The Long Rush

Thanks for your warm recep­tion of the new zines. They’re now marked “sold out” in the online shop, although I have a small number remaining — it’s just that the season has changed, and with it my location, so I don’t have access to my ship­ping setup. I’ll release those last zines when I return in December, along with some more books.

The olive har­vest looms! For the next eight weeks, the work will be intense and all-consuming. You can follow along on Fat Gold’s Instagram account to see the fresh olive oil emerge, green so bright it’s nearly neon.

I’ll cir­cu­late my annual gift guide in mid-November. I’ve been keeping notes all year; this is going to be a good one.

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 October 2025. 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:

• Recent reading: the focus of this dis­patch, because I have lately been reading some HITS!

• Robin’s thought: the next device is no device

• Links and recommendations: otaku, moths, pow­erful 1990s vibes

Recent reading

So Many Books

Paul Dry Books has just pub­lished a new edi­tion of Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books, with a few updates. This slim volume now boasts

• a great new cover,
• fresh interior illustrations, and
• a new introduction … written by me!

I took this assign­ment very seriously: it’s the second intro­duc­tion of my career, fol­lowing the new edi­tion of The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. This is turning into a pretty good dinner party, or maybe a ter­rific night at the bar.

I want to pull out and pre­view one part of my intro­duc­tion:

Moreover, the first time I read So Many Books, I felt — and I still feel this today — that it was a book about the internet, one that explains and reveals impor­tant things about the struc­ture and feeling of dig­ital systems. How can that be? What can Zaid tell us, the savvy denizens of the 2020s and beyond, when he is trapped in a time when, as he explains, “downloading a the­saurus from the Internet can take hours”?

Here is the secret: this slim volume is above all a book about vastness; about oceanic tides of lan­guage, about the feel­ings they pro­duce, for writer and reader alike. About how words work in the marketplace, and how they fail to work, too. About books and the internet and cul­ture itself as

a kind of Babelian poem of cre­ation con­sisting of everyone saying “Good morning” to one another. Maybe that is what life is: We stand up and say hello and then disappear.

The defining fea­ture of our era — at least its mediascape — is this oceanic tide of lan­guage, which surges now from books and e-books to social media plat­forms and e-mail newsletters, and also to the output of elo­quent lan­guage machines. (I find myself won­dering if Gabriel Zaid has, in his tenth decade, inter­ro­gated an AI lan­guage model. What does he make of these machines that, in their gru­eling education, are forced to process not just So Many Books but, prac­ti­cally speaking, All The Books?)

Ours is an age of logorrhea, and its expan­sion and accel­er­a­tion has only made Zaid’s tight, light mes­sage more of a tonic.

There you have it. This book is exem­plary in so many ways — its argu­ment and its style; its new and improved packaging; and, of course, its trans­la­tion. (We get into that in the intro­duc­tion.)

You can order a copy directly from Paul Dry Books, the absolute model of a small, opin­ion­ated publisher. Your busi­ness will be mean­ingful to them.

Apple in China

Apple in China was thrilling — one of the best non­fic­tion books I’ve read in years. If you have an iPhone in your pocket or a Mac on your desk, you should read this book. I don’t mean that in a scolding way, and nei­ther does Patrick McGee; rather just, if you read this book, you’ll under­stand the rich­ness of the system you’re involved in.

Here are some of my notes:

• If Patrick McGee has one great move, it’s to take some­thing often treated as abstract — “Apple”, “China”, “man­u­fac­turing”—and make it phys­i­cally real. “Apple” does nothing in this book; instead, we see real people working in real places. Like, in spe­cific rooms. We behold the avalanche of elec­tronic components: where are they going to PUT all that stuff? We see human hands at work.

• There’s the per­sis­tent paradox: every one of these incred­ible Apple devices, each appar­ently seam­less lump of futurity, is assem­bled by human hands. That’s the insight at the root of Apple’s 21st-century suc­cess: true future-lumps can only be man­u­fac­tured this way. It is assembly by hand that makes aston­ishing design pos­sible.

• This book is the story of the long-term renter who repaints the walls and installs new tile in the bathroom. Apple has stuffed fac­to­ries in China full of gear costing billions, and stuffed them full of Apple engineers, too — coaches, taskmasters — yet they have never owned a single one of those fac­to­ries, and they have never employed any of their workers.

• The super­high turnover rate at Fox­conn “rhymes” with the super­high turnover rate at Ford plants back in the Model T days. The jobs are ini­tially attrac­tive because they get you out of wher­ever you were — Central China, Southern Europe — but then reality sets in, along with monotony. Workers stay for a season, maybe.

• It seems like there ought to be a better way to do it, doesn’t there?

• (You can find a ter­rific potted his­tory of the turn-of-the-century Ford system in the opening chap­ters of The Machine That Changed the World, pub­lished in 1990, oth­er­wise about lean pro­duc­tion at Toyota. Read it along­side Apple in China to really bake your noodle.)

• The Apple heads know this already: the com­pany’s secret sauce isn’t design, per se, but mate­rials and man­u­fac­turing process, par­tic­u­larly the gonzo appli­ca­tion of rar­i­fied tech­nique at eye-watering scale. Reading this book, it seems cor­rect to see Apple pri­marily as a mate­rials sci­ence com­pany.

• It’s good to remember that desktop pub­lishing was the Mac’s first killer app. The actu­ally-suc­cessful product wasn’t a Mac; it was a Mac and a LaserWriter.

• Likewise, Apple’s begrudging release of iTunes for Win­dows was per­haps THE turning point in the com­pany’s whole his­tory. The first two iPod models were not suc­cessful! Because they were sold only to Mac users!! iTunes for Win­dows gets us a hit iPod, and a hit iPod gets us the iPhone … and we’re off to the races. Strange cas­cades through time.

• The first demo of mul­ti­touch was a huge rig with a pro­jector on the ceiling; this would shrink down into a phone screen within just a few years. Things happen fast!

Most of all, reading this book was a gen­uine threat to one of my core beliefs, which is that you can be hugely inno­v­a­tive and suc­cessful without being an asshole. I mean, I still believe that. But here is the spec­tacle of Apple in China, and these Apple people are: huge assholes. Famously. Proudly!

I don’t mean to sug­gest that Apple’s part­ners in China, the fac­tory owners and/or the fac­tory workers, were or are victims. That’s cer­tainly not the pic­ture Patrick McGee paints. Those part­ners weren’t and aren’t naive; the opposite: they are wily, hungry, farsighted. One chapter tells the story of the com­pany that wins the Air­Pods con­tract by agreeing to pro­duce them at cost, and by the end of the chapter, it makes per­fect sense. Okay, maybe not per­fect sense … but a kind of sense.

Anyone inter­ested in tech­nology, in the global economy, in the 21st century, should read this book. It’s a tremen­dous achievement, and I can’t wait to see where Patrick McGee turns his gaze next.

The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons

A wild find at a comic book store recently: The Making of Orig­inal Dun­geons & Dragons, a doorstop volume, devoted almost entirely to repro­duc­tions of early ver­sions of the game, from type­written drafts to pub­lished booklets. This isn’t just a breezy review, but a pre­sen­ta­tion of deep archival mate­rial. I pored over the book for hours, enjoying the edits in pencil, the 1970s paste-up design. I read out of order, flipped back and forth, skimmed and scanned, jotted notes on my phone.

It occurred to me, deep into a really won­derful experience, of reading and thinking and feeling and pondering, that if Wiz­ards of the Coast had pub­lished exactly the same mate­rial online — and you can imagine this easily: you can imagine the web­site, as slick as one of the Google Arts & Culture sites, or the dig­ital book from the Steve Jobs Archive — I would have clicked over; said, “wow, cool”; then moved on to the next thing.

Dig­ital reading just cannot sup­port engage­ment of this kind — call it “spending time with the mate­rial”—at least not for me. I know I am not alone.

It comes down to speed: show me the sim­u­lated, high-res book with pages I can handle and access exactly as fast as the real phys­ical book in my real phys­ical lap, and we can begin the con­ver­sa­tion. The AAA video game players will want to say “easy, no problem”, but a moment’s reflection — how do I manip­u­late a book? What kind of phys­ical feed­back does that require? — reveals that it is, in fact, a huge problem.

Here we can see plainly the value of the book as infor­ma­tion tech­nology: a mech­a­nism for accessing a bundle of mate­rial, for spending time with it, for inves­ti­gating and con­sid­ering it. Still unmatched!

My meta point here shouldn’t obscure the sim­pler one, which is that The Making of Dun­geons & Dragons is fabulous. It costs a hun­dred bucks, so it’s not for everybody, but I was happy to pay, if only to cast my vote in the marketplace. I sort of can’t believe they pub­lished this at all, so it’s like, yes! Allow me to reward your courage!

The Wayfinder

Over the summer, I received an advance copy of The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson, and the novel became my happy preoccupation, night after night. This is a Big One: in heft, in scope, in mag­netic force. “Moana, as written by Gabriel García Márquez” sounds reductive–and yet!

The Wayfinder is an ADVENTURE, or: a web of adventures. On these pages, there are gen­uine thrills (rare!) and magic that is matter-of-factly real. There is also the occa­sional poem, printed in italics, which you will skip: and that’s how you know you’re in epic territory!!

There is, of course, a map.

I loved this book, and I believe it is the Big One of this season. The phys­ical object is phenomenal: for­mi­dable like one of the story’s warriors, shim­mering like one of the story’s waves. MCD always does it right.

The next device is no device

I’ve been thinking a lot about devices. Apple in China was a prompt for this, obvi­ously; here in the San Fran­cisco Bay Area, the ques­tion is in the air. There’s some­thing lurking in Jackson Square. Every­body is thinking about it. So, here is my prediction:

Say goodbye, sooner than you think, to the phone. It will seem, sooner than you think, ludi­crous that we car­ried these things around.

Instead, we’ll live in a world of ambient computation, invis­ible micro­phones everywhere, many screens to choose from — just speak up or sit down and the system knows you, obeys you. As in Playbit, “your com­puter” and/or “your phone” will be vir­tual objects that can appear any­where they are needed. Only enthu­si­asts will care about the shape or specs of a phys­ical device.

Obviously, this sce­nario is gnarly in its own way, with plenty of room for Unfore­seen Consequences, but I will argue that a world of lightness, in which the internet is some­thing you can walk away from, is obvi­ously better than our present world, with an atten­tional black hole in every pocket.

It will someday seem strange that we were never without a camera.

Images of public space in which every person is hyp­no­tized by a phone will seem as antique as images do today of smoke-filled rooms, or trains full of men wearing hats. Whether that hap­pens in twenty years or fifty, I don’t know, but I am cer­tain of the destination. Bet on it!

A thought experiment: what would Steve Jobs have thought of AI lan­guage models?

Their “magic”, their seam­less adaptability, would obvi­ously be appealing to his product sensibility. Their messiness, the dark froth of their training, would not.

Of course, he would have hated the fact that they weren’t invented at Apple … 

“Don’t get high on your own supply,” I wrote the other day, and I was talking about tech­nology.

Human tech­nology is amazing — and I’m talking about every­thing from fin­ger­nail clip­pers to those AI lan­guage models — but it is nothing com­pared to the machinery of the cell. I mean, it’s not even in the same league: in terms of com­plexity, miniaturization, efficiency … and most of all resilience. Every human inven­tion is a glass bauble by comparison. A nuclear submarine’s got nothing on a mustardseed.

If you can find a way to see this con­trast clearly, I think you will be better set up for the 21st century, and for life in this universe.

Links and recommendations

For Bay Area readers, here is a sea­sonal offering from Clay and Steel, the forge in Rich­mond where I took a class ear­lier this year, a superfun and mem­o­rable experience. I can’t wait to return; I’d go make this scor­pion bottle opener if I was in town.

Here’s a new board game from Sky Lion, a young com­pany that I like a lot. The Kick­starter has already punched way beyond its goal, but you can still snag a copy before they go into pro­duc­tion.

I love the lingo of board games: the instant recog­ni­tion of mechan­ical genres and conventions. “Ah, yes, an asym­metric area-control Eurogame … excellent.” Making Monsters is a “bag-builder” game, and I do not yet know what that is, but, I am gonna find out!

Here is a lovely, nearly lit­erary review of the new iPhone Air. More tech writing like this, please!

The real story of the moon’s cre­ation is unknown and prob­ably unknowable, but more and more it is looking like the Mys­tery Impactor, usu­ally called Theia, was required for life to begin on Earth.

No life without tides — it’s nearly cer­tain — and no life, maybe, without the mate­rials Theia brought.

What a hit!

Many things can be true at the same time. The mustardseed’s got us all beat, AND, it’s aston­ishing that humans can per­form cataract surgery, and have been doing so for a long, long time.

I have loved Matt Alt’s writing on the smash suc­cess of the Demon Slayer movie. He walks anime’s global cul­tural supremacy back to its origins:

To otaku, anime was more than entertainment: it was a lifestyle and an identity. In the late Seventies, the econ­o­mist (and later Iron Chef judge) Shinichiro Kuri­moto dubbed this gen­er­a­tion shinjinrui, or “a new type of human.” In 1989 the jour­nalist Tomo­hiro Machiyama declared otaku “key to deci­phering post-industrial society.” [ … ]

Matt writes: “We’re all otaku now.”

Here’s Jim Rion on his trans­la­tion of a strange, sin­gular novel from Japanese into Eng­lish, and the evo­lu­tion of the book along the way — an unusu­ally pro­tean process. I wish more trans­la­tion worked like this!

I’m very excited about the prospect of a new Robyn album.

I can’t believe the Body Talk albums were released all the way back in 2010! They still sound totally contemporary — more 21st-century than most 21st-century music. I have vivid mem­o­ries of lis­tening to all three on a drive across the Drift­less in Min­nesota and Wisconsin.

Here’s a lovely short poem by George William Russell, who wrote under the pseu­donym Æ, which is extremely metal.

Here is eight hun­dred years of Eng­lish handwriting!

Unti­tled (near Cairo), 1977:

Here is an evoca­tive scene recalled by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, straight out of a spy novel!

Here are the colors of the fashion season ahead, tabulated by Sarah Constantin:

A public service!

Here is a project to grow algae exclu­sively in the light of another star. Humans!!!

Here beginneth the AI links

Brian Eno, quoted in Sentiers:

All my mis­giv­ings about AI really are to do with the fact that it’s owned by a group of people that I don’t trust at all. I don’t trust their taste, I don’t trust their morals, and I don’t trust their politics, and that’s a problem for me — that the whole tech­nology is in the hands of the wrong people.

Here’s an evoca­tive framing from Andrej Karpathy:

Stated plainly, today’s fron­tier LLM research is not about building animals. It is about sum­moning ghosts. You can think of ghosts as a fun­da­men­tally dif­ferent kind of point in the space of pos­sible intel­li­gences. They are mud­dled by humanity. Thor­oughly engi­neered by it. They are these imper­fect replicas, a kind of sta­tis­tical dis­til­la­tion of humanity’s doc­u­ments with some sprinkle on top. [ … ] It seems pos­sible to me that over time, we can fur­ther fine­tune our ghosts more and more in the direc­tion of animals; that it’s not so much a fun­da­mental incom­pat­i­bility but a matter of ini­tial­iza­tion in the intel­li­gence space. But it’s also quite pos­sible that they diverge even fur­ther and end up per­ma­nently dif­ferent, un-animal-like, but still incred­ibly helpful and prop­erly world-altering. It’s pos­sible that ghosts:animals :: planes:birds.

Here is Dan Cohen on the library’s new entryway. The premise is totally stirring: a library that can stand up and speak!

I think back to the Michigan State library, walking through the doors; I wonder what it would be like to have a con­ver­sa­tion — a sort of relationship? — with the col­lection. Not just a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the col­lection; the col­lection.

There will be oppor­tu­ni­ties ahead to develop and refine spe­cific voices for spe­cific models, moving beyond the one-size-fits-all concierge of the big cen­tral­ized models. I think it will be fun and exciting for people across the world to have jobs like Amanda Askell’s, who over­sees Claude’s personality.

What should the Michigan State library sound like?

Others have made this observation, but/and I think of it often: the real power of lan­guage models is per­haps not their capa­bility or their “intel­li­gence” but rather their patience, which is: infinite.

It’s the capa­bility and intel­li­gence that make the patience valuable — a stone is patient and nobody is paying $20/month to talk to a stone ( … yet?)—but maybe the patience is what unlocks those other properties.

The tutor who never tires of explaining some­thing another way; the doctor who never says, sorry, I have another appointment. I mean, it’s gen­uinely interesting — some­thing new on this planet.

As usual, though, it cuts both ways. Long con­ver­sa­tions turn pretty inevitably into weird con­ver­sa­tions. For my part, I think these models should be extremely, but not infinitely, patient. Lan­guage model users shouldn’t be able to fil­i­buster a sim­u­lated con­ver­sa­tion partner for the same gen­eral rea­sons that video game players shouldn’t be able to kill a sim­u­lated dog. Claude’s new ability to end con­ver­sa­tions is a step in the right direc­tion.

I like this note from Steve Newman:

If you’ve mas­tered tasks that take a single day, what addi­tional skills do you need to handle week-long, month-long, or year-long projects? Do we have any clear idea of what those skills are? I sus­pect that we don’t under­stand them very well, that we tend to dis­count the skills involved, and that this con­tributes to some people having (what I believe are) unre­al­is­ti­cally short esti­mates of the time it will take to develop AGI.

Is it pos­sible that we, as smart, com­pe­tent humans, basi­cally can’t explain what makes a human smart and com­pe­tent? It appears to be very pos­sible!

I’ll confess, I hope all the AI data center invest­ment comes to naught. I think it’s gross: a future that is heavy, not light, just at the moment when com­puters were becoming hyperefficient. I’ve written about this before.

But, my crit­i­cism doesn’t over­ride my curiosity. The great ques­tion of the Anth: what hap­pens next?

Here endeth the AI links

Recently, I rewatched the doc­u­men­tary Code Rush: a slice of Sil­icon Valley life from the late 1990s, free on YouTube:

The doc­u­men­tary’s cen­tral events, sur­rounding the browser com­pany Netscape, are not that momentous, so what’s really on dis­play here is vibes, and the vibes: are strong. I think any tech-adjacent person of any era will feel the resonances.

Honestly, the sur­prise for me — sincerely, a sur­prise — is that the late-1990s prog­nos­ti­ca­tion and hype “rhymes” with our moment right now, the AI Rush.

Watching this doc­u­men­tary, I had the sense, suddenly, of one huge event, run­ning from 1977 straight through today, still in progress, unresolved. Code Rush is 56 min­utes long and worth your time. And don’t miss the Ellen Ullman cameo!

If the doc­u­men­tary has a hero, it’s the ide­al­istic Jamie Zawinski, who went on to pur­chase San Fran­cisco’s iconic DNA Lounge. On camera, Jamie muses:

We’re at the begin­ning of an industry and who knows where that industry’s gonna go? This could all turn into tele­vi­sion again. It could be con­trolled by a small number of com­pa­nies who decide what we see and hear. And there’s a lot of prece­dent for that.

😬

Ted Nelson in 1974: You can and must under­stand com­puters NOW.

I tried to actu­ally read some of Computer Lib/Dream Machines the other day but it was just too dense, too wonky, too cut-and-paste to nav­i­gate on a screen. Ironically, it’s just not suited to reading on a com­puter!

Here is Jasmine Sun’s summer dis­patch from China, which you can read either (1) before you read Apple in China, to get your­self hyped up, or (2) after you read Apple in China, as an up-to-the-minute briefing.

Either way, you do have to read both.

Here is Colin Nagy on pass­port stamps—ter­rific, as always.

Here’s a head­line that reads almost as a poem: Migrating Moths Can Read the Stars. I’ll just echo Diana’s per­fect block­quote here:

Then, they fash­ioned the felt tent into some­thing sim­ilar to a minia­ture moth-sized planetarium. The sci­en­tists added a pro­jec­tion screen at the top and showed a real­istic ver­sion of what the moon­less night sky out­side would look like at the time of the experiment. When given the sky, but still deprived of mag­netic infor­ma­tion, the moths over­whelm­ingly flew in the cor­rect, migra­tory direc­tion according to the season: north-northwest in fall, south­wards in spring. If the sky pro­jec­tion rotated, the moths shifted their tra­jec­tory to match. “Moth after moth after moth that we put under the sky, when we knew that there was no other cue they could be using … flew con­sis­tently in the direc­tion that they needed to fly in at that time of year to reach their destination,” says Warrant.

W. David Marx lays it down:

Nick Susi wrote in 2024 “We Can’t Fight Atten­tion With Atten­tion,” and I increas­ingly believe that this phrase sums up the key crisis of the 21st century. “We”—consumers who desire com­plexity and innovation — are giving so much of “our” atten­tion to things we hold in contempt. [ … ] In the 21st century, the worst mem­bers of society have become the most suc­cessful mem­bers of society, and they owe so much of this to their skillful abuse this mech­a­nism.

You know I love a “we” with a spe­cific antecedent!!

Here is a ter­rific edi­tion of Per­fect Sentences, which is hon­estly the best way to follow the news.

The other best way is the Finan­cial Times, which com­bines a global per­spec­tive with a sober tone to pro­vide a daily product that respects its readers. The edi­tors at the FT are either unwilling or unable to employ the dark arts of atten­tion hacking; either way, the effect is refreshing — there are no hate reads in these salmon pages.

I look at plat­forms like, e.g., the New York Times: the absolute flood of content, all so tonally dif­ferent, and I am just like: what­ever this is, it’s no longer a newspaper. (I believe the NYT’s man­age­ment would agree with me; indeed they would insist upon it.)

So, I sup­pose I like the FT not (only) because it’s the best newspaper, but because it’s the last newspaper.

A gov­ern­ment shut­down pro­vides an occa­sion to con­tem­plate SQLite, the most widely-deployed data­base soft­ware in the world — maybe the most widely deployed soft­ware of any kind?

I’ve linked before to the story of its cre­ation. Richard Hipp was working on the soft­ware for a battleship:

 … so, of course, things are always breaking and they use it all the time, but the idea is it’s sup­posed to be able to work if you take battle damage, so it’s more than one pipe breaking and there’s going to be a lot of stuff broke, and people are going to be crazy and there’s going to be smoke and blood and chaos, and in a sit­u­a­tion like that they don’t want a dialog box that says, “Cannot con­nect to data­base server.” [ … ]

Why do we even need a server? Why can’t I pull this directly off the disk drive? That way if the com­puter is healthy enough, it can run our appli­ca­tion at all, we don’t have depen­den­cies that can fail and cause us to fail, and I looked around and there were no SQL data­base engines that would do that, and one of the guys I was working with says, “Richard, why don’t you just write one?” “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” [ … ]

This was back in 2000, and if I recall cor­rectly, Newt Gin­grich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all gov­ern­ment con­tracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that data­base engine now.”

What became of Richard Hipp’s project? Well, there are mul­tiple SQLite data­bases run­ning in the device upon which you are reading this newsletter. If you use an iPhone, all of your bub­bling cor­re­spon­dences are stored in an SQLite data­base.

The soft­ware is open source, free to use. It doesn’t come with any license at all, just this exhortation:

The author dis­claims copy­right to this source code. In place of a legal notice, here is a blessing:

May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

Con­sider the layers: Newt Gin­grich and Bill Clinton; Richard Hipp and his battleship; iTunes for Win­dows and the path to the iPhone; the beatific little data­base whirring inside the device in your pocket; that same device coming together in human hands, far away; the intol­er­able Apple exec­u­tive who made it so; every link in that chain, every agreement, every dollar; SQLite’s blessing; and the mustardseed.

From the San Joaquin Valley,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my annual gift guide in mid-November!

October 2025