Samantha: This town has a weird smell that you're all probably used to…but I'm not.
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Bonta sold us out to Trump's oligarchs (22 Sep 2026)"
Pluralistic: Neal Stephenson’s “Polostan” (04 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Science fiction isn't a collection of tropes, nor is it a literary style, nor is it a marketing category. It can encompass all of these, but what sf really is, is an outlook.
Pluralistic: No one wants to read your AI slop (02 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Everyone knows (or should know) that as fascinating as your dreams are to you, they are eye-glazingly dull to everyone else. Perhaps you have a friend or two who will tolerate you recounting your dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever presume that other people want to hear about your dreams.
Pluralistic: How to have cancer (05 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I've got cancer but it's probably (almost certainly, really) okay. Within a very short period I will no longer have cancer (at least for now). This is the best kind of cancer to have – the kind that is caught early and treated easily – but I've learned a few things on the way that I want to share with you.
Pluralistic: A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage (10 Oct 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Sometimes, you really can vote with your wallet. I know, I'm generally pretty down on this kind of thing, but sometimes, it works!
Pluralistic: Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives (21 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
My latest Locus Magazine column is "Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives," about the secret engine of sweeping political upheavals (like Trumpism) and their inherent fragility:
Pluralistic: Sarah Wynn-Williams’s ‘Careless People’ (23 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I never would have read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta's lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it:
Pluralistic: Sarah Wynn-Williams’s ‘Careless People’ (23 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I never would have read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta's lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it:
Pluralistic: Market participation is exhausting (30 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
We're a diverse species, cognitively speaking – different ways of thinking come more easily to some of us than others. I'm good at a lot of things, but I have terrible spatial sense. I can't parallel park or catch a ball, and I get lost so easily it's almost comical (it's a running joke in my family).
Pluralistic: How the Epstein Class recruits (20 Jun 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Perhaps you've encountered the stories about Dialog, an extremely weird secret society associated with Peter "Antichrist" Thiel, whose membership data and details have leaked this week:
Pluralistic: Three more AI psychoses (12 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"AI psychosis" is one of those terms that is incredibly useful and also almost certainly going to be deprecated in smart circles in short order because it is: a) useful; b) easily colloquialized to describe related phenomena; and c) adjacent to medical issues, and there's a group of people who feel very strongly any metaphor that implicates human health is intrinsically stigmatizing and must be replaced with an awkward, lengthy phrase that no one can remember and only insiders understand.
Weirding Diary: 10
It is now clear that the intellectual class has been caught entirely flat-footed on the wrong side of the Great Weirding in the US. Almost all discourses at…
Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2023 (01 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's that time of year again, when I round up all the books I reviewed for my newsletter in the previous year. I posted 21 reviews last year, covering 31 books (there are two series in there!). I also published three books of my own last year (two novels and one nonfiction). A busy year in books!
Weirding Diary: 1
I did a little poll asking people the extent to which they are treating the current zeitgeist as a temporary weirding (TW) versus a permanent new normal (NN).…
Pluralistic: The tax sharks are back and they’re coming for your home (27 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One of my weirder and more rewarding hobbies is collecting definitions of "conservativism," and one of the jewels of that collection comes from Corey Robin's must-read book The Reactionary Mind:
Weirding Diary: 3
A sense of weirdness in the environment can be understood as unfactored reality. A blooming, buzzing confusion of sensory input that impinges on awareness…