Season of change

IT IS A SEASON OF CHANGE. I look around the world from my van­tage point, and I see upheaval and trans­for­ma­tion at every scale, from per­sonal to pro­fes­sional, geo­graphic to economic. People are shut­ting things down, opening things up; people are packing their bags, buying one-way tickets. I think I am prob­ably the least upheaved person I know, and it’s not like I haven’t been busy!

It’s not all bad, or even mostly bad. I am thinking of straight-up metamorphosis — per­sonal and pro­fes­sional molting. These processes can be tough, but of course they end up lightening, liberating.

But also, there is war, and crisis perma/poly, and an economy that has become basi­cally inscrutable.

And there is some­thing strange brewing in the data centers.

It’s a season of change, simple as that. This obser­va­tion — this mantra, almost — has become a way for me to process new events as they stream in: oh, of course <insane thing X> is hap­pening <to person Y / in place Z> … it’s a season of change, what else would you expect?

Some­times a frame, an ordering, is a little boat you can ride through the waves. You’re wel­come aboard mine.

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 May 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:

• Penumbra aes­thetics: wind in our sails

• Infinite Loop: a couple of books about Apple

• Links and recommendations: “My life­long quest is now fulfilled”

Penumbra aesthetics

Thanks for your enthu­si­astic response to Penumbra Print Shop! Magic Post­card is now cir­cu­lating in the world. Stock is dwindling, so I’ll have to come up with a set of summer designs ASAP. That’s one thing that dis­tin­guishes this sta­tionery shop from my zine projects: I’m com­mitted to keeping things in stock — ongoing offerings, rather than an iso­lated spasm of commerce.

Here is some cool news:

Back in December, as I was reori­enting my work fol­lowing the olive harvest, Patrick Col­lison and Tyler Cowen launched a grant­making program, their Call for New Aes­thetics. You can read about their objec­tives on this one-page web­site—it’s a crisp little invitation.

There is a some­what per­snickety view of aes­thetics at the heart of Penumbra Print Shop, so, in the closing week of 2025, I sent over a proposal. I have to say, it felt cool to have the com­piled “argument” of last year’s zines avail­able as evi­dence of sus­tained development.

Well … I’m now happy to announce that Penumbra Print Shop has received a sub­stan­tial New Aes­thetics grant! It’s a great burst of early support, and it will allow us to move faster than we might have otherwise.

It puts us in good com­pany: fellow trav­eler Spencer Chang is also a New Aes­thetics grantee. I believe Patrick, Tyler, and com­pany are plan­ning to post a com­plete list at some point, and it will be inter­esting to see the whole lineup.

Infinite Loop

In a recent edi­tion, I men­tioned this event at the Com­puter His­tory Museum reflecting on Apple’s 50th anniversary. That led me to David Pogue’s new book Apple: The First 50 Years, which I read in a few sit­tings yesterday.

It has the feeling of one of those old visual encyclopedias, or the Usborne Book of the Future or some­thing; the pace is zippy, the layout is inter­esting, the pic­tures are great. It’s fun to see the whole saga in one place, one con­tin­uous unfolding story … and, of course, I found it fas­ci­nating to insert myself into the timeline — to remember where I was, who I was, as a user of so many of these tools, starting in the early 1990s.

The book’s opening section, on Apple’s ear­liest days, is the most thrilling, just because that whole scene was so thrilling, stuffed full of people seeing some­thing for the first time and thinking, of course! This is how it’s all going to work!

Steve Jobs chief among them, watching the demos at PARC.

It occurs to me that the aston­ish­ment of a modern LLM is on the same level, yet most people’s first encounter with the tech­nology has been simply … visiting a web page … with the effect, I think, of deflating the expe­ri­ence some­what. Maybe this is just an obser­va­tion about how it feels to dis­cover things on the web, or through a phone — the com­pressed dynamic range of the medium. There’s not much in modern tech­nology that com­pares to the buildup and payoff of, e.g., a trek to the West Coast Com­puter Faire to behold the brand-new Apple II.

A bit of dis­tance does won­ders for an expe­ri­ence; a bit of waiting has never been a bad thing. That seems cen­tral to Apple’s whole approach, and I hope they’re able to sus­tain it in this new era.

(And, of course, this is why I have so enjoyed cir­cu­lating things in the mail … )

It’s melan­choly reading about the mil­lions of Macs, hun­dreds of mil­lions (!) of iPods mini, nano, and touch … under­standing that the fruits of this pro­found labor became, ultimately, inevitably, garbage. To the degree their parts were recycled, maybe that’s not so bad; to the degree they became landfill, it’s pretty gross. Yes, these devices all had their moment in the sun, or in someone’s pocket; yes, they were enjoyed, brought happiness, a bit of wonder; but won­drous things do not have to be disposable. Or, if they are disposable, they can be TRULY disposable.

I await the com­postable computer. That sounds fanciful, but I don’t think it’s any more sci-fi than a slate of dancing light or a super­fluent chatbot. I just think enough people — notably, enough product designers and engineers — need to become suf­fi­ciently weary of this cycle.

Books get trashed, too, of course … but they relax back into the world — are reabsorbed — so much more grace­fully than these elec­tronic confections.

It’s been an Apple-y stretch. Last weekend, I read and enjoyed Creative Selection by ex-Apple designer Ken Kocienda in one sitting, a long after­noon in the yard.

Honestly, I would have enjoyed an even more tech­nical ver­sion of this book, too, but there is plenty of crunchy detail here; we get to see sev­eral projects up close, all the iterations. The book’s cen­tral episode has to do with the iPhone’s keyboard — at the time of its design, a huge unsolved problem; some believed it might be unsolvable — and it’s fun and inspiring to read about the breadth and depth of Ken’s exploration.

Here is inven­tion in its truest form: grinding it out.

I’m now on a hunt for more books of this genre, par­tic­u­larly those that get into the gritty details of product design and development, at Apple and elsewhere.

Here’s my list to explore:

• Dealers of Lightning, by Michael A. Hiltzik (I know a lot of the PARC story already, but often a book like this is worth the read even for just two or three juicy new details)

• Frog: Form Fol­lows Emotion, by Fay Sweet (David Pogue’s book presents many pics of Helmut Esslinger’s work for Apple at frog design, real­ized and unreal­ized, and it’s all totally swoonworthy)

• Designing Interactions, by Bill Mog­gridge

• Designing Design, by Kenya Hara

If you have other recs, please send them over — as always, you can just reply directly to this email.

Links and recommendations

Recently, I read that Isaac Newton insisted there had to be seven colors in the spec­trum mainly for occult/numerological reasons, which explains the per­sis­tent “ … really?” around indigo and violet. Con­nect this to Apple, above: who were wise enough to rec­og­nize there are really only six colors in that rainbow … 

Here’s a pro­file of chef and restau­ran­teur Jimmy Par­dini, whose work has raised the bar of food in Fresno, California. As you know, I spend a fair amount of time there, and Jimmy’s restau­rants are fre­quent stops. There’s a dif­fer­ence between the places that are “as good as you can find in Fresno” and “as good as any­thing in the Bay Area”: Jimmy’s are the latter. In fact, I will argue that his Annesso Pizzeria is making better pizza than any place in the East Bay. There, I said it!

Some­thing to notice about Jimmy Par­dini is that he always goes out of his way to credit his mentor Nancy Silverton, and the for­ma­tive value of his time working at her Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles. I think other people, after this much time, at this level of success, might rea­son­ably con­sign their edu­ca­tion to the his­tory books … so it’s striking to see Jimmy invoke his lineage, his debt, every time.

A cool person, a great contribution.

Here’s a rich inter­view with Jon Peterson, the great his­to­rian of Dun­geons & Dragons who has traced its roots back to the open-ended sce­narios of war plan­ners of the mid-20th century:

Jon: [ … ] There were these polit­ical exer­cises that were being con­ducted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1964, which were the first instance I can really find of our use of the term “role-playing game.” You were playing the head of the state or the head of the military, and someone else played the director of the internal affairs of the state, and then some­body else was exter­nally facing, like the for­eign sec­re­tary versus the home sec­re­tary or whatever. And that cre­ated a frame­work that people would rec­og­nize as role playing.

This is a weird, impor­tant point: the truly pro­to­typ­ical RPG deals with ships and missiles — the wiz­ards and trolls only came later.

This book looks great: Profane Altars: Weird Sword & Sorcery!

I always eagerly open the emails from Asterism, which are like meta-newsletters, cut­ting across all the little presses they distribute.

Here’s an amazing piece by Natalie Wol­chover about recent illu­mi­na­tions of the fla­gellar motor, a bio­log­ical “machine” that, in its atom-scale minia­tur­iza­tion and efficiency, puts all human engi­neering to shame.

You’ve got to love this sentiment:

“My life­long quest is now fulfilled,” said Mike Manson, a pro­fessor emer­itus of bio­physics at Texas A&M Uni­ver­sity who started studying the fla­gellar motor in the 1970s. “I finally under­stand how this thing I’ve been studying for 50 years actu­ally works. That’s about as sat­is­fying as can be.”

Com­pu­ta­tion from another time, another context … I found this series of World War II instruc­tional films about fire con­trol computers sort of mesmerizing.

Snoopy: “the last sacred thing in a sea of the profane”.

I have gotten REALLY GOOD at being bored. Four-hour train journeys, three-hour drives: no media stim­u­la­tion required, no problem. I don’t sit there THINKING, either; only musing, daydreaming, wan­dering through ideas. Every so often, I’ll record a voice note. This turns out to be pow­er­fully generative, in the long run.

Ease with boredom is a useful muscle, and I’m glad to have (re)developed it.

Here is an absolute smorgasbord of tiny web tools. Notably, the QR code generator is nicer than many others I’ve come across online.

Here is a short, tragic con­sid­er­a­tion of the rise and fall of the book review.

Here’s Cinema1909, a gor­geous typeface. Every­thing at Contrast Foundry is great!

“For var­ious reasons, I have been searching for artists who work with whale songs.” Here is Alexis Madrigal on inter­species music—an edi­tion of his One Good Thing newsletter, always per­fectly bite-sized, yet rich with wonder and erudition.

These days, he hosts a radio show, live every morning, but Alexis will always be a blogger at heart … 

I love this online exhibit of ledgers and journals bound in the “Italian sta­tionery” style. The col­lec­tion spans the 12th to 19th centuries, and I just love the look of these books. Check out out the tall, skinny expense log at the bottom of this page … !

Here’s Michael Nielsen on “wot writers are doing”:

The ques­tion “am I a writer?” con­tinued to bother me. I would some­times con­sider playful variants. Was Plato a writer? What about Charles Darwin? Albert Ein­stein? After all, much of their cre­ative output was words on a page. Didn’t that make them writers? Instinc­tively we know this is silly. Obvi­ously these people are not writers — they are a philosopher, naturalist, and physicist. Ein­stein was “doing physics”, not “writing”. In some sense that answered the ques­tion. However, I sus­pected there were hidden depths I wasn’t seeing.

In this essay, we’ll take these playful ques­tions seriously. We’ll examine what many dif­ferent “writers” are really doing — ranging from Darwin and Ein­stein to people more con­ven­tion­ally con­sidered writers, like John McPhee, Jane Austen, and Ted Chiang. What is similar? What is dif­ferent? What activ­i­ties beyond writing feed their work?

I’ll note that I appre­ciate Michael’s quo­ta­tion mark style, keeping the punc­tu­a­tion safely — sanely — outside.

Here is Nick Cave’s lament:

I often wonder why musi­cians don’t seem more alarmed by the rise of these song­writing generators. But per­haps I am hope­lessly out of touch with how the world functions, and don’t fully under­stand the immense pos­i­tive poten­tial they may offer. No doubt there is some truth to this, but at the same time I believe we musi­cians and song­writers are sleep­walking into a sit­u­a­tion where we allow this tech­nology to strip the world of one of the last gen­uine tran­scen­dent expe­ri­ences left to us — man-made music — by sur­ren­dering our souls to a machine. What does this say about us, that we so pas­sively acquiesce? Are we not the valiant knights, the truth-tellers, the beauty-makers, who journey to the dark side, slay the dragon, and bring back the drip­ping treasure? Are we not the guardians of the world’s soul?

Barry Kort died about a year ago after a long life and career. Here is a person whose work had a huge influ­ence on me: a cre­ator and main­tainer of MicroMUSE, the vir­tual realm where I first came online as an internet explorer and a cre­ative programmer. These threads con­tinue to this day, obviously, and both can be traced back to their origins — their anchors — on Barry’s imag­i­nary space station.

When you make things and share them, espe­cially in an open-ended way, a public way, the ripple effects are vast and unknowable. I’m grateful to Barry Kort for helping to estab­lish one of the key loca­tions of my life.

In my estimation, this was the iconic frame of Artemis II. Humans have been braiding their hair for a few tens of thou­sands of years; there’s some­thing deeply whole and right about this image of a braid floating in zero G, while our astro­naut gazes out at the starting point, the mother of all braids, of everything.

From the lab,

Robin

P.S. I’m on the road for a couple of weeks, but/and I’ll return in mid-June with some new print offerings.

May 2026