Fogbound

THE FOG! It has come to the valley: a dense gray blanket laid across the belly of California.

THE FOG: which is sup­posed to be San Francisco’s trademark, but let me tell you, Fog City’s got nothing on this. In 1579, Drake missed the Golden Gate in the fog; in 2026, Sloan missed the Fresno Best Buy. Last weekend, I crept through a mall parking lot, searching des­per­ately for some contour. Its blue bulk emerged as sud­denly as a galleon in the gloom.

THE FOG: appears not to be going any­where. Every scene is cinematic; some­body should make a movie in the San Joaquin Valley. Sci-fi, of course.

THE FOG: clas­si­cally fear­some and foreboding, but here a sign of com­fort and normalcy. A twenty-five-year drought just ended in California, during which the winter fog was mostly absent. Now it’s back, and the chil­dren of the valley all sigh: “It’s like when I was a kid.”

THE FOG: as good a metaphor for our time as any­thing. Confusion, but/and also oppor­tu­nity. Peril, for sure. Formlessness — form waiting to be found, or made. The shock of the vast sil­hou­ette looming sud­denly ahead. Refreshment — the world all wet, all day, all night. Invis­ible in the gray: a deeper green.

I’m Robin Sloan, a fiction writer with wide-ranging interests, which I capture here in my newsletter. This is an archived edition, originally transmitted in January 2026. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

As usual, this newsletter has a few dis­tinct parts. Here’s what’s ahead:

• The shop: is restocked!

• Body talk: there’s def­i­nitely some­thing in the room

• Links and rec­om­mendations: urgent klaxons

Shopkeeping

All three of my zines from 2025 are now back in the online shop! I’m very proud of these; taken together, they build an argu­ment … almost a storyline. That wasn’t my con­scious plan — just my preoccupation, apparently. Some­times ideas become clear in that way.

In par­tic­ular, the Aspire Zine, with its essay and demo titled This Is How E-books Should Work, is a pre­view of things to come, a bit later this year.

I won’t reprint these par­tic­ular zines again, so this, right here, is your last chance to snag them. If you’re quick, you can obtain a full set, all sealed together in a neat envelope, eagerly mailed any­where in the world.

I’ve also added to the shop a small stock of So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid, the new edi­tion with my introduction, stamped as usual with my ex libris. Note: this is a VERY TINY BOOK. A very good one, too — and improb­ably rel­e­vant to the world of 2026 — but I don’t want anyone to be sur­prised!

Orders will ship next Monday.

THERE’S MORE! Fat Gold is cur­rently run­ning our annual Big Fat Gold Sale, the only time all year that we mark down our olive oil. You can stock up with a sub­stan­tial discount. Also in the shop: our Two-Ingredient Lip Balm, made from extra virgin olive oil and ultra-pure cap­pings wax and NOTHING ELSE.

Body talk

The slow lift

After a long season away, I’m back to my weekly weightlifting routine. I wrote about this a while ago, and if you missed my report at that time, I rec­om­mend taking a look: because this is easily the best thing I have ever done for my health. I mean that in the most expan­sive way pos­sible. It’s improved my strength, sure, but also my metabolism, my mood … I wish I’d started ten years ago.

Best of all, I can rec­om­mend this type of training to any­body of any/every age and fit­ness level, because it’s an approach that scales per­fectly with your abilities, only ever asking that you try your best … for a mere 25 min­utes!?

My gym is Live Oak Strength in Emeryville. The approach seems to be gaining ground around the world, and the key­word is usu­ally “high-intensity training” and/or “super slow strength training”.

The silver cord

I’m in my mid-forties. Here is some basic knowl­edge I wish I could deliver to my younger self, just cresting thirty:

Many years ago, I went through a grim period during which my stomach roiled all day. I was burpy and unsettled; falling asleep, my heart would pound. In tandem (it will not sur­prise you to hear) I felt anxious, my mind dip­ping eagerly into dark thoughts and dire sce­narios.

It was during this period that I had my first panic attack: strange stir­rings in my chest accom­pa­nied by the over­whelming urge to get up and go — lit­erally, I felt com­pelled to walk out of the house, and I did — an unhelpful trans­mu­ta­tion of some ancient instinct.

A couple more panic attacks, after that.

I went to sev­eral doc­tors to figure it out, but nobody had any diag­nosis more sophis­ti­cated than, man, your stomach is messed up. Along the way, naturally, I won­dered which came first: the roil in the stomach or the thoughts in the brain?

Eventually, I acknowl­edged it was pos­sible that the volume of coffee I con­sumed (prodigious) might be part of the problem. I cut way back, at the same time rec­ti­fying my diet — less alcohol, more vegetables — and the problem went away. Not overnight; it was a mul­ti­year cross­fade to normalcy.

I recall that volume of coffee … the hours across which it was spread … and I think: 😱😱😱

It’s not only about the caffeine, but also about that super­sat­u­rated state (and I think most coffee drinkers have reached it) in which your blood feels acidic.

These days, I have a max­imum of two cups, early in the morning. I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self that my body was changing — had changed — and would soon demand more sen­si­tive treatment. I’d say simply: be cautious. Also, add cream.

I told you I won­dered which came first, the stomach or the brain. The real answer is inevitably that it goes both ways, but/and I did discover, in myself, an over­riding causal flow. For me, dark thoughts and dire sce­narios swim up out of the gut. I had the sense, back in that grim period, of my vagus nerve dan­gling into a vat of acidic broth.

The silver cord: be careful with that thing, Robin!

The boiling shadow

Have you ever expe­ri­enced sleep paralysis? I gather it’s not uncommon; for me it occurs once or twice a year. I believe my case is fairly generic: I wake up in bed, but only partway. I can’t move my body (duh). I am uncer­tain if my eyes are actu­ally open. I see the room around me, but hazily — somehow a mix of dim sight and murky memory.

There is always the sense of some pres­ence looming just out of view. This was, of course, super­creepy the first few times it hap­pened, but with famil­iarity it has smoothed into some­thing I can inspect more neutrally. It’s inter­esting to have such a strong sen­sa­tion totally divorced from its “cause” … like a shadow without any­thing to cast it.

Sep­a­rately from the looming pres­ence, a dark corner will boil with faces and figures — a froth of pareidolia. Once, I peered through a broad window into the tan­gled branches of a tree, and the organic visual noise, the gnarl, absolutely buzzed with gargoyles, with snakes, with leering dragons and witches. That was a bit scary … but mostly inter­esting.

Some­times, I can even observe the cooldown: the boil settles, cor­ners become cor­ners, branches become branches. One of these cooldowns hap­pened just the other night, which is why I’m describing this now.

It’s obvious to me that, during these episodes, my dreaming brain is somehow still run­ning, set­ting the pot to boil. It’s just that the ingre­di­ents are streaming in from my real senses, rather than … wherever they usu­ally come from?

That’s all to say, for me, reg­u­larity has worn down fear and replaced it with fascination: because this weird in-between state is plainly the well­spring of a whole treasury of sym­bols and stories, going back to the very begin­ning of humans, and sleep, and shadows.

Links and recommendations

I’ve started a pop-up newsletter. It’s about AI; it will run for six edi­tions, then self-destruct; the first edi­tion is here. You are offi­cially invited to subscribe!

Yes, I started this mostly for the oppor­tu­nity to choose a bunch of fonts.

David Warsh’s long-run­ning newsletter has returned with this per­fect statement:

Eco­nomic Prin­ci­pals had planned to shut down for good today.

Times change. There is too much left to say.

So, here we go again, per­haps weekly, per­haps monthly.

It depends.

There’s nothing in eco­nomic jour­nalism quite like Eco­nomic Prin­ci­pals: deeply inter­ested in schol­arly dis­course but/and oper­ating with the verve and voice of a metro desk. David’s newsletter once had a bulldog edi­tion, a term now almost entirely lost to his­tory — cer­tainly, no bulldog edi­tions are pub­lished any­where — but still totally irresistible.

Here is a his­tory of the postcard, more recent than you realize. The Divided Back Period only begins in the 1900s!

Here is Laura van den Berg with some good advice about the “small, tac­tile steps” of cre­ative work:

This is the point where I feel a lot of writers become overwhelmed. I have a headful of ideas and a shit ton of voice memos: where do I even begin? And this is where I think it can be really helpful to start with small, tac­tile steps. For me that meant I started by tran­scribing the voice memos. I lis­tened to them and I typed them up. Simple. A task with a clear pur­pose and end point. Then I orga­nized the notes by sec­tion (this iter­a­tion of the novel was in three parts). I also made myself a little syl­labus of novels I thought would be good for me to read right around now.

It’s a subtle thing, but really powerful. The to-do item isn’t “work on your novel”; it’s “transcribe that notebook” or “read that essay” or … lit­erally any­thing, as long as it’s some­thing you can actu­ally DO.

Responding to my invo­ca­tion of the magi in December’s edi­tion, a sub­scriber sent a link to T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, which I’d never read. It’s a short poem, and captivating. Eliot explains:

I wrote it in three quar­ters of an hour after church time and before lunch one Sunday morning, with the assis­tance of half a bottle of Booth’s gin.

🚨🚨 NEW JEN­NIFER L. ROBERTS LEC­TURE KLAXON 🚨🚨

Here is Jennifer’s brand-new lecture, titled Launching from Print, about the wild inter­ac­tions between print­making and sci­ence and phys­i­cality and EVERY­THING in the Voy­ager I mission.

Early in the talk, you will encounter this sentence … 

But an argu­ment could be made that this etching is per­haps the most dis­tin­guished intaglio print in the entire uni­verse.

 … and we are off to the races! Just a bit later:

So, the aliens might be con­fused about the dif­fer­ence between what would we call a print and what we would call a musical record, or a circuit.

Come on!!

This is also a fine oppor­tu­nity to remind you about Jennifer’s thrilling multi-part lecture that frames the whole uni­verse of print­making.

You have really got to start watching lec­tures with less than a thou­sand views on YouTube. The algo­rithm won’t get you there. Instead, go searching. Use random terms of interest; add “lecture”; filter for videos over 20 min­utes long.

This, not the infi­nite Cheez-It box of ver­tical video, is the promise of the internet!!

🚨🚨 NEW M. JOHN HAR­RISON NOVEL KLAXON 🚨🚨

The End of Everything arrives later this year!

THE FOG! There’s a renewed feeling in Bay Area tech, pal­pable, aerosolized; and I sup­pose AI is at the core of it, but/and it goes deeper, because AI reopens all the foun­da­tional ques­tions about oper­ating sys­tems, applications, documents, the whole enchilada; and the feeling is: I can be the one to define the next era — or help define it — if I work hard enough, and fast enough, and if I do it now, now now now.

This rush coin­cides with a boom, of course; maybe also a mania; and though the eco­nomic and emo­tional parts overlap, they are dis­tinct, and I think it’s worth­while to iso­late and iden­tify the latter, because the emo­tional part is what puts a pro­grammer to bed still vibrating with the work underway. It really is a vibration — I’ve felt it mostly with books, but some­times with other projects, too — a feeling of the work packed into your mind, your cells almost; and of course there is also an ambient terror, the sense that you cannot lose even a single day, because you can just FEEL all the other minds out there chasing down the same idea.

It’s tempting to com­pare this com­munal rush to the late 1990s internet boom, but lately I’ve been reading about the early days of per­sonal computers, circa the 1970s and 1980s, and I think that young, sham­bling industry might pro­vide a stronger parallel.

The eco­nomic part of all this seems presently pretty stupid, but the emo­tional part is, I will insist, just good human stuff: the spirit of inven­tion abroad in the world.

The feeling of now-now-now is compounded, this time around, by the pos­si­bility of recruiting AI agents, whole yap­ping pla­toons of them; and if those agents are still limited, wonky, plodding, they can really do work, or cer­tain kinds of work. That’s a new thing on this planet.

Jack Clark, as ever attuned to the New Feelings, writes:

This pal­pable sense of poten­tial work — of having a lit­eral army of hyper-intelligent loyal col­leagues at my command — gnaws at me. It’s common now for me to feel like I’m being lazy when I’m with my family. Not because I feel as though I should be working, but rather that I feel guilty that I haven’t tasked some AI system to do work for me while I play with Magna-Tiles with my toddler.

Yet we should never forget that the product of work isn’t only the work — it’s also the worker. Doing the work changes you; the up-close expe­ri­ence trans­forms your capa­bil­i­ties and even your desires. Insights and ideas emerge from that interface, and I believe the agent mae­stros lose a lot — too much — when they take their big step back.

But I sup­pose this is just my temperament, which I’ve written about before. I don’t merely want things done; I want to do them.

Con­nect this to Laura van den Berg’s writing advice, up above. You could indeed ask an AI agent to “transcribe that notebook” or “read that essay” … and you wouldn’t have made any progress at all 😇

Of course, this urgent, all-bets-are-off feeling isn’t restricted to tech. The rush has come to art and media, too.

Sam Valenti begins to process some big ques­tions in his latest Herb Sun­days newsletter, writing in a reg­ister that’s somehow both sharp … 

Avoiding a cul­ture busi­ness that starts to resemble the con­tem­po­rary snack aisle, each package with a little pic­ture of the founder, some platitudes, and a litany of labels of non-this/that markers … 

 … and prophetic:

The issue with focusing on inputs is that the music and art that form the bedrock of my pas­sions come from cracked software, mis­used hardware, toys, hearsay, illegal samples, or elec­tronic recre­ations of real instruments, most of which are as dim and cold as a robot’s thumb. It is the artist who orga­nizes this immoral or amoral detritus into human shape. Many of the most dynamic images in my mem­o­ries come from the tip of an odious and brutal aerosol can. Artists didn’t create these objects and sys­tems, but they dig­nify our lives in spite of them, trans­fig­uring the banality and dis­gust of our age into some­thing worth living for.

And here is Sam on Jar­rett Fuller’s design podcast—a dream combo!

Always good to browse a dic­tio­nary of demons! This is not a link about AI! Or is it!

Here’s an old favorite, Van Morrison’s Almost Inde­pen­dence Day, in which a Moog drone plays foghorn. I love that sound so much; any other great foghorn songs out there?

I think Hagfish is terrific: “a small pub­lisher that reis­sues out-of-print, hard-to-find books and intro­duces over­looked con­tem­po­rary writers to the mainstream.” They have a new membership program that I was excited to join; don’t miss the paean to their name­sake on the about page.

Obvi­ously I love the logotype, not to men­tion the domain: hag dot fish!!

Here are the glyphs of David Jonathan Ross—a super­cool way to present and enjoy a body of work. I’ll bet this is fun (even surprising?) for David him­self to browse, too … 

I’m always, on some level, thinking about Iain M. Banks, the Mr. Olympia of imagination. Here is a wise con­sid­er­a­tion by Alan Jacobs of the Cul­ture that I’ve returned to many times over the years. Thanks to the growing capa­bil­i­ties of AI sys­tems — the dim but unmis­tak­able glim­mers of Mind-ness within them — it glows with fresh urgency.

On my most recent reread of Alan’s piece, a thought occurred: we shouldn’t take Banks to be less silly than he is. I say this with total admiration: Iain M. Banks is closer kin to to Dou­glas Adams than most readers realize, or want to admit. The Minds are all sort of goofy Muppets! You know it’s true!

Remember that it all comes down to the training data:

There would be no AlphaFold without $10 billion+ of public funding over 50 years, sup­porting PhD stu­dents painstak­ingly fig­uring out 100,000+ pro­tein struc­tures and adding them to the Pro­tein Data Bank.

Here is Josh Kramer on the utopian promise of the For­ever stamp:

There will be mail service, and this sticker will ensure the delivery of your letter.

Choosing art for my newsletter, I usu­ally go for the public domain deep cuts, but when you’re talking fog, you gotta splash a few Monets across the screen.

I’m still thinking about the For­ever stamp.

The basic offering of the internet is like­wise breathtaking. Friends of ours just moved to Hawaii, and we receive pic­tures: gorgeous, instant. They are on a beach; we, too, are on that beach! I think about the actual TCP packets flick­ering through a cable laid along the ocean floor, spraying out through some gnomic lump of 5G tied to a lamp­post in my neighborhood, caught and reassem­bled by my phone … it’s insane!! This tech­nology is mag­ical and nourishing, safe in the space that iMes­sage has carved out and defended.

It’s only with abstrac­tion that the trouble begins; only when con­nec­tions become imper­sonal and automatic; when the owners and oper­a­tors of internet sys­tems reject the respon­si­bility of standing behind the mate­rial they transmit and, especially, promote.

Me, I like a For­ever stamp … I like an iMes­sage thread … and I like a simple, straight­for­ward online shop. Mine is open, stocked with all the zines and books that remain here in the lab. Meanwhile, Fat Gold’s big sale rolls on!

From the fog,

Robin

January 2026