If a book about the history of chaptering literary works wasn’t enough to draw me in, this write-up in the Sydney Review of Books sold me:

One of the basic structures of the book, the chapter is a ‘box of time’ that shapes the reader’s experience of temporality. As such, changes in chaptering present one way of exploring changes in the experience of time in literary history. How did time feel in late antiquity, or in fifteenth-century Burgundy, or to a former slave at the end of the eighteenth century? Studying the chapter might also tell us something about our experience of time now, in ‘the present’ – whatever that is – and the historical distance between our time and that of times past.

Borrowing from the library now.

 

I don’t write a lot of essays, but I was so so pleased to write this one. I volunteered multiple times a week with a nonprofit that sends books to incarcerated readers across the country for more than five years. It changed who I was as a reader, writer, and person. Reading hundreds and then thousands of letters from people on the inside asking for the books that they hoped would entertain, distract, or educate themselves expanded my world in ways that I am still discovering.

Plus, writing this made me realize I have stared at Colin Powell’s butt more than all but maybe three or four people. I promise there is a reasonable explanation for this, but you will have to read on for it: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/reading-behind-bars-and-beyond-barriers/

Anthropic, which built Claude, the LLM I find most useful, tests each of its models on Pokemon Red (I was a Blue player myself). Earlier models weren’t able to do much, but the latest version, using “extended thinking” (aka reasoning, the trend all the AI providers are after), is on a roll.

Anthropic Pokemon Red

This is more meaningful to me than most benchmarks, and I’m only half-joking. I remember Misty’s badge being hard to get!

You can watch the AI play here: https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon.

Just about had to pull my car over listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast when Brandon Sanderson said this in response to a question about when the story isn’t working:

One important mindset that is kind of a ground rule is remembering, as a writer, that the piece of art is not necessarily just the story you’re creating, that you are the piece of art. The time you spend writing is improving you as a writer and that is the most important thing. The book is almost a side product, not really, but it almost is to the fact that you are the art and if you know that, it helps a lot.

::Mind blown emoji:: The whole 2+ hours is worth a listen.


My other story for WSJ was on how foundation models are being fed satellite data and how that means a lot more of us could have access to cutting edge tools that let use explore Earth and track things we care about.

Foundation models is the tech under tools like ChatGPT, but can be put to use doing all sorts of things, like spotting illegal airstrips with satellite data in my story or study DNA sequencing, covered in this Quanta story. Let’s try out AI to save the planet or understand new things about ourselves and not just use it to create ad copy, alright?

Here’s a gift link to my Earth foundation model story.

Comments on my stories are usually dumb, but if people take the time to email, they are almost always thoughtful, and sometimes quite lovely. Here is one I quite liked from my robotics in the apple orchard story:

Jackie, greatly enjoyed  your Apple Orchard article
My Dad was born and raised on my grandfather’s 400-acre apple farm in Kinderhook, NY.
I can well recall his stories of the farm, to include tree planting, picking, pruning, storing, packing and shipping apples.
It was all handwork, with the workdays being long and physically demanding.
When Dad shared stories of the farm it was always started with the family – two brothers and sisters, in addition to my grandparents and the effort by all that went into the growing and selling of apples.
My grandfather graduated from Princeton University in 1909 and with the help of his father acquired the farm in 1912.  He sold the farm in 1955 and lived for about another 30 years.
If my Dad and Grandfather – also my Grandmother, who born and lived in Kinderhook her entire life – could read your article each would say “sounds great – but there is much to a growing a good apple.”
Again, enjoyed your article – makes me feel good and look back on the farm, my grandparents and for sure my Dad.
Thank you.

I wrote about how robots are increasingly used in apple orchards for Wall Street Journal. Every piece of tree fruit is picked by hands (well, except for a few in orchards where researchers test these robots out). It’s grueling work even though orchards have been engineered to make picking as simple as possible—the trees are more like grape vines at this point, only about twelve feet tall and grown to keep apples on a two-dimension plane. Standardizing the trees also lets robots, which really struggle in outdoor settings, pick about fifty percent of the fruit right now. So despite the really out of pocket comments on this story, human workers are still needed and not going anywhere. (Gift link)

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Most concrete in the United States is prepared to order at batch plants—souped-up materials depots where the ingredients are combined, dosed out from hoppers into special mixer trucks, and then driven to job sites. Because concrete grows too stiff to work after about 90 minutes, concrete production is highly local. There are more ready-mix batch plants in the United States than there are Burger King restaurants.

This makes it incredibly hard to decarbonize concrete, one of the biggest greenhouse emitters. But researchers are trying anyway! Great story on IEEE about greening concrete.