The Golden Sardine

Last week, I went into the city — North Beach — for a reading of long­shoremen poetry, part of Alexis Madrigal’s book tour. The venue was the Golden Sardine, a bar relatively young but somehow instantly iconic; it seems as if it’s been there as long as City Lights, across the street.

Alexis stood at the micro­phone (appealingly old-timey, clearly selected with care; no cruddy talent-show mics at the Sardine) and told us the whole his­tory of the shore, San Francisco’s mar­itime economy before the coming of the container. He told us about that, too.

Then he read a few poems, and, magically, invited audi­ence mem­bers to join the fun. Folks scootched up to the mic, clutching print­outs of poems totally new to them, and they delivered. Killed.

The poetry was excellent — what an era, what a scene — and the vibe was immaculate. Alexis held court with gen­erosity and erudition; no one knows more about the bay than him (the whole of it, in time and space) and if they do, they can’t charm a room like him. Alexis for mayor, basi­cally. Too bad he’s already got a better job.

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 April 2025. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

I’ve sensed a thaw lately in the cosmos of letters: an energy, an urgency. Maybe it’s because people fear this might be the last good season before the end of the world, so we’d better get it all out now. Maybe it’s just because it’s spring.

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

• Shop talk: a fresh print run

• Recent viewing: I spent all of 2024 rewatching Star Trek

• Spring reading: Abun­dance and the Anth

• Tariff talk: a spe­cial col­lec­tion of links

• Links and rec­om­mendations: AGI, type design, my favorite T-shirt

Lots to share in this edi­tion, as you can see. SAR­DINE MODE: GO!

Shop talk

Thank you for the over­whelming response to my new online shop!

My stock of zines sold out in a day, which wasn’t my inten­tion. I know it’s annoying, as a poten­tial customer, when offer­ings dis­ap­pear before you even see them; you shouldn’t have to hover in your inbox for a chance to snag a pub­li­ca­tion of interest. Gradually, I’ll figure out the level of demand here, and print accordingly.

To that end, I just printed a fresh bundle of my inau­gural zine, and those are now avail­able in the shop.

There’s another zine coming soon-ish, and, yes: signed books, too!

This shop rep­re­sents a new “line of busi­ness” for me — not as sub­stan­tial as the novels or the olive oil, but still very serious. (I explained my moti­va­tion in the pre­vious edi­tion.) Thank you for giving it such a warm and encour­aging launch!

Okay, again: this edi­tion is packed. I sup­pose I think it’s good prac­tice, after you’ve launched some­thing new, to spend some time praising and cir­cu­lating other work.

I do how­ever have a few links of my own to share here at the top.

First, an addi­tion to the Moon­bound mini-site: a fresh note on influ­ence, focused on Hayao Miyazaki … but not the Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli, exactly. This one is about the master at work, alone.

As a reminder, my inten­tion with the mini-site is to build, over time, a durable com­panion to the novel — a kind of dig­ital appendix.

I was delighted to join my friends Paul Cloutier and Kevin Farnham for the inau­gural episode of the podcast attached to their new agency. The con­ver­sa­tion is mostly about AI — you have been forewarned! It’s an hour long and we cover a lot of inter­esting ground.

Paul in par­tic­ular has had a huge influ­ence on me. Shortly after arriving in California, I met him at Cur­rent TV, where before long I mus­tered the courage to approach his desk and inquire: “Paul. You dress like you’re from the future. Where do you get your clothes?” He took me to the N.I.C.E. Collective sample sale the fol­lowing spring, where I bought a cool jacket that I wore for years.

New posts on my tech blog: five years of home-cooked apps, the cyber­netic CEO, and more. Go browse.

My captain

Nearly all of my streaming time in 2024 was devoted to a com­plete rewatch of Star Trek: Voy­ager. I saw a scat­tering of episodes during the show’s ini­tial run, 1995-2001, then watched the whole series for the first time in 2020-2021. Now, it’s part of my house­hold canon — we’ll be hap­pily rewatching every five years or so until we’re dead.

If your pro­file is sim­ilar to mine in 2020 — i.e. you’re familiar with the series but haven’t seen most of it — I will sug­gest that a com­plete viewing is a great idea. Here are a few reasons:

• Kathryn Janeway is the finest Star Trek captain; Kate Mul­grew makes her lead­er­ship bal­anced and irrefutable. Like most Star Trek, this cuts both ways, inspiring/melan­choly: inspiring because it’s inspiring, melan­choly because our real world faces such a deficit.

• The per­for­mances in gen­eral are terrific, with spe­cial praise reserved for Tim Russ as Tuvok and Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine, both of whom develop a deep, dry humor — subtle and delightful.

• As a writer, I find TV from this era ener­gizing and instructive, not because every line of dia­logue is dazzling, or because every episode is great, but because these people were trying to tell com­plete stories. When I com­pare Voy­ager to the modern streaming series, in both its pres­tige and slop variants, the modern stuff seems like a smear of content, arbi­trarily divided into episodes.

You can find plenty of Voy­ager viewing guides online, detailing which episodes to watch, which to skip. My guide is simple: just watch them all! Even the dull and dorky episodes are an improve­ment on most of the modern alter­na­tives; even the dullest and dorkiest glitter with opti­mism and curiosity.

I’ll con­fess that Voy­ager is the last of the Star Trek fran­chise to cap­ture my imag­i­na­tion. I’ve dipped into the 21st-century offer­ings — Enter­prise, Discovery, Strange New Worlds — but in all of them some­thing seems, to me, deeply amiss. (Picard was dismal.) Prob­ably I’m just old, with my Star Trek neu­rons hard-set. That’s okay. Voy­ager is my ship, and Janeway is my captain.

Spring reading

Here are some highlights:

The Book by Keith Houston is grade-A Robin bait, and it is per­haps for that reason that I didn’t read it imme­di­ately upon pub­li­ca­tion in 2016. Maybe I felt per­son­ally targeted? Turns out, it’s wonderful, full of fas­ci­nating details. Keith’s focus is sharply on the book as object — the mate­ri­ality of the thing.

I’ve read a lot about books and their his­tory — I mean: A LOT — yet there was so much here that was new to me. I loved learning about the Mono­type system for casting and set­ting type — a pow­erful sort of proto-computer, deeply ingenious.

Dis­cussing any book that’s been out for a few years, I often find myself saying some­thing like, “I’m sorry it took me this long to get to it,” but of course the whole point is that phys­ical books are patient. They will wait for the right moment; they will not dis­ap­pear off the bottom of your screen in the meantime. I had The Book on my shelf for almost ten years!

Even so: I’m sorry it took me this long. The Book is meta, charming, beautiful, and inspiring.

And, guess what: the paper­back arrives later this month! This is one to read in print — The Book refers to itself, “explains itself”, in a deli­cious way.

(Needless to say, it pairs well with Roland Allen’s The Notebook, dis­cussed pre­viously. I read them back to back and I am now over­flowing with Book Feeling.)

Abun­dance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is newly-pub­lished, already much-dis­cussed. I’m a long­time reader and fan of both authors; Ezra’s writing and thinking in par­tic­ular has been a big influ­ence on me and Moon­bound.

His devel­op­ment of a muscular, pro­duc­tive “liberalism that builds” is one of a few key strands that came together to form my vision of the Anth: an actually-suc­cessful human civ­i­liza­tion; a system of global coop­er­a­tion and coor­di­na­tion that could get things done.

That future civ­i­liza­tion is in Moon­bound’s past, but the glances and recol­lec­tions that I give to the novel’s nar­rator are some of my favorite parts of the book.

What are the other strands? Along­side Ezra, there’s some of the Cul­ture of Iain M. Banks; some of the com­pe­tence of the modern Fed­eral Reserve; some of the suc­cess of the Mon­dragon cooperative; and this one newsletter from Deb Chachra.

So: read Abun­dance along with me, and enjoy a pre­view of how an actually-suc­cessful human civ­i­liza­tion might func­tion, and how it might feel.

We can have it if we want it.

I am a wild-eyed fan of Ray Nayler’s The Moun­tain in the Sea. His new novel, Where the Axe Is Buried, was just pub­lished by MCD. I’m very proud to have Ray as a labelmate, and I can’t wait to dig in.

The arrival of this new novel also means it’s a per­fect time to read The Moun­tain in the Sea, because if (when) you dis­cover that you love it, you won’t have to wonder for a moment what to read next.

A few days ago I watched a freight train pass, one of the really long ones, many of its cars bearing the tell­tale blister of a refrig­er­a­tion unit, and it made me think again of Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite, the book that explains the his­tory and struc­ture of the cold chain: the global system of refrig­er­a­tion that makes the whole gro­cery store pos­sible. Nicky pur­sues this with great spelunking spirit — Frostbite reads more like an adven­ture than an explainer.

I believe the cold chain is the layer of infrastruc­ture most cen­tral to modern life in coun­tries like the U.S. There’s stiff com­pe­ti­tion for that designation — the internet! the power grid! — but really, take away the refrigerators, and we are living in a dif­ferent economy, eating dif­ferent food.

Tariff talk

Here’s Matthew C. Klein on how to think about the tar­iffs. His newsletter remains the single best pub­li­ca­tion that I cannot quite jus­tify paying for. It is priced for finance professionals, and my pure nerdy interest ALMOST gets me there … but not quite.

If you’re up for some meaty and useful analysis of global trade across the past few decades, read Matthew’s book with Michael Pettis, Trade Wars Are Class Wars. I pre­dict that most people not mar­i­nated in finance or eco­nomics will find this a chal­lenging read, but the chal­lenge can be inviting and ener­gizing — a hill to climb.

Here’s how a small importer is thinking about this new world. Lisa Cheng Smith is the founder of Yun Hai, the fab­u­lous online shop that imports my favorite soy sauce, so her response is rooted in the real­i­ties of busi­ness and work.

In her item­iza­tion of what comes next, I liked this note … 

Divesting from tech and adver­tising plat­forms as much as pos­sible. Affil­iate marketing, per­for­mance marketing, pay­ment gateways, social media man­age­ment plat­forms, and col­lab­o­ra­tive cloud-based tools all cost money and add up to a big per­centage of the pie. I’m looking at how working man­u­ally and in a more lo-fi way could be just as effec­tive while saving cost. We’ve been sold the Amer­ican techno­pre­neur suc­cess story, enabled by big data and scaling tech, but we aren’t even capable of uti­lizing it all. Our cus­tomers already give us every­thing we need when they sign up for this newsletter and express interest in our store — we just need to dia­logue with you all. Even out­side of threat­ened tar­iffs, I’m ready to move in this direction. It better reflects my values.

 … because it made me feel good about skip­ping all of that stuff for Fat Gold in the first place 😉

Here’s a note on tar­iffs and mon­e­tary policy from Neel Kashkari, pres­i­dent of the Min­neapolis Fed, who is a top-ten technocrat. If your gov­ern­ment was all Neel Kashkaris, you’d be set.

Tell you what: if I was Europe, and I was feeling feisty, I’d imagine some new kind of “dig­ital tariff” and slap it on all the big tech plat­forms.

The odd and antique thing about tar­iffs is that they only apply to phys­ical goods, even as more and more of the economy has become intangible. For the U.S., this is very convenient. What do we export? Software, light as air.

How do you col­lect a tariff on a dig­ital ser­vice? Who pays? I have no idea! Sounds like a VERY fun assign­ment for some wonks in Brussels.

Remember: no tar­iffs on zines 😇

Links and recommendations

Here is Jas­mine Sun on AGI:

Finally, I con­clude that AGI is more a world­view than tech­nology — nobody knows when we’ll get there, or where “there” is — and we may be better off focusing on the AIs we build along the way.

“AGI is more a world­view than a tech­nology”! Med­i­tate on that one — a puckish and useful reframing. Jas­mine brings a ton of con­text together in this piece; I think even long­time AI heads will find some new threads here.

She expands a bit on her conclusion:

However, I don’t think that we’ll know AGI when we see it. Instead, it’ll play out more like this: Some com­pany will declare that it reached AGI first, maybe an upstart trying to make a splash or raise a round, maybe after acing a slate of benchmarks. We’ll all argue on Twitter over whether it counts, and the argu­ment will be fiercer if the model is internal-only and/or not open-weights. Reg­u­la­tors will take a second look. Enter­prise soft­ware will be sold. All the while, the out­side world will look basi­cally the same as the day before.

And there’s this sharp line:

AI dis­covered wholly new pro­teins before it could count the ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’, which makes it nei­ther vapor­ware nor a demigod but a secret third thing.

What a voice!

An aside: it’s a shame that AI is such an ugly acronym, both in terms of phonetics — eyy-aii, gross — and letterforms. AGI gives us a little more struc­ture, in the mouth and on the page.

In a recent edi­tion of her increas­ingly indis­pens­able newsletter on design, tech, and cre­ative work, Carly Ayres writes … 

If March taught us anything, it’s that cul­tural velocity is out­pacing our ability to process it. We’re not iterating — we’re accelerating. No brakes.

 … and I think I have to disagree. Isn’t it pre­cisely the oppo­site? A cer­tain strand of tech­nology might be accelerating, but cul­ture is going nowhere in par­tic­ular — a decaying orbit around a decades-old gravity well; cycling and recycling; pas­tiche and déjà vu; playlist set to loop.

Carly’s canny documentation of a recent wave of AI-generated images in the style of Studio Ghibli makes this case clearly. Tech­nical prowess meets cul­tural stasis.

Here is W. David Marx on the age of the double sellout.

Here is Navneet Alang, reminding us what a graceful writer he is, reflecting on some lin­gering lessons of the pandemic.

Anth vibes:

Ongoing declines in solar PV module costs are the single most extreme value gen­er­a­tion oppor­tu­nity that has ever occurred to humans, and busi­ness models that exploit this steady pro­gres­sion need to find some way to get the unit eco­nomics the right way up at the beginning. It turns out that cap­ital has a finite appetite for bil­lion dollar experiments.

THE RAMIELUST IS BACK! This is my favorite T-shirt, by a wide margin. The ramie fabric, cousin to linen, feels great. (For my part, I think Outlier’s cli­mate pre­scrip­tion for this shirt is too narrow: I wear mine in every season.) (I wear the Cut One, because I am old.)

Here is Quentin Blake, iconic illus­trator of Roald Dahl books and more: How I Draw. Yes, please! That’s via Diana Kim­ball Berlin.

I’ve been making my way slowly but hap­pily through the John May­nard Keynes biography I men­tioned a while ago. His mind was just BIG in so many ways — generous and ener­getic. Jupiterian.

A few stray thoughts:

• Reading about the ups and downs of the 1920s and 1930s, infla­tion and defla­tion start to seem almost like human mania and depression. There’s a theory that both are linked to an ener­getic bias in the brain, i.e., when neu­rons are too quick to fire, you get mania, and when they are too reluctant, you get depression. Infla­tion and defla­tion work the same way, tilting a whole economy away from an appropriate, sus­tain­able level of production.

• Keynes’s vision for the future, not un-Star Trek: “The love of money as a possession — as dis­tin­guished from the love of money as a means to the enjoy­ments and real­i­ties of life — will be rec­og­nized for what it is, a some­what dis­gusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propen­si­ties which one hands over with a shudder to the spe­cialists in mental disease.”

• Keynes: “The polit­ical problem of mankind is to com­bine three things: eco­nomic efficiency, social justice, and indi­vidual liberty.”

• Keynes: “The republic of my imag­i­na­tion lies on the extreme left of celes­tial space.”

A report from the city of the robo-taxi: Waymo con­tinues to be really great. This is a dif­fi­cult thing to get right, and they have gotten it: exactly right. I mean, talk about a lot of moving parts. Impres­sive as hell.

I’d like to make the case that Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is one of the three or four jour­nal­ists most per­fectly suited to this pre­cise moment.

Her eye is just so good: locked onto the seams of the global system, pur­suing deep ques­tions of who gets to be a cit­izen of where, and why; of what cit­izenship even means (or will mean) in the 21st century.

Fas­cism is, in my estimation, a direct linear func­tion of us vs. them.

The cos­mopolitan view is its ulti­mate antidote, as it asks, with ice-cold innocence: us who? Them who?

I loved Joel Dueck’s recent newsletter about “a cer­tain cat­e­gory of lit­er­a­ture which has no name”: the web-native work posted on a rudi­men­tary HTML page now crum­bling before our eyes.

One of Joel’s examples — the one that really struck me — is this poem by John M. Ford posted (so casually!) as a com­ment on the blog Elec­tro­lite in the year 2003. Joel has now given the poem a fresh presentation, spare and solid. It’s lovely.

Bravo to John M. Ford (who died in 2006) and bravo to Joel.

Here’s some magnetic core memory from the IBM System/360 mainframe, as much tex­tile as hardware.

Wow: rumors of a Cul­ture adap­ta­tion at Amazon.

The notional writer Charles Yu is a superstar, but/and, even so — oof! Risky busi­ness! (Longtime readers know I would not begin with Con­sider Phlebas. In fact I would decline to adapt Con­sider Phlebas at all.)

I have zero interest in marathons: run­ning them, hearing about them. Leave it to Matt Webb to lure me in:

And what an expe­ri­ence to expe­ri­ence my body as pure system, this kind of meta­bolic system which is just astounding and fas­ci­nating, and has so many nuances and edges; I’m learning a new landscape, a geography, this sur­face of a meta­bolic man­i­fold of sur­pris­ingly few para­me­ters really.

Here is Adam Roberts on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beren and Lúthien. I cannot follow Tolkien into all of his expanded lore … but I can, apparently, follow Adam Roberts there! What a mind. What a delight.

Here is Universal Thirst, a type foundry spe­cializing in Indic and Latin scripts, e.g. Tiffin, with matched Devana­gari and Latin letterforms. I love stuff like this — talk about cos­mopolitan.

Here is a talk by Antonio Cave­doni and Chris Wilson on the design of a bespoke Baskerville for the ultra-emeritus design firm LoveFrom. This is deeply nerdy type stuff; it’s also worth watching just to see the intro­duc­tion by Jony Ive who, for all his significance, we don’t hear from that often.

Watching the talk will lead you to this book, which helps sharpen an under­standing of type punches as tiny 3D sculptures. Absolutely fab­u­lous.

Here’s Brandon Bovia on the truly painstaking art of manga let­tering translation. I have read a lot of manga and, I’ll con­fess, never pre­viously thought much about the work involved here. The side-by-side com­par­isons are absolutely wild.

Here’s a win­ning inter­view with type designer Rachel Kriebel about her first font:

So the backstory, it was when the when the Soviet Union was around, the West wasn’t sending them metal type­faces or, you know, type faces for print. And so then they were seeing all of this stuff come in from the west, and they saw Futura, and they were like, “that is the coolest font ever.” And in my opinion, yeah, Futura is the best geo­metric sans serif; it’s the coolest one. Maybe ITC, uh God, what’s it called? Avant Garde. So they boot­legged their own so that they could use it for stuff. They used it for print, and they used it for poster designs, and it’s charming.

This looks great: a book about type in film, coming in April from the new pub­lishing arm of Mubi, the streaming ser­vice.

I was a sub­scriber for sev­eral years, early on, when Mubi’s cat­alog was pre­cisely thirty films, and every day, the oldest expired as a new one was added. While I under­stand the need to move beyond such a restric­tive model — to become just a tiny bit more “normal”—I still miss that version. The modern approach that Mubi has now adopted (“here is a bucket of stuff”) afflicts me with the same paral­ysis as all the rest of the streaming ser­vices — and so I left it behind.

I remain a fan of what they’re doing, and a fan of the targeted, the­matic streaming ser­vice model in gen­eral: Shudder, Retro Crush, etc.

Here’s a four-panel comic from Marc Wei­den­baum and Hannes Pasqualini. Here’s another one. I love these! What a cool new stream of work.

Here is a meaty essay from a synth plugin designer about THE VERY CON­CEPT OF THE PRESET!

Charlotte Shane:

I think jail­breaking from the middle dis­tance is trans­for­ma­tive and liberatory, and I don’t think it hap­pens auto­mat­i­cally by putting your phone away. I think you have to make a conscious, curious effort and find the right teachers. The tools that worked best for me were his­tory and religion, which are of course tightly entwined.

“Jailbreaking from the middle dis­tance”—what a phrase.

I’d like to cross-reference this notion with my own warning about orthographic media. It also rhymes with temporal bandwidth, Alan Jacobs’s mem­o­rable invo­ca­tion of Thomas Pynchon, who wrote:

“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now … The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the nar­rower your sense of Now, the more ten­uous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remem­bering what you were doing five min­utes ago.

I’m happy to know the term calefactory: the one warm room in oth­er­wise frigid monasteries.

Here’s a view from the Blue Ghost lander: a lunar eclipse expe­ri­enced from the other direction, the sur­face of the moon … 

 … so it’s Earth eclipsing the sun.

Again: that’s us — me writing this newsletter, you reading it — there on that rock, floating in space.

You just can’t remember it often enough.

A note for Bay Area readers: Clay and Steel is phenomenal. Celeste Flores runs a forge in Richmond, and her classes are per­fect: small and serious, still totally affordable. I had a great time, and I’m delighted with the copper and bronze bracelets I made. I rec­om­mend her highly to anyone with any curiosity about blacksmithing.

Here is a watch, beautiful and insane. I wish I could choose like, four of these com­pli­ca­tions for a sim­pler (though still medium-insane) entry-level version … 

What are we doing with all these links, anyway? We’re weaving the web tighter. Making intro­duc­tions. Main­taining provenance. It’s meaningful, espe­cially now, as AI sys­tems work in the oppo­site direction: dena­turing the links, melting down the chains of connection.

Or maybe, like Alan Jacobs, we are building and main­taining an alter­na­tive cul­ture, for the “fraction of one per­cent of us will be willing and able to choose some­thing other and better”.

I appre­ci­ated this post of Alan’s, in which he expresses weari­ness at the end­less diag­nosis and re-diag­nosis of the toxic chal­lenge of the internet and, espe­cially, the internet-connected phone. Here is his assessment:

I believe we keep on re-diagnosing, and describing the same diag­nosis in slightly dif­ferent terms, because we don’t know what to do. Some people, of course, know what to do: they opt out. And that’s why we don’t hear from them: we remain in the places that they’ve opted out of. But I con­tinue to believe that it’s pos­sible to use the internet healthily, without unplug­ging altogether. I’m trying to prac­tice that healthy use, and do so right here where my suc­cesses and fail­ures can be seen and learned from.

A note to myself, recorded on March 29:

A book that is the equiv­a­lent of cool breeze beneath warm sun. Somehow both hot and cold. Ner­vous system dancing. Delicious. Pos­sibly nothing better. What a goal.

Another note, recorded in mid-February:

Two things, at minimum, that wealth cannot save you from:

1. death
2. being a piece of shit

Isn’t that sort of wonderful? And amazing? You really cannot buy every­thing. You cannot buy being an inter­esting, sensitive, char­i­table person.

The art in this edi­tion is all by Christo­pher Richard Wynne Nevinson, new to me. He was a painter, etcher, and lith­o­g­ra­pher whose career brack­eted World War I. (By the way: it’s only after reading The Book, dis­cussed above, that I think I might finally under­stand what lith­o­g­raphy even is.) He was prolific! Here are some col­lec­tions of his work: at the British Museum, at the Tate, at Artvee—just for starters.

More to come!

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in early May.

April 2025