Matthew Fox

Reading this month (I can recommend all of these):

Theory & Practice (Michelle de Kretser)
Ixelles (Johannes Anyuru)
Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)
Discontent (Beatriz Serrano)
The Maniac (Benjamin Labatut)

The frozen Baltic Sea at sunset from the roof garden of Artipelag, an art gallery outside Stockholm, February 2026.

The frozen Baltic Sea at sunset, east of Stockholm, February 2026.

The 'Golden Egg' artwork at Artipelag, in the snow, February 2026.

The sunset shining through a piece of ice held in my daughter's hand, standing on the frozen Baltic Sea, February 2026.

February recap. High point: walking on the frozen Baltic Sea out at Artipelag (and on the Årstaviken).

Last Thursday it was still -4°C in Stockholm; then it flipped and went up to +9° on Friday. Now it's spring.

Low point: everybody being ill and off school with unbelievable coughs and colds.

Oh boy. Enslopification here we come.

Oh boy. Enslopification here we come.

The Bachelors is still my fave.

It’s the worship of the inhuman.

I am kind of writing one... Agents likes it, going to talk about it next week x

The 4th Indiana Jones movie.

I'm writing a book. Every working day begins with me rewriting what I wrote the day before, and the day before that. If your reaction to that is "AI could save you that trouble," I know you're not a writer. Computer programs can't sleep on it, can't dream an idea, can't suddenly realize something.

Yup. As Kurt Vonnegut said, “I am a mono-polar depressive descended from mono-polar depressives. That's how come I write so good.”

Well done!

Of all the easy things you can do to help the environment, conserve water for communities not corporations, not perpetuate scams, support the labor and rights of creators... *not* using generative AI is the fucking easiest. You absolutely deserve to be shamed for using it for image and text creation

We gotta come up with a better system than “everything rests on whether these twelve billionnaires are nice”

Daughter went to a birthday party and the party bag contained a BOOK. These are my people.

Lord, spare me from tenured faculty with strong views about the job market.

BBC Radio 4 - Upon a White Horse by Peter Ross, Ring Journalist Peter Ross joins a festival of hope and renewal at Stonehenge.

I am absolutely delighted that @peteralanross.bsky.social Upon a White Horse is BBCRadio4 Book of the Week. For it is another of my own Books of the Year. Adventurous, ruminative, watchful encounters with place & time
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Oh this is wonderful. I'm so jealous.

Environmental Impact of AI | NEA As you are making decisions about the use of AI in your classroom, it is important to understand the environmental impact of AI's use.

“A single generative AI text query consumes energy at four or five times the magnitude of a typical search engine request.

Generating a single image using AI consumes the same amount of energy as charging a phone to full power.

Training one large AI model consumes nearly five times the lifetime..”

TikTok and Instagram usage leading to brain rot, says APA study The more short-form content a person watches on social media, the poorer their cognitive performance, the study found

Excessive viewing of TikTok and Instagram Reels is damaging cognitive performance, according to this American Psychological Association study:

www.independent.co.uk/tech/tiktok-...

Insurers retreat from AI cover as risk of multibillion-dollar claims mounts AIG, Great American and WR Berkley seek permission to limit liability from AI agents and chatbots

“Insurers increasingly view AI models’ outputs as too unpredictable and opaque to insure, said Dennis Bertram, head of cyber insurance for Europe at Mosaic. “It’s too much of a black box.”

www.ft.com/content/abfe...

Caffeinated Coffee Consumption or Abstinence to Reduce Atrial Fibrillation This clinical trial compares the effect of caffeinated coffee consumption vs abstinence from coffee and caffeine on recurrent atrial fibrillation.

Drinking coffee (vs abstinence) reduces the risk of recurrent atrial fibrillation. Lots of coffee studies are observational with residual confounding, but this is an honest-to-god RCT 👍

YouTube video by Like Stories of Old Why Movies Just Don't Feel "Real" Anymore

I stumbled upon this the other night, and it's terrific - well worth a half hour of your time. I'm a tech layman when it comes to film, but this felt spot-on to me and I learned stuff, too! www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvwP...

Millionaire Tax That Inspired Mamdani Fuels $5.7 Billion Haul in Massachusetts A millionaire levy in Massachusetts that New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani holds up as a model for taxing the rich has generated $3 billion more in revenue than expected without forcing...

NEW: The first two years of Massachusetts' millionaire tax has raised $3 billion more than expected.

And rather than driving the rich away, IPS researchers found that the number of millionaires has *increased.*

Tax the rich. Greg Ryan in @bloomberg.com:

And if I’m shaken by this book, I haven’t been paying attention. I’ve looked away far too often.

The cover of One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against this by Omar El Akkad.

'The medics are forced to create a new acronym for them. WCNSF - wounded child, no surviving family.'

I am so shaken by this book.

The cover of One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against this by Omar El Akkad.

'The medics are forced to create a new acronym for them. WCNSF - wounded child, no surviving family.'

I am so shaken by this book.

Went trick or treating as myself last night. Because nothing seems to terrify some of the locals as much as an immigrant.

Motherfucking wind farms…

Friends and comrades made a crowdfunding page for my family.

It’s really hard to post this. I know that there are a lot of other important issues asking for money but things have gotten to the point where we need to open ourselves up to your support.

Thank you for your consideration.

Let alone the planet.