...how much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel either human or free? [loc. 3719]
Published in 2017, and very much a post-Brexit novel: at one point Smiley says to Peter Guillam "was it all for England, then? Of course it was... But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I'm a European."
Told from Peter Guillam's point of view: he's an old man now, retired to his family's farm in Brittany, but he's called back to London to explain his actions during Operation Windfall( Read more... )
Today was exciting in two ways. First, I got the book proposal submitted, whew! I also have a backup plan if this publisher isn’t interested, which helps reduce my stress level.
Second, and more interesting – the Hugo finalists were announced today! For best novel, I already own and have read three of the six books. I started a fourth but had to give it back to the library before I got very far; I expect to get it again soon. I also own (but haven’t read) one of the novellas, and gave J one of the graphic novels for Christmas, and own all of the books in one of the nominated series (but haven’t read the last one yet).
Both of the games we nominated were on the list, and J will probably want to play at least one of the others a bit.
I was also quite puzzled that Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance was on the list. Was it “related to science fiction and fantasy” because she’s also the author of a science fiction series? Because if the fact that it’s about meta-narratives is sufficient, my own eventual book would also qualify – and it will actually mention some SFF, which Inventing the Renaissance did not.
Anyway, the list portends lots of fun for the next three months!
The one duplex built using the 3D printer remains unfinished. Julia Rendleman
I wasn’t looking for a revelation on a country road in southeastern Illinois. But on the outskirts of Galatia — a tiny town where Appalachian hardship seems to have drifted west and settled in — that’s what I found.
It was not a burning bush in some biblical wilderness, but an industrial 3D printer the size of a small garage — a machine, I would learn, that took a $1.1 million investment to get to Illinois, carrying with it the promise of an affordable housing renaissance across the region known as Little Egypt.
And it called to me.
I drove past it again and again. A year prior, in August 2024, this printer was at the center of a groundbreaking ceremony attended by more than 100 people, myself included. I covered the event for Capitol News Illinois and watched as the machine laid down the first layers of what was supposed to be a new beginning. Two local men had promised to help save Cairo, Illinois, by using the machine to print new homes in a town that desperately needed them.
I watched as state and local politicians ceremoniously tossed dirt. Officials posed for photographs beside the machine, holding it up as proof that a new era had arrived. They promised fast, efficient, modern homes — and with them, the sense that someone, at last, was paying attention to this corner of the state.
A year later, though, the printer had produced the framing for exactly one duplex — but the project was abandoned before the interior was finished. Before anyone could move in, the walls cracked.
State and city officials break ground on the Cairo, Illinois, 3D-printed duplex project in August 2024.Julia Rendleman for Capitol News IllinoisRyan Moore, then a Prestige employee, points to a crack in the duplex in December, one of dozens the company says caused it to stop work. Prestige said it waited a year for its printer supplier to provide a crack remediation plan. When one wasn’t provided, the company used hydraulic cement.Julia Rendleman
When I started to investigate what had gone wrong, I found the printer disassembled on a flatbed truck at a country repair shop that doesn’t need to advertise because you either know it’s there or you wouldn’t be going anyway.
The more I stared at it, and continued to drive by it, I wondered how a promise as large as housing had been left to rust in the sun and rain. What did this abandoned printer say about false promises so often made in the name of saving rural America? About officials who insist they are trying to help? And, at the heart of it, how did this quite expensive piece of modern technology become abandoned here in the first place?
After the 2024 Cairo duplex celebration, the 3D printer was parked at this country repair shop in Galatia, where parts of it sat outside on a flatbed trailer for more than a year.Julia Rendleman
For an investigation I published with ProPublica in collaboration with Capitol News Illinois, I sought answers to those questions. I followed what became one of the most windy and wild reporting journeys of my life. I learned that, behind the scenes, the project to build 3D housing in Cairo had been ushered along by political connections: State Sen. Dale Fowler, whose district includes Cairo, helped introduce the 3D printing company to top leaders, including Gov. JB Pritzker and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office. The company, Prestige Project Management Inc. — in the same Harrisburg, Illinois, high rise as Fowler’s district office — pitched the project as part of the state’s housing future.
A Pritzker spokesperson said the governor’s office took no action after meeting with Prestige. A Duckworth spokesperson said the senator’s office had just revived discussions about how to address Cairo’s housing crisis when Fowler reached out and that the office did not have additional involvement with the company. Fowler took an active role boosting the company’s project in Cairo but said he just wanted to see housing development in the city and wasn’t otherwise involved in Prestige’s business dealings.
What I assumed would be a simple story instead got weird — part Old Testament prophecy, part Facebook rumor mill weird.
From left: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker poses for a photo with Harrisburg Mayor John McPeek and state Sen. Dale Fowler. During a January 2024 meeting at Harrisburg City Hall, Fowler talked up the Cairo 3D printer project to the governor.Courtesy of Harrisburg Mayor John McPeek
I’d learn that within a few months of that groundbreaking party, the work stopped on the duplex. After the owners of Prestige said dozens of cracks started running through the walls, a half-dozen employees quit the company. Not long after, the FBI launched an investigation into Prestige’s broader business dealings. There have been no charges or arrests, and the owners say they have fully cooperated with investigators and have done nothing wrong. They also said the concrete “ink” that came with the printer was faulty and that’s why the printer has been idle since. Black Buffalo 3D, the printer supplier, said it has offered Prestige a new concrete solution and to find a buyer for the printer if Prestige no longer wants it.
I spent months digging through records and speaking with Prestige’s owners, former employees and others who’d done business with the company, trying to piece together a timeline of the company’s dealings in Cairo and beyond. Along the way, I encountered intense interviews, moments of tears, strange contradictions and a swamp of rumors.
And in the middle of it all, I found myself pulled in, too — whispering prayers in my car, chasing the truth like a storm rolling off the Shawnee, loving this place with my whole chest and still wondering: What in the hell happened here?
At the same time, maybe part of me already knew what happened, in a way. The failed promise of housing in Cairo is a story I’ve written over and over, for more than a decade.
The McBride Place housing complex partway through demolition in 2019Molly Parker/The Southern Illinoisan
I’ve written about how mold, mice, lead-tainted water and decay persisted in the city’s public housing, at one time home to a fourth of the town, for generations. I’ve written about misspending by public housing officials, the federal takeover that followed and the long, painful effort to tear down what could not be salvaged. For years, federal officials promised even as housing was being torn down that it would be rebuilt. The plan, they said, depended on private companies working alongside government agencies, and on innovation. In this light, things like 3D construction printers seemed to fit exactly with their vision.
So when Prestige Project Management Inc. in Harrisburg, backed by a state senator, offered to buy a printer and deliver it straight to Cairo — on what one of its owners described as a mission from God — people believed.
What was the alternative?
In Cairo, I’ve learned, progress (and the illusion of it) carries its own kind of grief. The demolition of public housing less than a decade before hollowed out a town already on its knees. People were forced to choose between opportunity elsewhere and home, between safer housing and the place that made them.
And the emotional gravity of this story wasn’t from the strangest things I encountered, but from the ones that were the most real and heartbreaking: a town that raised its hopes, only to see them, once again, dashed. A mother living in a cramped one-bedroom unit across town who’d dreamed of moving into one of the duplex’s two-bedroom units, finally able to give her 6-year-old daughter a space of her own.
Kaneesha Mallory, who shares a one-bedroom apartment with her 6-year-old daughter, had hoped to move into the duplex.Julia Rendleman for ProPublica
Some towns, I’ve heard people say, cannot be saved.
I understand the argument. I’ve felt it myself, driving the backroads of southern Illinois between the two great rivers that meet at Cairo, through a landscape marked by poverty, abandonment and a stubborn struggle to hang on. But Cairo has always seemed worth saving to me, because of its history, its suffering and its resilience, a word that can feel too neat for what Black residents there have endured: racism and exclusion that lingered long after much of the South began to change.
Is an unfinished 3D-printed housing spectacle really the best we have to offer?
I’ve written thousands of stories by now. Most disappear as soon as they’re filed. But a few stay in the bones.
Украинский пранкер взломал закрытое совещание по дронам в РФ: "Ваши е********* все сняты — ходите, оглядывайтесь". ВИДЕО
Украинский блогер и пранкер Евгений Вольнов, известный под псевдонимом Майор Чорнобаев, заявил об успешном проникновении на закрытое совещание Министерства промышленности и торговли РФ
On a spring day three years ago, the river climbed out of its banks.
Unseasonable heat and heavy rain had hit the snowpack high in the mountains, sending a winter’s worth of meltwater in a pulse down the tributaries, into the mainstem, and spilling across the valley floor.
Work seemed unlikely under these circumstances, so I visited the flood instead.
In the park, the river wrapped its arms around cottonwood trunks and overtopped the grass in gentle, reaching puddles. I watched the river push up in roiling parabolas against bridge piers, then drove to the thin riffle where it dashed across the highway. I stopped at a friend’s property, where the river filled swales and ran through the garden and lapped just short of the house’s back stairs. “It’s the Everglades,” my friend said, as we stood on the porch surveying all that mirrored water.
Inside, my friend’s teenage daughter showed me into the bathroom, where she was fostering seven kittens. She placed the smallest—a gray fluff of a tabby—on my outstretched forearm. The kitten toddled up to my shoulder, then curled against my neck and fell asleep. She chose me. And the next day, I chose her.
One week later, I was in a car accident so bad it is hard even now to talk or think about.
It wasn’t my fault; I walked away physically unharmed. But the person who hit me left the scene in a flight-for-life helicopter, and afterwards, I discovered that something inside me had tilted at a dangerously steep angle. Over the coming months, as I wrestled with nightmares and the persistent sensation of falling into space, Israel began its genocidal campaign in Gaza, murdering tens of thousands of people with U.S. support. Then, a relationship with someone I loved, and with whom I imagined a future, came to an abrupt end.
Nothing felt safe or within control. And yet I was safe, and the kitten remained, warm and wiggly, her body unaware of threat, determined to thrive, growing every day in spite of everything. When she settled purring onto my chest in the evening, my muscles would unclench, and I would realize that I’d been bracing for hours as if for a hit. My boyfriend and I had named the kitten for the tall wild grass in my yard, where she liked to hide. Now, I stood alone and watched her among its blades, squinting her eyes at the sun, lifting her nose to the breeze, and I felt the tickle of something growing and green in me as well.
To be alive, I suppose, is to try to hold the strange all-at-onceness of beauty and pain, good fortune and tragedy, love and atrocity.
Most summers, wildfires burned in our mountains, in surrounding states, in Canada. Under a sky copper-colored with smoke, I watered houseplants, lingering over fresh leaves opening like hands, the unfurling stems of begonias, the fragrant, preciously-infrequent night blooms of cacti. In the yard, the ponderosa I planted added a whorl of branches each year, its trunk filling to the thickness of my wrist. The aspens leafed and spread and the deer ate their tops and made them bushy. The sagebrush took over its corner by the front walk, full with the buzz of bumblebees. The kitten became a joyous lunatic of a cat.
Then, last fall, my dog of 15 years—keeper of all my stories, coyote singer, full with the wisdom of smells—began her slow slide from life. I laid her on a sheepskin on the porch on a warm October day. While she slept, I scattered native wildflower seeds in all the bare patches of the yard. Two weeks later, she died in my arms.
Winter came—lonelier without her, with less snow than I’ve yet seen in these parts—then gave way to a spring much warmer than it should be, teetering on the brink of global warfare. Walking barefoot through the bunchgrass, I spotted a single green leaf covered in silver hairs sprouting from cracked earth. I dropped to my hands and knees and found two more, then a third. The first shoots of arrowleaf balsamroot—a perennial sunflower that grows in clusters with furling leaves big as mule’s ears. Each morning after, I crouched on the ground in my pajamas with my coffee, finding the starbursts of tiny lupine leaves, feathery baby yarrow leaves, more arrowleaf. Tiny new lives, rooting in our small plot land ground, whatever future may come. The cat followed after me, padding soft through the dust.
Fandom: Heated Rivalry Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Ilya Rozanov Content Notes/Warnings: none Medium: digital art Artist on DW/LJ: n/a Artist Website/Gallery:christianpuppetshow HR art on tumblr Why this piece is awesome: Gorgeous colours in this nearly single-colour painting of Ilya by the lake, bathed in sunset. Link:Drawing Ilya at sunset, backup link here
Thank you for all the birthday wishes. It was a very chill day. My partner bought me one of those Kindle/phone/gaming stands, that will prop your device up in front of your face, leaving you with the ability to snuggle under the blankets with your controller or page turner.
Last year’s Cherrywood Quilting Challenge was themed “the abyss.” They have a virtual gallery of all the amazing entries, and a calendar for the traveling exhibit. Some beautiful work on display! The 2026 challenge has started and the theme is “storytime.”
Lastly, Sarah and I were having a similar discussion about reading levels and romance, AND LO AND BEHOLD, this popped into my Reddit feed. It’s such an interesting convo around historical romances and anti-intellectualism.
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Life is full of things which are hard or tedious or otherwise unpleasant that need doing anyhow. They help make the world go 'round, they improve skills, and they boost your sense of self-respect. But doing them still kinda sucks. It's all the more difficult to do those things when nobody appreciates it. Happily, blogging allows us to share our accomplishments and pat each other on the back.
What are some of the hard things you've done recently? What are some hard things you haven't gotten to yet, but need to do? Is there anything your online friends could do to make your hard things a little easier?
Here we are again - 7.55 in the morning and workmen all over the house. I mean, it's our own fault, we booked them to come and change our windows. The windows that came with the house are now over 20 years old, and on many of them the double glazing is compromised, and on several of them the wood surroundings are moldy and black mold is beginning to creep into our bedroom.
This was a situation that needed something doing about it even before we had the heat pump put in. But the heat pump people said that if we were going to be properly efficient with the heat pump we should make sure the windows were insulated to standard, which our rotten old windows were not. So that precipitated us to finally do something about them.
In theory therefore we are pleased that they are here and doing their thing. However, 'an Englishman's home is his castle' etc, and this always feels like an invasion. Plus there is a lot of banging going on, plaster is raining down on us, and we're afraid to go to the toilet in case they take the window away while we're in there.
They're here for four days. I wonder how we'll hold up. Our tempers got frayed very thin during the heat pump installation but we managed to hold on to them. I hope it will be like exercising a muscle - we'll do even better for the practice - and not like having Covid, where the damage mounts up.
Still, I am looking forward to windows you can see out of and window frames you can't put your hand through. Plus a new front door with stained glass panels. Worth waiting for? I hope so.
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Elizabeth Weir, Teyla Emmagan, Radek Zelenka Rating: Mature Length: 13,319 Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply Creator Links:Rachael Sabotini on AO3 Themes: Arranged marriage, AU - royalty, Diplomatic marriage, Politics, Mutual pining
Summary: "It is your duty to the empire to marry Rodney McKay."
Reccer's Notes: This is an interesting romantic romp set in a somewhat steampunk AU where John is married off by his cousin the empress Elizabeth, to Rodney, a leader in the neighbouring nation. John is part of treaty agreements to negotiate peace. Consummating his marriage proves difficult due to Rodney being a workaholic, anxious about never having had sex with a man before, and, that common marriage of convenience trope, as John can end the marriage after a year and a day if he chooses. There are obstacles and pining and inadequate communication, but eventually John makes a place for himself in Rodney's labs, proves his loyalty, and we get the happy ending. A fun read!
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Yes, AI is changing things in the corporate world, but let’s be clear: The humans are driving the actual change. McClatchy proves it.
McClatchy is a company that screams legacy. Nearly 170 years old, it has acquired a number of significant newspapers over the years, most notably in 2006, when it acquired the iconic Knight Ridder chain.
It is a company that has faced many challenges over its long history, notably filing for bankruptcy around the time of the COVID-19 outbreak. Even after merging with the former owner of the National Enquirer (really), it is barely holding on, and plus it has to figure out this whole AI thing.
One of my favorite metaphors is the idea of using a wrench in place of a hammer. It technically works, but it’s not the right purpose. AI tools are often the wrench of technology. And McClatchy just found its wrench.
According to The Wrap (paywall), the chain is pushing its journalists to use AI tech to repackage content in multiple directions. The technology was sold to the employees as Grammarly on steroids, and the hint seems to be that those who don’t accept this technology will be on thin ice career-wise.
“Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win,” McClatchy VP of Local News Eric Nelson said recently, per the publication. “Journalists who are defiant will fall behind. Bottom line: We need more stories and we need more inventory.”
McClatchy is effectively using Claude to take already-written stories, repackage the reporting, and reuse it in whatever ways are necessary. Put another way, the company is trying to scale up for the arms race that is SEO, social media, and Google Discover.
The problem is, that means that these journalists are now going to have their bylines on content that AI actively wrote and repackaged, while attempting to limit the say those journalists have in the matter. From the piece:
Kathy Vetter, McClatchy’s chief of staff for local news, said during the March 17 meeting that the company’s general policy was that reporters who cannot revoke the use of their bylines must keep them attached to CSA-produced stories. For those who can revoke their byline, she said, McClatchy will still use their work anyway.
“We have every right to use their work,” she said, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting. “It belongs to us, and if an editor wants to go … in there and repurpose a reporter’s content, they can put their name on it.”
Unions have gotten involved, limiting how those bylines get used, but not every paper has a union.
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When you use AI, one hand is always robotic. (photos via DepositPhotos.com)
An unwanted byline introduces murky questions
What’s fascinating about the Wrap piece is the divide between journalists and executives that it exposes. VPs and business staffers seem excited about the opportunities this opens up. Journalists are upset that their names are going to be associated with work they didn’t actually write.
I’m not a lawyer, but the decision to essentially force non-unionized employees to include their bylines on pieces they didn’t write feels like it could be legally risky to me. Let me pose a scenario: Let’s say one of these LLM stories gets something wrong, and a journalist gets strong pushback on social media about the story, maybe even death threats, even though they didn’t write it. Does that put the newspaper at risk of a lawsuit from their own employee? Given our current culture, that does not seem far-fetched.
There are other risks, too: Imagine a defamation lawsuit against a journalist based on an error AI introduced, for example. And for readers, it might introduce a misrepresentation risk that gets a regulator like the Federal Trade Commission to weigh in, potentially even restricting the use of AI in news content. The parallels to the Wild West of early adtech are hard to miss.
If it was the government forcing this situation, that byline might even be seen as “compelled speech,” though employers have a lot more leverage. Nonetheless, it points at a moral wrong of sorts, a breaking of norms, and one that feels avoidable. After all, journalists typically have the right to take their bylines off of pieces, even if McClatchy appears to be quietly eliminating that right.
By McClatchy attempting to make this shift, it highlights the weakening state of the power dynamic between the newsroom and its employees. And AI is the justification.
That robot hand is gonna hit its limit at some point.
A truism about AI: It’s often a scapegoat
Another headline that I stumbled upon around the same time I think points to a broader issue: Often, AI is just used as a reason to do something that employees would otherwise be uncomfortable with.
This week, Meta announced a plan to start tracking employees’ mouse and keyboard input, with the idea of building training data for its AI agents. See, it’s okay if we spy on you, because it’s for AI.
Let’s be clear, if Meta wanted to do this, it would just do it. It doesn’t need to attach AI as an excuse. But the addition makes it generally more palatable.
Likewise, if McClatchy wanted to have a bunch of inexperienced interns or non-journalists repackage content in haphazard, over-the-top ways, it could just do it. If it wanted to strip employees of the right to take their name off a story, it could just do it. But AI gives it enough of a sheen that it takes attention off the fact there’s nothing stopping them from just doing it because today is a day that ends in y.
And I think that’s ultimately the point I want to get at here. Employers are going to say a lot of things in the coming years and blame AI for doing those things. After all, it’s a great wrench for hammering in nails. But let’s not be silly: It’s also an excellent excuse to sweep a lot of other changes through, whether it’s layoffs or costing employees some of their taken-for-granted rights.
In Wizard of Oz parlance, don’t let the flashy visuals fool you: There’s a human behind the curtain, making the choices that could reshape your life and career.
Wrench-Free Links
So John Ternus is gonna be Apple’s new CEO. Good for him, it’s a well-deserved promotion and it could help make Apple a little less conservative with some of its decision-making. One thing hinted about in recent coverage was that the MacBook Neo was his baby, and its success proved to Tim Cook that he was leaving Apple in good hands. Sounds like a good first sign.
The new Beck single, “Ride Lonesome,” is such a weird tune. It sounds like he intentionally went back to “The Golden Age,” the leadoff track of his classic breakup album Sea Change, changed a chord or two, and shipped it off to the label. He’s lucky that his music is so good that he can John Fogerty himself.
Shout-out to the new pasta sauce microphone manufacturer, Prego.
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