Keep going

Thanks for your enthu­si­astic response to Summer Work­shop 2026; the entire edi­tion sold out in a little over 24 hours! The Writer & the Witch has been dis­patched (and, in all except the most far-flung cases, received), while Mr. Penumbra’s All-Night Reading Room will ship in late August.

I’ll have news about future edi­tions at some point, too.

Penumbra Print Shop’s first series of Magic Post­card just sold out, as well, so I’m now pleased to offer Series 2: Enjoy Summer. That’s one of the designs up top; I’ll place the others throughout this newsletter. This print actu­ally has three colors, with a layer of flu­o­res­cent pink laid down over the red … hot sub­lim­inal glow.

What is Magic Post­card again?? Just a plain old post­card with a single trick up its sleeve: you can attach a short video for your recip­ient to play upon delivery. Both sides of the experiences, sending and receiving, are super­fast and simple — there’s no app, no account, no bullshit. In these new sta­tionery products, I aspire to the light­ness and it-just-works-ness of paper itself.

You can order a pack of three Magic Post­cards here.

I’m Robin Sloan, a writer, printer, and manufacturer. This is an archived edition of my newsletter, originally transmitted in July 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:

• Scene report: the most beau­tiful city in the world

• Dazzled by Disney: Walt, cooler than pre­vi­ously thought

• Links and rec­om­mendations: lots of ‘em

Scene report

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been spending more time in San Fran­cisco proper. I lived in the city for many years, of course, but the East Bay has been my home since 2012; SF is there­fore re-enchanted, con­sis­tently dazzling.

That’s even more true now, as the city has rebounded from its pan­demic funk. The omnipresent robo-taxis dust the streets with sci-fi futurity; most of my visits begin with a cir­cuit through the hanging gar­dens above the transbay bus terminal, which I dub Starfleet Park; and everywhere, the city feels lively. (This is all judged regionally: SF remains nar­coleptic by the stan­dard of, e.g., Tokyo and New York City. It is what it is!)

Here are a few recent highlights.

If you find your­self down in Dogpatch, as I did last weekend for the SF Art Book Fair, and you’re bound for BART or the Ferry Building … just walk! Crucially, hop over to 2nd Street rather than 3rd. The devel­op­ment of Mis­sion Bay included a great water­front promenade; it’s a fab­u­lous stroll, with tow­ering crystal slabs on one side, funky boat clubs on the other. Stop at the Ramp for a beer. Approaching the Giants, don’t miss the cute little park on the south side of the bas­cule bridge; last weekend, there was a marching band rehearsing on the grass?? Then, naturally, you’ll loop around the back­side of the ball­park and walk along the Embar­cadero. Stop for another beer at the Hi Dive.

Bound for a late-night movie screening in Laurel Heights, Kathryn and I con­structed an itin­erary along Cal­i­fornia Street. The cable car is, I insist, no tourist gim­mick but actu­ally the city’s best mode of transportation. We boarded the Cal­i­fornia line at its Embar­cadero terminus, then hopped off at the crest of Nob Hill and ducked into Arabella’s, a superfun new bar on the ground floor of the Hunt­ington Hotel. After that, it was a short walk to Col­lina, which I like even better than its sister restau­rant Seven Hills. We wanted to eat some­where cozy and neighborhood-y, and Col­lina was per­fect. I can’t wait to go back.

The movie was Groove, a San Fran­cisco classic from the year 2000, a dorky and pre­cise dis­til­la­tion of an era. I’ve watched this one prob­ably ten times, and I rec­om­mend it, par­tic­u­larly if you lived in the city any­time in the 1990s or 2000s. This was the Vogue Theater’s third annual summer screening—with luck, they’ll keep it going.

It’s not all cock­tails and cacio e pepe in San Fran­cisco.

At this moment, the city is plau­sibly the center of the world. I’m talking about AI, of course, including (but not lim­ited to) the pair of tril­lion (!) dollar (??) mod­el­mon­gers mean­dering towards IPO. The Bay Area tech scene feels like a super­sat­u­rated solution — of money, ambition, awe, dread. On the sunny side of the street, you find fizzy excitement, open-ended possibility; on the other side, end-times desperation, titanic musical chairs. These feel­ings are not unprece­dented in San Fran­cisco … but, this boom, it’s a weird one.

I also believe it is, in a new and dif­ferent way, quite reckless. So, a few week­ends ago, I joined a march to Stop the AI Race; here’s my report. My blog post includes a video clip of the marching band … that’s two marching bands in as many weeks!!

Dazzled by Disney

This has been my big read lately, in the back­yard and the bathtub. Neal Gabler’s Disney biography is an enor­mous book, dense with detail. I picked it up as a con­tin­u­a­tion of my investigation of design—I was inter­ested in under­standing Walt Disney as a designer: of characters, techniques, experiences.

The first third of the book chron­i­cles a period I knew nothing about, cov­ering Walt Disney’s first expo­sure to ani­ma­tion, his ini­tial projects and col­lab­o­ra­tions, and then the early days of the Walt Disney Company: the basi­cally instant global suc­cess of Mickey Mouse, the break­through of Snow White. Neal Gabler’s ren­dering of the working studio in this era is magnetic — cre­ative, convivial, ingenious. And, I’ll confess, I did not realize how cen­tral Walt Disney truly was. More than just a man­ager or a marketer, he had pro­found cre­ative gifts and sensibilities, not to men­tion a stub­born com­mit­ment to quality. He made beau­tiful things happen.

I’m now halfway through the book, and the story has flat­tened out, because Walt Disney has matured (or curdled) into the iconic figure we all know, and because he’s not so inti­mately involved in the ani­ma­tion anymore. The project of Dis­ney­land is just ahead; I know some people find that part fascinating, but it’s never moved me. I am, after all, inter­ested in documents: in this case, car­toons and movies.

If you’re inter­ested in any kind of cre­ative work, you will find the opening chap­ters of Neal Gabler’s book dazzling, and pos­sibly a bit melancholy: That sounds like so much fun …  It was a dif­ferent time — there was less com­pe­ti­tion for everybody’s atten­tion; every­thing was cheaper, including space to gather and work — but/and the allure still pierces through the decades.

Nearly a cen­tury ago now!

Links and recommendations

The newsletter Eng­lish Teacher Weekly is very good … even if you’re not an Eng­lish teacher. It’s a fun weekly cul­tural review and a wide-ranging link roundup — honestly, better than many general-interest newslet­ters and/or web­sites that pro­fess to be doing the same thing.

I loved the 25 unso­licited thoughts on Amer­ican literature.

In a just world, Eng­lish Teacher Weekly and Perfect Sentences would be the two giant media prop­er­ties of the newsletter era. Each exhibits more spirit in a single edi­tion than most pub­li­ca­tions muster in a year.

Here’s a clever project: aggre­gating pre­dic­tions to pro­duce a time­line of the future. Because the data is drawn from an open platform, the events pre­dicted range from geopo­lit­ical to trivial … the effect is weird and fun.

In the hubbub around The Odyssey, we are reminded, again, that Christo­pher Nolan doesn’t use email, has never owned a smart­phone. This is great … but/and it should be under­stood as a marker of great wealth rather than of cog­ni­tive fortitude, because, of course, somebody is get­ting all those emails on his behalf.

I thought of this again when I read this recent pro­file of Dave Eggers in the FT:

By contrast, one of the city’s most cel­e­brated writers is an enlight­ened Luddite. Off the grid, aboard a small hand­crafted boat, Eggers’ thoughts return to how to nur­ture cre­ativity in a world designed to flatten it. His method is to qui­etly resist. He doesn’t carry a smart­phone or have an email account.

Again, this is great — seri­ously, I love it — but, if it was me living this way, I hope I’d have the grace to say:

Yes, a col­league han­dles emailing duties for me. You know this, because you emailed with them to arrange our interview! I’m aware this is an incred­ible luxury — though I’m not bashful about taking advan­tage of it.

Here is Wendy MacNaughton’s moving appreciation of David Hockney. I was aware of Hockney’s fame, of course, but I haven’t looked at much of his work; this 1978 portrait is so fab­u­lous.

Wendy quotes the artist:

You don’t retire doing this. You do it till you fall over. It’s an inter­esting life. My mind is always occupied. That is what you want at my age. That’s what I’ve always wanted.

Maybe this isn’t what everybody wants … but it’s cer­tainly what I want, too.

There is no get­ting around the fact that this dude did a LOT of drawing. That’s the way to mastery: just do it. And keep doing it.

Claire L. Evans cites another master:

[M]y favorite story is about the ill-fated col­lab­o­ra­tion between Robert Irwin, James Tur­rell, and NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Laboratory. After years of ideation, Tur­rell walked away from the project in 1969 — because he decided he actu­ally didn’t need sci­ence to glimpse the sublime. “When we want to go into the universe, we can’t look at a rock,” he observed, derisively, in a pro­gram report. “We have to actu­ally go to the moon. We’re so literal.”

M. John Harrison’s new novel is longlisted for the Booker Prize, and WE LOVE TO SEE IT:

Our judges described it as “shimmering” and “oblique”, and as “a book not just about every­thing, but about now”.

The End of Every­thing arrives in the U.S. later this year.

Here is a very well-done video pro­file of a long-running art project, a hyper­chro­matic map of an imag­i­nary place. From my notes:

Art project like an extended waking dream. Humans!! GO BUDDY GO

Here is a ter­rific interview with host and pro­ducer Mike Rugnetta. Two of his answers struck me in particular. First:

What is your favorite gadget you’ve ever owned?

There are a few gad­gets that, upon first holding, I’ve thought “Oh! Every­thing is dif­ferent now!” The iPhone was one. The Switch was another. But each feels as though it’s chasing the path­breaking sig­nif­i­cance of what, to me, is the orig­inal gadget, the ur-device: The first Gameboy. So much of how we con­ceive of what’s cen­tral to the design of devices today (absent, of course, a con­nec­tion to the internet) feels like it was first pro­to­typed in the orig­inal Gameboy design. Plus, I still have mine, and it still works; my wife does too. I cannot say the same for our first couple of iPhones.

And then:

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

More than once, I’ve heard someone I respect say some ver­sion of “No one will take your life seri­ously for you.” Often, grand life advice assumes a kind of per­fect agency, which we don’t all have. Stu­dent loans, care­giving responsibilities, dif­fering levels of ability, or health mean that telling someone to “just get out there” or “drop every­thing, and make a bet on your­self” or what­ever is a total nonstarter. Some­times the most helpful thing is to be reminded that you do have agency within your own life, though it may be remote, forgotten, unused, underdeveloped.

I think of this advice as a reminder to look for the ways I have con­trol over my life and use them in ser­vice of my goals. For me, that is what “taking life seri­ously” means; it is some­thing no one else can do for me.

Here’s a great post on atten­tion from the essen­tial Mandy Brown:

There’s a pre­vailing nar­ra­tive that says we’ve lost our ability to pay atten­tion, that we need drugs or dis­ci­pline or sternly-worded warn­ings about the dan­gers of social media to deal with this growing public health threat. This nar­ra­tive com­pletely obscures the fact that anni­hi­lating atten­tion is a polit­ical project with clear ben­e­fits for the bil­lion­aire class: if we cannot attend the world, nei­ther can we inter­cede in it. We become pas­sive recip­ients of their worldbuilding, dis­en­fran­chised from our own respon­si­bility to make sense of — and there­fore to remake — the world around us.

I love the pod­cast In Our Time, a deep well of eru­dite exploration. Melvyn Bragg has recently retired … but there are enough old episodes to last you basi­cally forever.

I recently enjoyed this con­ver­sa­tion from 2016 about the 12th-cen­tury renaissance. Listening, I jotted this down:

Remember, we don’t get astronomy without astrology. It is the nec­es­sary precursor: a group of people who are deeply inter­ested in the world; who are paying atten­tion. You could ask your­self, what is the astrology of today?

Over on my tech blog, I cir­cu­lated this prompt/provocation from Rex Sorgatz:

Imagine you were the only person on earth with access to AI. No one else knew it existed.

What would you do with it? How much of an edge would that give you?

Here’s a mis­print of Magic Post­card, revealing the pink layer:

GAH why do the mis­takes always look so good … 

The type­face on Series 2 is Lautsprecher from David Jonathan Ross, part of his great Font of the Month Club. This was one of David’s “summertime revivals”, so it feels per­fect for these summer messages.

Thanks also to Stephen Coles at the Letterform Archive for pointing David in the direc­tion of this type­face.

Here’s Nicholas Carr on “the mail as the prac­tice of public reason”—you know I love it!

Here’s a video pro­file of a USPS art director!!!

Here’s the dark, goth-y pho­tog­raphy of Andreas Feinginer. I love it.

Here’s more—that gallery leans more architectural.

Samuel Arbesman writes about two museums with inter­esting polarities: Pittsburgh’s Large Scale Sys­tems Museum and Kansas City’s National Museum of Toys and Miniatures. I’d eagerly visit both!

Many years ago, a Sloan left Ireland, and ended up in the Amer­ican Midwest, and became my ancestor. Now, his descen­dant is quoted in Irish parliament—a line from this newsletter, in fact:

“Yet we should never forget that the product of work isn’t only the work — it’s also the worker.” That is a quote from the author Robin Sloan, which I think is very apt to tonight’s dis­cus­sion.

That dis­cus­sion con­cerns a motion to pro­tect the copy­right of Irish artists in the age of AI — very apropos!

The the­olo­gian and philoso­pher Car­mody Grey writes in the FT about her encoun­ters with AI companies. I thought this pas­sage was won­der­fully clear-eyed:

Despite the con­tinual deploy­ment of the lan­guage of emotion, biology and neurology, the dis­analo­gies between brains and com­puters are incom­pa­rably greater than the analogies. Human con­scious­ness is not inci­den­tally but con­sti­tu­tively organic. Living and engi­neered sys­tems are dif­ferent not in degree but in kind. Real intel­li­gence is inex­tri­cable from organic embodiment, from being a feeling organism passing through time and space shaped in every moment by its needs, fears, desires. Func­tional infor­ma­tion-processing taking place in an atem­poral math­e­mat­ical space is so utterly unlike the lived intel­li­gence of a human being that to call it “intel­li­gence” at all is to wholly fal­sify its nature. “Artificial intel­li­gence” is a highly con­se­quen­tial misnomer.

In my view, this clar­i­fi­ca­tion is in no way dismissive. You can be impressed, even awed, by the capa­bil­i­ties of AI sys­tems … and you can still insist on precision.

Here, I’ll spoil the ending:

I did not go to San Fran­cisco. This is a moment in which what we most need is the humane intel­li­gence of free human minds. It is a time for aca­d­e­mics and faith leaders to main­tain a fierce inde­pen­dence from the AI industry.

P.S. The FT con­tinues to be the Good Global Newspaper!

Here, Alex Imas calls for a Man­hattan Project for eco­nomic data:

I’ve been saying we need a Man­hattan Project for data. We don’t have data on con­sumer demand elasticities. We don’t know what they are. We’re not really tracking what jobs are get­ting cre­ated or destroyed. The O*NET database, with all of the tasks and dif­ferent jobs, has been rarely updated and is super low quality.

By “con­sumer demand elasticities”, Alex means the ques­tion of how much people are willing to pay for goods and ser­vices pro­duced by humans, vs. by AI; i.e., how much am I willing to pay for a pretty good robot accoun­tant vs. a pretty good human accoun­tant? What about for AI music vs. human music? And so on.

More and better eco­nomic data, gath­ered and syn­the­sized in some­thing closer to realtime, would be such a pow­erful public good — valuable for all kinds of busi­nesses in this weird moment, and for reg­u­la­tors and lawmakers … a light in the dark. An early warning signal!

Of course, we seem to be going in the oppo­site direc­tion … 

Reading the China Dream remains essen­tial. Rather than the­o­rize and spec­u­late about China, one can simply: go to the source! One can read the writing of real people in a real place. Real con­ver­sa­tions, real arguments. Plus, David Ownby’s preface to the trans­la­tion is, as always, illu­mi­nating on its own.

From the director of a short doc­u­men­tary on YouTube, here is an extremely 2020s disclaimer:

Since my spoken Eng­lish is still a work in progress, I want to ensure you still get accu­rate pro­nun­ci­a­tion and a smooth lis­tening experience. To achieve this, I used AI tech­nology to clone my own voice foot­print for this video’s narration. Meanwhile, I am working hard on my Eng­lish and hope to per­son­ally nar­rate these sto­ries for you in the near future. Thank you so much for your under­standing and con­tin­uous support!

For the record, I like the doc a lot: No Boss, No Money: The Raw Reality of China’s Gen-Z Freelancers.

Here is an interview with Julia Ringo and Naomi Huffman, founders of the great Hagfish. I loved this:

Julia: And there’s so much out there. There are things that are not on the internet. There are things that are not saved, but they can still be found. They can still be dis­covered, recovered. Maybe that’s a cer­tain sense of hope or opti­mism that comes from an ear­lier gen­er­a­tion or more pre-internet, pre­served from that time.

I liked R. W. Blickhan’s reflec­tion on reading Infi­nite Jest—this part in particular:

I wouldn’t call Infi­nite Jest a work of genius not made by human hands. When I think of a book that feels inhuman, in the sense of “how did a human even write this?”, I instead think of Watchmen, a long, convoluted, episodic nar­ra­tive in which all the random ele­ments turn out to be part of a single over­ar­ching grand plan, which is then the­mat­i­cally about grand plans and their ten­dency to go awry. I’m not sure I under­stand how Watchmen exists, though then again I’m not sure Alan Moore would say he under­stands either.

Also, linked from R. W.’s post, what an inter­esting idea: comparing the var­ious fore­words to Infi­nite Jest through the decades.

I love a post with the title A Metallurgist’s Doubts About Self-Replicating Probes!!

You might already have heard about the library of Her­cu­la­neum:

For almost 2,000 years, the car­bonized library of Her­cu­la­neum has kept a cruel bargain: its scrolls sur­vived the erup­tion of Mount Vesuvius, but only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it. Hun­dreds of rolls have there­fore remained sealed, their con­tents pre­served yet unreachable.

Just recently, an entire scroll was vir­tu­ally unwrapped and read—a major milestone. Starting with a CT scan, this was accom­plished using a suite of com­puter tools, including AI … but it fits neatly into the overall story of human ingenuity, in which we are constantly, hun­grily finding new ways to see.

Here’s a manifesto from type designer Ruther­ford Craze, whose Mass-Driver fonts are cen­tral to my print projects. This pas­sage is ter­rific, emphasis mine:

In ancient Rome, holding a flat brush in the right hand, a writer could make a cleaner line if they began and ended with a short hor­i­zontal flick; this was the origin of the serif. And their wrist was less com­fort­able rotating the brush to always face its direc­tion of travel, so they would have found it easier to hold at one angle, making strokes of dif­ferent widths — thicker when pulling it down­wards and to the right. Our let­ters still fea­ture this same stroke mod­u­la­tion today. Did the sign­writer know their idea would out­last their civilisation?

I actu­ally encoun­tered this blockquoted by L. M. Sacasas, and seeing Mass-Driver appear in his newsletter felt like one of those great super­hero team-up issues. Batman AND Green Lantern?!

Here’s a wild, aggres­sive new font called Ferro: “a con­jec­tural bridge between Renais­sance mas­ters and the early com­puter age.” Naturally, I love that black­letter ver­sion … 

Here is Ghost Font—note, that web page is a bit eye-searing — which reminds me of the work I did to elude/frustrate AI vision in The Secret Playbook.

Here is Sinistral Hand: cal­lig­raphy for lefties. Back when I was devel­oping the fic­tional script for Moonbound, working for the first time with cal­lig­raphy pens, I was sur­prised to dis­cover that stan­dard black­letter cannot be written with your left hand. Or, it can … but you have to write it sideways, or backwards.

Like Phaedra Charles, I remember the light tor­ment of being left-handed in grade school: the meat of my palm always stained with graphite.

In replies to my pre­vious edi­tion, sev­eral people used the same simple phrase: “Keep going.”

This strikes me as an ideal response — ideal encouragement.

“Keep going”, as in, you’re not there yet. And maybe you’ll never get there, wher­ever “there” is. But we can tell you’ve got your gaze set on some­thing; and we under­stand that nobody else is going to find out what’s down this road, if you don’t; and we want to know what’s down this road. So, keep going.

I think this is one of the most ener­gizing things you can say to someone, and I’ll now tuck it away for my own use. “I like it” is nice to hear. “Keep going” is FUEL.

From the lab,

Robin

July 2026