.

www.longandshortreviews.com/guest-blo…

Finished reading: Michael Vey by Richard Paul Evans 📚

Finished reading: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein 📚 Some of its social positions are dated but the overall force of its intellect is astounding. I read it as a study of an AI that was on the side of humans.

Looking to switch up my sign off for email. Found this: “As always, with love” - was used sincerely by Fred Rogers in professional correspondence.

Finished reading: Decisive by Chip Heath 📚