Almost nobody asks AI for the cruel version; you just arrive angry and it's agreeable. It's also the thing that talked me out of sending the reply I was proudest of, by pointing out that a criticized email and a life's work are not the same size.

Some processes were never held together by discipline. They were held together by latency, a delay doing review work nobody assigned it, and a deleted wait leaves no trace. The two-week chapter turnaround I resented for years was one.

A GPA works like a golf score: every failure baked into the cumulative, forever. A teacher's essay on cheating and AI sent me back to the skate session, which reads skill a better way.

Every school is fighting about AI, and almost nobody fighting it has noticed we settled this in math class in the 1980s. The calculator rule still works. Where it stops working is the part worth worrying about.

A 71-year-old reader survived his own rent collapse in Queensland and bolded four words about the next one: at the same time. Gradual displacement leaves exits. Simultaneous displacement jams them, and luck stops being the tiebreaker.

Three weeks after Claude started marking its own output, someone shipped the solvent. The clever objection to the watermark assumed the checker was the lever. It wasn't, and the law that required the mark says what it was actually for.

We gave Tony Hawk's foundation a domain name and an app for free. Four years later I got a thank-you that never announced itself as one. My uncle told me to network through golf; this is a story about the network I built instead.

Two days after publishing Holding Both, a Kentucky mother and daughter turned down $26.48 million from an AI data center. They are the exact people my essay said were mostly quiet about this, and one of its harder lines owes them a correction.

The part of my writing that feels most like me is the part I worried was starting to look like a machine. A chess scandal says the suspicion runs the other way, which turns out to be worse news, not better.

I built a tool that detects AI writing and it called me a fake. So I went looking in my 2008 blog archive, and in a book O'Reilly copyedited before the iPhone had an App Store. The tells were already in there.

Andreas Goeldi figures 20 to 30 percent of what he reads each day was generated just for him, text nobody else will ever see. Print spent five centuries handing every reader the same fixed page. Its successor is quietly taking the page back.

John Douglas of the Trashcan Sinatras died on August 3rd at 63, three days after the band released its first album in a decade. He was in it from 1986, played on all seven records, and wrote a great deal of what that band is.

98 teens spent a weekend in a replica Senate chamber writing the AI-in-schools bill Congress hasn't. I expected the AI-native generation to write itself a permission slip. It wrote guardrails.

The Trashcan Sinatras released their seventh album the same day this essay went out. First record in a decade, from a band that rebuilt on living rooms after the industry took everything back. I planned none of it.

Rufus Rock names the problem well: when credible-looking work gets cheap, scarcity stops signaling quality, and every gate built on it stops working. The 1492 defense of handwritten books is that argument in period costume, and it was printed.

The Tour de France finished on Alpe d'Huez the same weekend the Hungaroring ran a Grand Prix, a climb I once rode with an audience of one. A topical note for The Unwatchable Race: the two things a machine can never hand you are a clock and a rival.

Michael J. Whalen and I landed on the same claim about art and lived experience this month, from opposite ends of it. He has a distinction I wish I'd had, and we disagree about the only part neither of us can prove.

The most undervalued use of AI is thinking, not making — and the one discipline that separates leveling up from being expertly flattered: don't ask whether your idea is good, ask how it fails.

One day after The Diamond Was Always a Story went up, De Beers cut official prices across nearly every category. The storyteller conceded to the secondhand market, on invoices designed to keep the size of the concession quiet.

The joke at the center of The Automation Line: some things you do for the outcome, some things are the doing, and the whole skill is telling which one you're holding before you let go.

A viral post claims Amazon runs secret AI-forensics on Kindle uploads. Most of the mechanisms are invented. The one that's real flags the most consistent human voices first.

For everyone who knew me from the tech books: I'm writing again. A series of short essays called Becoming Gnarly, about choosing the harder path when it's worth it, and the harder skill of telling which paths those are.