I need to learn French.  This is lovely. Who is this girl? Here's one clue. Another. Look for more. Never heard of her before today.

Hello, I still love you. The Doors are 60 this year. Or would have been. Good and legendary as they were, I think they are woefully underrated. Manzarek, Densmore, and Krieger were great musicians. Morrison wasn't a great poet, but he was a damn good one, and a helluva performer. What too few remember, or respect, is The Doors' melodies. Wintertime Love, for example, is a sweet waltz. Dig around the oeuvre. Lotta good stuff there.

Apparently, he did. I didn't know Elvis played piano.

Hard to beat. That song from The Man Who Would Be King. My second-favorite movie of all time.

Today's links

• Daniel Pinkwater's "Jules, Penny and the Rooster": Klong! We are ALL pickles.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Daniel Pinkwater's "Jules, Penny and the Rooster" (permalink)

"Cult author" is a maddeningly imprecise term – it might mean, "writer whose readers are a small but devoted band," or it might mean "writer whose readers are transformed forever by their work, so that they never see the world in the same way again."

That latter sense is what I mean when I call Daniel Pinkwater a "cult author." Pinkwater has written more than 100 books and has reached a vast audience, and those books are so singular, so utterly fantastic that when one Pinkwater fan meets another, they immediately launch into ecstatic raptures about these extraordinary works.

Pinkwater writes all kinds of books: memoir, picture books, middle-grades titles, young adult novels, extremely adult novels that appear to be young adult novels, and one of the classic works on dog-training (which I read, even though I don't own a dog and never plan on owning a dog) (it was great):

https://pinkwater.com/book/superpuppy-how-to-choose-raise-and-train-the-best-possible-dog-for-you/

Pinkwater has a new book out. It's great. Of course it's great. It's called Jules, Penny and the Rooster and it's nominally a middle-grades book, and while it will certainly delight the kids in your life, I ate it up:

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/jules-penny-the-rooster/

Jules and her family have just moved to a suburb called Bayberry Acres in the sleepy dormitory city of Turtle Neck and now she's having a pretty rotten summer. She misses all her friends back in the city, her grumpy bassoon-obsessed sister broke her finger and it staying home all summer watching old movies and hogging the TV instead of going to bassoon camp, and all the other kids in Bayberry Acres are literal babies, which may pay off in babysitting gigs, but makes for a lonely existence for Jules.

Worst of all: Jules's parents always promised that she could get a dog when they eventually moved out of their little apartment and bought a house with a yard in the suburbs, and now that this has come to pass, they're reneging. They say that all they promised was that they would "talk about getting a dog" after moving, and that "no, we're not getting a dog" constitutes "talking about it," and that settles the matter. Jules knows that what's really going on is that her parents have bought all new furniture and rugs and they're worried the dog will mess or chew on these. Jules loves her parents, but when she gets her own place, she's a) definitely getting a dog, and b) not allowing her parents to visit, because they might mess or chew on her furniture.

All that changes when Jules enters an essay contest in the local newspaper to win a collie (a contest she enters without telling her parents, natch) and wins – coming home from a visit to see her beloved aunt back in the old neighborhood to find her finger-nursing, oboe-obsessed big sister in possession of her new dog. After Jules and her sister do some fast talking to bring their parents around, Jules's summer – and her life in the suburbs – are rescued from a summer of lonely doldrums.

Jules names the collie Penny, and they go for long rambles in the mysterious woods that Bayberry Acres were carved out of. It's on one of these walks that they meet the rooster, a handsome, proud, friendly fellow who lures Penny over the stone wall that demarcates the property line ringing the spooky, abandoned mansion/castle at the center of the woods. Jules chases Penny over the wall, and that's when everything changes.

On the other side of that wall is a faun, and little leprechaun-looking guys, and a witch (who turns out to be a high-school chum of her city-dwelling, super-cool aunt), and there's a beast in a hidden dilapidated castle. After Jules sternly informs the beast that she's far too young to be anyone's girlfriend – not even a potentially enchanted prince living as a beast in a hidden castle – he disabuses her of this notion and tells her that she is definitely the long-prophesied savior of the woods, whose magic has been leaking out over years. Jules is pretty sure she's not the savior of anything, but the beast and the witch are very persuasive, and besides, the prophecy predicts that the girl who saves the woods will be in company of a magic wolf (Penny's no wolf, but close enough?) and a rooster. So maybe she is the savior?

This is where Pinkwater really whips the old weird/delightful plotting into gear, introducing a series of great, funny, quirky characters who all seem to know each other (a surprising number were in the same high-school as Jules's aunt), along with some spectacular, mouth-watering meals, beautifully drawn animal-human friendships, and more magical beings than you can shake a stick at.

The story of how Jules recovers the lost artifact that will save the woods' magic is just a perfect, delicious ice-cream cone of narrative, with sprinkles, that you want to share with a friend (rarely have I more keenly regretted that my kid is now a teen and past our old bedtime story ritual). As I wrote in my blurb:

"The purest expression of Pinkwater's unique ability to blend the absurd and the human and make the fantastic normal and the normal fantastic. I laughed long and hard, and turned the final page with that unmissable Pinkwatertovian sense of satisfied wonder."

I am so happy to be a fully subscribed member to the Pinkwater Cult (I've got the Martian space potato to prove it).

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Firmware update bricks HP printers, makes them unable to use HP cartridges https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/firmware-update-bricks-hp-printers-makes-them-unable-to-use-hp-cartridges/

• Unsettled Times: A Conversation with NYT Bestselling Author Cory Doctorow on Tech, Labor, and Activism https://rvamag.com/opinion-editorial/unsettled-times-a-conversation-with-nyt-bestselling-author-cory-doctorow-on-tech-labor-and-activism.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking copyright https://memex.craphound.com/2010/03/12/leaked-uk-record-industry-memo-sets-out-plans-for-breaking-copyright/

#15yrsago US census infographics from 1870 http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?9thcensus

#10yrsago RIP, Terry Pratchett https://memex.craphound.com/2015/03/12/rip-terry-pratchett/

#10yrsago How Harper’s “anti-terror” bill ends privacy in Canada https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/03/why-the-anti-terrorism-bill-is-really-an-anti-privacy-bill-bill-c-51s-evisceration-of-government-privacy/

#10yrsago Laptop killing booby-trapped USB drive https://hub.paper-checker.com/blog/usb-killers-how-they-work-and-how-to-protect-your-devices/

#5yrsago How to run a virtual classroom https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#sosh

#5yrsago The EU's new Right to Repair rules finally come for electronics https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#eur2r

#5yrsago Senate Republicans kill emergency sick leave during pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#gopandemic

#5yrsago Boeing is even worse at financial engineering than they are at aircraft engineering https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#boeing

#5yrsago Ars Technica's Covid-19 explainer is the best resource on the pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#bethmole

#5yrsago A former top Cigna exec rebuts Joe Biden's healthcare FUD https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#wendellpotter

#5yrsago Akil Augustine on Radicalized https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#go-akil

#5yrsago TSA boss doubles down on taking away health care from part-time screeners https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#sick-system

#1yrago Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Burbank: Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton, Mar 13
  https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3257/Thu%2C_Mar_13th_6_pm%3A_Pick_%26_Shovel%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/

• Europa Park: Cloudfest, Mar 17-20
  https://cloudfest.link/

• San Diego: Picks and Shovels at Mysterious Galaxy, Mar 24
  https://www.mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow

• Virtual: Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast, Mar 24
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• CBC Bookends
  https://www.cbc.ca/books/bookends/cory-doctorow-writes-science-fiction-to-come-to-terms-with-his-tech-anxiety-1.7477457

• The Futurists
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko0BdEm-Uw4

• Make It Make Sense
  https://open.spotify.com/episode/6XccT3wp6udfiuooYa8jcb

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

ISSN: 3066-764X

[pressed for time; please excuse brevity and typos]

I have always felt that one of the most chilling episodes of Black Mirror was called Nosedive. As the Wikipedia summary puts it, “The episode is set in a world where people can rate each other from one to five stars, using their smartphones, for every interaction they have, which can impact their socioeconomic status.” Nobody would want to live in that world.

Axios broke a story this morning that made my blood curdle. The State Department intends to revoke the visas of large numbers of foreigners (in this case largely student protestors) in part based on AI analysis of their social media posts .

A senior official is quoted as saying “it would be negligent for the department that takes national security seriously to ignore publicly available information about [visa] applicants in terms of AI tools. ... AI is one of the resources available to the government that's very different from where we were technologically decades ago."

Right now the targets are (putative) supporters of Hamas. I despise Hamas. I am loathe to defend anyone who supports them.

But I also fear a world in which the State department can judge anyone, at any time, to be a “threat” to the state, even based on superficial AI analysis, and deport them without due process, using AI as a smoke screen to authoritarian action.

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I ran across this story from Vanessa Guerrero on Instagram recently. She originally posted it to Twitter a few years ago; here’s the full text:

Living in LA, I’ve lived in many a neighborhood in which police helicopters circle all day and they don’t do anything except be loud an annoying. You know what improved the morale and safety of my neighborhood in less than two weeks?

A new taco stand. I’m 1000% serious.

In general street food vendors on a block means more pedestrian foot traffic round the clock, if they’re open late, that’s more eyes in a neighborhood. Additionally in an area with many dark empty storefronts, literally adds light and vitality to the area.

More of the neighborhood is meeting each other waiting in line for nearby tacos. I met people three houses down I didn’t know. It feels like we’re all only now getting to know each other, over a torta and some soda.

They also posted up at a bus stop and out open until 2am. Meaning people waiting for a bus stop are not longer waiting alone in the dark. There’s a noticiable air of camaraderie, safety and enthusiasm.

Street vendors did more for our neighborhood than the city ever did.

City planners had left the area in disrepair. The vendors literally CLEANED THE BLOCK. THEY PICKED UP TRASH THE CITY NEGLECTS.

I’m serious when I say in the area they posted up, it’s markedly cleaner. This is not the work of the local waste removal services. This is taqueros.

I love this. In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote about the importance of “having eyes on the street” and foot traffic to building successful neighborhoods:

A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:

First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.

Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.

And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.

Tags: books · cities · Jane Jacobs · The Death and Life of Great American Cities · Vanessa Guerrero

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“We should stop training scientists now. It’s just completely obvious that within three years, AI is going to do better than Nobel Laureates.”

is the new

“We should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.”

§

The latter quote is of course from Geoff Hinton, 2016, and it deserves to be the centerpiece in an AI Hype Hall of Fame, along with Elon Musk’s 2019 prediction

“I feel very confident predicting that there will be autonomous robotaxis from Tesla next year — not in all jurisdictions because we won’t have regulatory approval everywhere … From our standpoint, if you fast forward a year, maybe a year and three months, but next year for sure, we’ll have over a million robotaxis on the road.”

Nine years post Hinton, we still haven’t replace a single radiologist, as far as I know. Musk’s robotaxi promise hasn’t fared much better.

§

The “stop training scientists” line at the opening of this essay, said with touch of humor, isn’t a literal quote, it is a composite. It was inspired by Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, who in October 2024 promised us AI “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields – biology, programming, math, engineering, writing” as early as 2026. It was also inspired by his co-founder Jack Clark, who more less just promised POLITICO essentially the same, “We have this notion that in late 2026, or early 2027, powerful AI systems will be built that will have intellectual capabilities that match or exceed Nobel Prize winners.” And it was inspired by the physicist Max Tegmark, who a few days ago endorsed the above position with such certainty that he chided his MIT colleagues for not the (alleged)“coming tsunami”.

I think this is absurd beyond words. So absurd, and so beyond words that I made up a graph instead:

As one person on X put it, in reply to Tegmark,

Al can also "almost" drive a car. It can also "almost" draw a picture of a full glass of wine. So yeah, it can also "almost" make novel scientific discoveries.

Per the 80:20 rule I described a few days ago, it’s easy to make demos; 80% of driving, 80% of some scientific problem, etc. Getting the last 20% is often really really hard.

Augmenting scientists versus replacing them

I don’t doubt that AI built in 2026 or 2027 will be valuable to future Nobel Laureates. Human scientists will get plenty of leverage from AI (just as they did with databases, calculators etc). But I highly doubt that in the next few years AI’s will conceive of and execute Nobel-caliber work on their own. Even in the best work, like Google’s new AI co-scientist, humans scientists are still choosing the research goals.

That is not going to magically change next year, at a time when AI still can’t reliably solving river-crossing problems. (Heck, if you look closely at the picture at the top, Grok doesn’t even seem to know that Elon Musk doesn’t have a twin.)

The reality is that (a) Nobel-calibre science is a lot harder than driving, which we still have not reliably solved, and (b) Nobel-calibre science requires sound logic, reliable causal reasoning, and originality, and none of those are firmly in the grasp of current AI. Worse, I think the DOGE world will lean on these absurd predictions to justify the outrageous cuts of scientific institutions.

Science needs every bit of help it can get right now. Playing make-believe with predictions isn’t helping.

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Gary Marcus wishes that just once a prominent person spouting these AGI-is-imminent predictions would agree to public, moderated debate.