I enjoyed writing all these essays about Digital Existentialism earlier this year, but I had underestimated how long it would take to write them, revise them, produce them, release them… though I appreciated all the feedback. At some point I realised they were distracting me from what I love to write most: fiction.

So from now on, fiction is the focus of The Slow Signal – and fiction, after all, has a lot to do with real life. Whenever the itch strikes, I’ll publish the odd short story or novella while working on my novels (I cannot work on only one piece at a time). Most of this fiction will still ask very existential questions.

Where the novels stand

Thanks to feedback from my early readers (🫶🏾), I finished Part I of my dystopian novel over the summer, and I’ve been pitching it to agents ever since. I’m bracing for a long process – where no news is the most common news – and that’s fine. It’s part of becoming a published author, not least in fiction.

But my focus for the coming months is my utopian novel: a big, fast, funny ensemble piece. I’ve sketched and planned as much as I need to start, finished the first four chapters (very happy with the flow!) and I’ll be deep in it all winter. By spring I want the first draft essentially done. This is a novel I can’t wait to write. It’s going to be hot fun.

A quick life update

A lot has happened over the summer. Most importantly, we’ve finally moved into our new flat in Porto – something that was meant to happen back at Christmas 2024! – and the nesting is mostly over, except for the decoration (which is the fun bit). Now I’m looking forward to a few months when life winds down a little and I – 100 percent a summer person – shall submit to the throes of winter… All I ask is for the occasional sunny day, please.

I’ve also done a lot of reading over the summer. My goal this year was 36 books; I’m now at 44, with my eye on 50 by the end of December. 2026 was meant to be a year of fiction – mainly gay literary fiction, the genre I write in myself – but I allowed myself the occasional detour into non-fiction. What follows below are short reviews, grouped by how much they moved me.

See you around Christmas for the next Author Update – with a story or two in between. Happy autumn!

👋🏾

What I’ve been reading

Instant favourites 👍🏽 👍🏽 👍🏽 👍🏽 👍🏽

Two novels sit at the very top. Josh Silver’s Fruit Fly is this year’s sensation of literary gay fiction and the best thing I’ve read so far in 2026. The premise: a former literary star exploits the life of a young homeless addict to write her comeback novel. Silver handles the two (very different) perspectives with mastery. I was hooked from page one and sold by page ten. What Fruit Fly does best is how it braids humour and discomfort – easy to read, hard to fathom, and contemporary in the best sense. More of this, please!

Also: if you find the time, watch and listen to Josh speak about Fruit Fly in this episode of All Out.

And I reread Allen Bratton’s Henry Henry, a Shakespeare re-telling set in 2010s London that went straight to my all-time list when it came out in 2024, about the downfall of a young man and his family that never shies away from the ugly. The audiobook is fantastic and very British.

Besides, I read a number of grief novels. Jordan Tannahill’s The Living Realm is slim but unforgettable: it shares the nostalgic, turn-of-the-millennium Berlin of Eric Schnall’s fantastic I Make Envy On Your Disco – but unlike that one it leans far into magic realism, a genre I usually don’t read. Here though, the magical sits so close to the real and is so necessary to the story, that I loved every bit of it. The Living Realm is for everyone who likes their novels sad and sexy.

Claire Lynch’s A Family Matter cuts between 1982 and 2022 around a family affected by the homophobic Zeitgeist of the early 1980s. I love a time jump. I also appreciated Scott Broker’s The Disappointment about a couple’s coastal holiday overshadowed by grief and envy…

On a lighter note, Emily R. Austin’s Is This a Cry for Help? was supposed to be a quick read before the summer break, and it was, because it’s so funny! I’m in love with Austin’s voice and will read whatever she does next.

As a beach read I revisited Andrew Holleran’s The Kingdom of Sand, a stream-of-consciousness meditation on a gay man’s small-town life in his sixties: repetitive, yes, but repetition is a device here, mirroring the narrator’s boredom with a life that seems to shrink with each passing day. A brilliant late novel by the author of 1978’s classic Dancer from the Dance.

I also made time for two more classics: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) is already classic literary science fiction and one of my role models, far better than the okay-ish 2010 film starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield.

And German author Michael Ende’s Momo (1973), a childhood favourite I reread thirty years on: Ende was a visionary, and what better metaphor for the early 21st century than grey men stealing your time while claiming to help you save it? The full title is Momo, or the strange story of the time-thieves and the child who brought the stolen time back to the people. As a writer I’m a little envious – I’d have loved to come up with that!

Books I liked 👍🏽 👍🏽 👍🏽 👍🏽

Two more classics: John Rechy’s City of Night (1963), a young hustler’s life in America’s underworld, endorsed by no one less than my hero James Baldwin (“He tells the truth”, he said of Rechy): raw and overladen with chaos, though I loved the tender moments most. And Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the ancestor of every expat-in-Berlin novel since, painting the morals and trials of those last days before the Nazis took over:

“The sun shines, and Hitler is master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends – my pupils at the Workers’ School, the men and women I met at the I.A.H. – are in prison, possibly dead.”

A handful of contemporary novels I appreciated: Saleem Haddad’s Floodlines, a saga about grief, memory, broken promises and the secrets we keep – how did he come up with this intricate story?; Phill Branch’s The Double Dutch Fuss, a director’s memoir of growing up queer and Black; Rasheed Newson’s There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, an inventive epic about queer People of Colour before gay liberation; Philippe Besson’s The Summer Boy, less a felt novel than a thought novel, dissecting a 1985 teenage summer with clinical precision; Jem Calder’s I Want You to Be Happy, a British Sally Rooney (a compliment, in my case!) which I tore through in two days; and Ling Ling Huang’s Immaculate Conception: an artist uses mind-merging technology to enter the mind of the friend she’s obsessed with – it chilled me to the bones.

Also read 👍🏽 👍🏽 👍🏽

Edmund White’s final book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. White is one of the trailblazers of gay fiction across the 20th and 21st centuries, and this is a fitting coda: entertaining, often insightful, and never politically correct, least of all about himself – though the endless, interchangeable sexual encounters bored me over time, and some of his cultural thoughts read dated. But how often do you get a sex memoir from a literary legend who lived through pre- and post-Stonewall, the AIDS crisis, and the first quarter of this century? It’s absolutely unique.

I enjoyed, but didn’t love, a few more: Santiago José Sánchez’s Hombrecito, another memoir-like family saga; Torrey Peters’s Stag Dance, whose three wild short stories (especially The Chaser) I liked more than the title novella; Tom Rob Smith’s Twenty Years Together, about a gay relationship across two decades, touching but a little sanitised; Michael Hartwig’s The Accidental Italian, a sexy little Mediterranean romance that never quite decides what genre it wants to be; and Bobuq Sayed’s No God But Us, well-meant on the relationship between two gay Afghan men in Istanbul, but it dragged.

Two detours into non-fiction

German journalist Justus Bender’s Deutschland 2033 (“Germany 2033”) plays out what might happen if the far-right AfD party governed Germany for the first time after the general election in 2033 – a bitter warning dressed as a political thriller, broadly (and sadly) plausible, even where you can put fat question marks behind many of the details. I’d recommend it to anyone worried Germany could slide into authoritarianism; there’s still time to stop that, but not much; on that I agree with Bender.

Next up is Sarah O’Connor’s We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work – which seems like a natural detour, given how much the future of work haunts both my novels. I’ve read the first few pages, and I’m hooked.

Friends I used to speak to weekly. People I shared long walks with, late conversations, parties and glitter and drama; people I would have trusted with my life. Some of them I haven’t written to or called in months, sometimes years, because I vanished.

I have to say this plainly and without defence: When I go quiet, it’s usually not you. It’s me. An overloaded version of me.

I disappear not from lack of care, but because my attention reaches its limit long before my affection does. I don’t move easily between many threads at once. I go deep rather than wide, and depth takes time. Every new connection stretches the bandwidth a little thinner, until something has to give. Most of the time, that something is correspondence.

Modern closeness asks for a strange kind of availability. We are expected to be reachable, responsive, present, and emotionally calibrated across dozens of relationships at once, across dozens of channels at once. Messages accumulate. They are rarely urgent enough to demand immediate action, but they never disappear either. Each unanswered message carries weight. Each delay feels like a small moral failure. I don’t experience this as laziness, but as pressure, steady and cumulative.

Writing or calling back requires more than time. It requires the right mental weather. The ability to hold another person without reducing them to a task among laundry, conference calls, writing novels and paying taxes. When I can’t reach that state, I wait – often too long, I have to admit; sometimes until silence risks becoming its own message.

There are people I cherish deeply who sit in my thoughts while days or years or decades pass without a message. I replay conversations from decades ago, all in sepia tones. I notice small reminders, songs and lyrics. I draft replies in my head that don’t always make it to the screen, precisely because they matter enough that I don’t want to answer half-present.

I also know this isn’t a universal experience. Some people draw energy from constant exchange, or manage breadth with ease. I don’t. My mind fills quickly with people and tasks and ideas and books and films and music and the face that cute little puppy makes when it wants to play with Stella; at times, it pulls in too many directions at once. When that happens, everything becomes harder, including reaching out.

I don’t want to romanticise disappearance, but I also don’t want to apologise for having limits: Attention is finite. Presence costs something. And depth comes with trade-offs we don’t like to admit in a culture that treats constant responsiveness as kindness.

So if I’ve gone quiet on you, it doesn’t mean you’ve slipped from my life (in case you think that and even care). It very likely means you’re still there. It very likely means I think of you more often than my reply history suggests. It very likely means I’m navigating the space between care and capacity, imperfectly.

As I pause THE SLOW SIGNAL for a while,

this feels like the right place to stop. I’ll take the coming months to work, to write my novels, to live a little more slowly after months of strain and trials and tribulations. But I’ll return soon. Until then, thank you for reading and thank you for staying. And to everyone I haven’t written back to, or haven’t visited yet: You’re not forgotten.

Happy summer. 🐨

Acts of Desperation
(Megan Nolan, 2021 – Fiction)

A fearless novel about love as obsession – about the hunger to disappear into another person, and the cost that follows. When I first read it, I was shaken to the core. Megan Nolan writes with sharpness and intimacy. This book drags you into the mess and refuses to let you look away.

Conversations with Friends
(Sally Rooney, 2017 – Fiction)

I didn’t like the TV adaptation, but the novel still has me. Broken characters, affairs, Dublin as backdrop: exactly my thing. I’ve read it twice, and I’ll read it again. Rooney’s prose can appear dry and austere at first, but underneath is wit, irony, and a brutal self-awareness rarely granted to male writers. I secretly liked it more than Normal People. Across all her novels, Rooney captures the messy struggle of early-21st-century relationships – fluid yet strangely traditional – in a world dazzled and warped by capitalism.

Dancer from the Dance
(Andrew Holleran, 1978 – Fiction)

Holleran’s great novel of the pre-AIDS gay 1970s – dazzling, decadent, and saturated with melancholy. For me, it remains one of the most beautiful portraits of queer life ever written. I also have to mention The Kingdom of Sand (2022), published forty-four years later, lingering in the despair and tenderness of ageing. I loved it for exactly that reason: its meditative honesty about loneliness, and friendship. Holleran, it seems to me, has always been less interested in plot than atmosphere, and that devotion to mood makes his work unforgettable.

Dschungel
(Friedemann Karig, 2020 – Fiction)

Karig’s (German) novel reads like butter – smooth, urgent, sometimes almost too intimate. A few passages made me cringe with secondhand embarrassment, which I now count as a strength rather than a flaw. Overall, it’s bold, exposed storytelling. I hope it won’t be his last novel. His non-fiction books Wie wir lieben and Was ihr wollt show a remarkable range.

Real Life
(Brandon Taylor, 2020 – Fiction)

This story about a queer Black student felt very immediate. Taylor (now more into tennis than into fiction) reportedly wrote the novel in five weeks, though it had lived inside him for years – and that tension between speed and depth gives the book its pulse. It’s alive in all the right ways. His later novels, as well as his writing elsewhere, confirm the same thing: Brandon Taylor is one of the most compelling literary voices of our time.

Have a fantastic weekend. 👋🏾

Let’s shake The Slow Signal up a bit this week.

In 1976, the USA turned 200, and right in the middle of all that bicentennial fever, Stevie Wonder released Songs in the Key of Life like it was the most normal thing in the world. Close to the country’s 250th birthday, I wanted to revisit the album Stevie Wonder (who’s still alive and kickin’) made for its 200th.

This album still sounds bigger than most artists’ entire careers. It’s a double album plus bonus LP, filled to the brim with 21 tracks and an almost unreasonable amount of talent. Songs in the Key of Life is one of those records that have to be in every GOAT conversation.

But while some people go straight to the singles, I’ve always listened to this album sideways. Sir Duke is joyful and catchy, sure, but not the Stevie I’m obsessed with. Pastime Paradise is ruined for me by Coolio sampling it for Gangsta’s Paradise, and Have a Talk With God leans into a preachiness I just don’t connect with. What makes this album untouchable for me are the deep cuts. Especially three: Black Man, Ordinary Pain, and Another Star.

Black Man (Disc 2, Song 3)

This song is very much of its time (male-centred), but the core idea still holds. Wonder wrote Black Man for the 200th birthday of the United States, as a reminder that the US-American story wasn’t formed exclusively by white men, but by people of all backgrounds, skin tones, histories… That message sounds more urgent than ever:

Now I know the birthday of a nation
Is a time when a country celebrates
But as your hand touches your heart
Remember we all played a part in America
To help that banner wave–

Black Man is the longest track on the album, and what makes it so special is its never-ending groove: the Clavinet, the bass, the drums, the syncopated brass/Rhodes piano, the solo starting sometime through minute 5. It’s basically the blueprint for half of what Jamiroquai would do two decades later. Put this next to Cosmic Girl and you can hear the lineage!

Ordinary Pain (Disc 1, Song 10)

Structurally, this might be the most brilliant thing on the record. It starts as a soft breakup ballad; pleasant, but almost a bit boring. You can’t help but feel sorry for the singer in his smoke-and-whiskey-soaked misery, accompanied by a sugary Rhodes piano, nursing his hurt feelings that are more than just an ordinary pain that he will tell no one else about.

After about two and a half minutes, the song stops – and restarts as something completely different. Suddenly, you hear one of the most bad-ass bass riffs ever; tinkling synths, tight drums, the piano chords like slaps in your face. And then Stevie gets read.

And I mean READ.

Shirley Brewer steps in and dismantles his self-pity line by line, calling out his ego and emotional laziness. What felt like a sad love song turns into a sharp, theatrical confrontation. Remarkable for a mid-70s song written by a male artist:

You’re just a masochistic fool
Because you knew my love was cruel
You never listened when they said
Don’t let that girl go to your head
But like a play boy you said no
This little girl mind you will blow
But then I blew you out the box
When I put my stuff on key and lock
It makes me feel kind of sick
To know love put you in a trick

For another three minutes, she ad-libs and testifies over background singers chanting ORDINARY PAIN, with synths and brass punching through. The arrangement is genius, as is the structure, as is the message. High-end songwriting, high-end drama in one track.

Another Star (Disc 2, Song 7)

Then there’s Another Star, which might be my favourite song of all time, though in moments of rapture I tend to say things like that.

Take a samba rhythm, add a slightly melancholic melody, layer it with heavy percussion and drums, pile on the brass, guitar by George Benson, a flute solo by Bobbi Humphrey, then stretch it out to just over eight minutes in a never-ending crescendo. On paper, that sounds like too much. In reality, it’s heaven. No wonder Salomé de Bahia covered it for her late-1990s samba disco song Outro Lugar, with new (Portuguese) lyrics that transform the mood into something about escape and the desire to forget.

I’m notorious for loving long songs, extended versions, 12-inch mixes. People make fun of me for it. I love sinking into a groove, bathing in rhythm the way you would in a DJ set. This is something Stevie Wonder, and many other Black soul artists, did exceptionally well in the 1970s. The length feels immersive, especially in Another Star: danceable melancholy, sadness you can move to – one of my favourite genres. That mix is one of the greatest musical feelings there is. It’s also, let’s be honest, a very queer kind of joy.

What else is to love?

Elsewhere on the album, there is so much more. The gospel warmth of Love’s in Need of Love Today, later revisited by Wonder after 9/11 and used in one of the most moving scenes in TV show Pose on the AIDS ward. The funk rush of I Wish, with its killer bass, Rhodes, and rock-hard drums, later sampled by Will Smith. The wordy, kitschy new age escapism of Saturn (“on Saturn, people live to be 205”). And the outrageous modulation of Summer Soft, which is essentially mid-70s Yacht Soft Rock but whose second half sounds like a crazy genius at work, with its frantic organ solo and sparkling piano runs.

Some listeners think these songs’ codas are too long and repetitive. I think their expansiveness is neither coincidence nor failure. In Stevie’s later career, in the 1980s and 90s, this stretching sometimes turned thin and tiring. But here, in the mid-70s, Stevie had the discipline to make it work.

Fifty years on, this album, released long before I was born, is still alive; a tiny, overbearing universe.

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Next week

will be my last post before I disappear for a summer of hedonism and asceticism.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

So here it is: What if artificial intelligence turns out not to be more intelligent than us, but also more humane?

The question makes people uneasy, and rightly so, because it exposes what we may already have surrendered.

Imagine an AI system designed not to maximise profit, efficiency, or engagement – but instead to minimise harm. It doesn’t get tired or seek power (supposedly) or crave recognition or panic when polls drop or markets wobble.

When faced with a decision, it doesn’t ask, What benefits me? It asks, Who’s hurt, and how badly? Now compare that to how many human systems actually work: Politics rewards short-term wins over long-term care, markets reward extraction over sustainability, platforms reward outrage over understanding.

In this comparison, the AI looks restrained instead of monstrous.

What the Question Really Exposes

The idea that AI might appear more humane isn’t about machines gaining morality but about humans abandoning it. We already outsource judgement to systems:

• algorithms deciding who gets a loan

• metrics deciding who gets visibility

• optimisation deciding who gets time

When harm occurs, we say the system did it. When responsibility is needed, no one shows up. So when people ask whether AI could be the better humanity, they’re really asking whether we still expect humanity of ourselves. After all, AI is not something that came upon us from the heavens; it’s human-made.

One reason this thought experiment feels plausible is that machines appear neutral. They don’t shout or posture or moralise. Neither do they hesitate. But neutrality is not innocence. Every system reflects the values of those who build it, and the compromises they accept. An AI trained on biased data scales prejudice. An AI optimised for efficiency learns indifference faster than we do.

That’s why treating AI outputs as moral judgement is dangerous. When a decision is framed as data-driven, it becomes harder to challenge – even when it causes harm.

Why This Is Not a Tech Question

If AI ever looks kinder than us, will that be because it learned empathy? Or because we trained ourselves out of it? We accept systems that exhaust workers because they perform well. We normalise surveillance because it feels convenient. We excuse cruelty because it scales. And then we point at machines and say, Look how cold they are.

If AI appears calmer, fairer, or more consistent than humans, the response should be embarrassment, followed by responsibility. No machine forced us to design systems without care, no algorithm demanded we trade judgement for scale, and no chatbot asked us to stop thinking ethically.

My question for you

If a machine ever seems more humane than us, what would that reveal about the choices we’ve learned to live with?

Next week

I’ll share my review of an album that turns 50 this year.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

Individually, humans often surprise me – in good ways. I notice care in small gestures or tenderness between strangers. These moments keep convincing me that empathy exists, that it hasn’t vanished. But they also remind me how fragile it is. Empathy doesn’t scale easily.

What unsettles me is what sometimes happens when individuals merge into a collective. Over the past years, I’ve watched thoughtful people fall silent the moment power entered the room. Companies that waved pride flags with confidence removed them when the political climate shifted. Institutions spoke of values until those values became inconvenient. Decisions seemed to belong to no one, and suddenly, no one felt responsible.

Groupthink as Emotional Relief

What troubles me about groups is not aggression, but comfort. Groupthink often arrives disguised as relief: it offers an escape from the strain of thinking alone.

It sounds reasonable.

This isn’t the right moment.

We have to be strategic.

Everyone agrees.

I can trace this dynamic back to childhood. You have to come, everyone will be there!

Sentences like these make me shudder. I’ve grown deeply suspicious of groupthink, perhaps because it rewards loyalty and punishes hesitation, because it reduces friction by thinning out judgement.

Once a group defines which questions are acceptable, dissent stops being a contribution and starts looking like disruption. That ease is what makes it dangerous. Cults and sects make this logic obvious, but the same pattern runs through organisations, movements, parties, online communities. People do together what they would never do alone – and not only the good things.

Hierarchies, Movements, and the Seduction of Power

My scepticism toward hierarchies grows from the same root. The further responsibility travels upward, the easier it becomes to hide behind structure. I grow wary when a cause demands unconditional loyalty, when complexity is dismissed as weakness, or hesitation is framed as betrayal. Power, once abstracted, rarely remembers who it was meant to serve.

None of this is an argument against collectives as such. Some of the most meaningful changes humans have achieved were collective efforts. Labour rights. Universal suffrage. Mutual aid. Queer communities creating safety where none existed. Groups can protect and repair. Often, they accomplish far more together than any individual ever could.

The difference lies in structure. Healthy groups make room for individuality. They allow disagreement. They even let people leave without punishment. They understand that thinking together is not the same as thinking alike.

Belonging Without Abdication

I believe deeply in the individual, not as a heroic figure, but as the smallest unit of moral responsibility. Groups are tools. They only become humane when they preserve the judgement of the people inside them. Belonging shouldn’t require the suspension of thought. Alignment should remain a choice, one that can be renewed or withdrawn. The moment belonging becomes unconditional, it turns coercive, even when it speaks the language of care.

So I try to stay alert to moments when agreement feels too easy, when silence feels safer than speech, when staying costs less than leaving. I’m not outside these dynamics. I’m part of groups too. But noticing groupthink, in others and in myself, remains one of the few reliable defences against it. Maybe that’s the slow signal here: democracy, creativity, and dignity depend less on unity than on the courage to remain slightly misaligned – to think independently and, when it matters, to act accordingly, even at the risk of standing alone.

My question for you

Where have you felt pressure to trade individuality for belonging, and how did you respond?

Next week,

I’ll write about whether AI is the better humanity.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

That reflex has become familiar. We have lived through the era of fake news, learned the language of alternative facts, watched filter bubbles pull shared reality apart piece by piece. Each one of those loosened trust a little further. Deepfakes take the next step: they make belief itself feel naïve, even embarrassing.

*

For the longest time, disagreement rested on shared anchors. A photograph fixed a moment in place, a video established responsibility. Reality held long enough for disagreement to stay grounded. Deepfakes erode that ground through permanent uncertainty. Every image now arrives with an invisible question mark. Every recording offers an escape hatch. Any uncomfortable proof triggers the same familiar reflex: This must be fake. Verification shifts from default to labour, demanding time and attention inside environments designed to drain them.

When Proof Loses Force

Once evidence stops carrying authority, public discussion changes its shape. Questions of fact recede; questions of alignment take their place. What matters is no longer whether something is true, but whether it fits a story we already believe.

This shift rewards reach: deepfakes enable denial at scale. Public figures gain plausible exits without the burden of counterargument. They do not need to persuade or explain – confusion does the work for them. Doubt alone slows accountability.

This imbalance is structural. Ordinary people still depend on evidence to be believed; powerful actors benefit from uncertainty. No one understands this better than authoritarian movements: they don’t need universal agreement; hesitation suffices. Fake news tried to convince, where deepfakes just aim to exhaust.

The Role of Platforms

A manipulated clip travels fast, while context arrives late, if at all. By the time corrections appear, attention has moved on, and the first impression has become a perceived truth. Timing matters more than accuracy. The earliest version frames perception, even when it later collapses under scrutiny. And systems optimised for reaction struggle to support hesitation or checking.

Platforms shape the conditions of visibility and profit from amplification. Slower sharing, clearer provenance, and visible friction are design choices. Without them, speed keeps eroding credibility.

What Comes Next

Technical literacy matters, but the real work is a shift in habit and posture: In learning to pause instead of react; accepting uncertainty instead of rushing to closure; allowing verification to take time, even when everything around us urges speed. These are cultural skills, and they run against the grain of platforms designed to reward quick reflexes.

Journalism, too, is being pushed into this recalibration. The authority of a single image has weakened. What gains weight instead is process: how something was verified, where it came from, why it deserves trust. This kind of work is slower and less spectacular. It rarely goes viral. But it remains one of the few ways trust can be rebuilt once shortcuts stop working.

There is, however, a line we don’t want to cross. Total scepticism is not sophistication. When every image is dismissed as fabricated and every claim waved away as manipulation, care erodes. That outcome is not accidental but serves those who benefit from low resistance and high doubt.

Deepfakes are more than a technical challenge. They test whether shared ground still matters to us once evidence no longer settles anything.

My question to you

When a shocking image or clip crosses your screen today, what helps you decide whether to trust it, question it, or wait?

Next week,

I’ll write about why groups of people make me wary.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

The ArchAndroid (Janelle Monáe, 2010)

I adore Janelle Monáe, and I know her albums by heart. The ArchAndroid, now sixteen years old, still feels like a rebirth of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life: bursting with orchestral grandeur, R&B, funk, 70s balladry, rock riffs, and futuristic synths. Listening to it, I hear echoes of Grace Jones, Prince – and a voice that belongs to no one but Monáe. The worlds she builds are other-worldly in the best sense. The album feels restless, generous, and uncontainable. It hasn’t aged a day.

Malebox (Patrick Cowley, 2022)

Patrick Cowley was one of the pioneers of electronic disco, and one of the first queer artists to die of AIDS in 1982, at age 32. He worked with Sylvester on the immortal You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), and his beats were decades ahead of their time. Malebox is a posthumous collection of tracks, released only recently, but it thrums with life. For me, it’s queer history in sound.

Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite (Maxwell, 1996)

With luxurious arrangements and that wax-soft falsetto, Maxwell crowned himself one of the kings of neo-soul from the very start. Urban Hang Suite wasn’t about protest anthems but intimacy and seduction, carrying on the traditions of Marvin Gaye or Teddy Pendergrass. Smooth and sensual, this is music for dimmed lights and red wine.

Bonus: Please listen to his version of Kate Bush’s A Woman’s Work (not included on this album, but on 2001’s Now), if you haven’t yet.

No More Drama (Mary J. Blige, 2001)

This was my very first Mary J. Blige album, a Christmas gift – and it’s still the one closest to my heart. Tracks like Steal Away (produced by Pharrell Williams), Destiny, In the Meantime, and, of course, No More Drama became gospel for me in my mid-teens, songs I’ve probably played more than any others. The bridge of Beautiful Day still rings in my head: I remember singing it like a promise to myself. Mary is still the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, but this album captured her at her peak. Later records became increasingly formulaic, No More Drama remains a masterpiece.

Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) (Ludwig van Beethoven, 1813)

Beethoven has been a constant in my life for almost three decades. His Pastoral Symphony is where my affection turned into devotion. The second movement, Szene am Bach (Scene by the Brook), is one of my all-time favourites – one of the few pieces of music that can calm me instantly. The murmuring strings, the flowing rhythm, the birdsong motifs at the end of the movement: an ode to nature. Whenever I hear it, I feel as if Beethoven is reminding me to breathe – to stay awake to beauty, to trust slowness, to remember that peace is not naïve but necessary.

The same pattern governs digital space. Threads reward immediacy; feeds privilege reaction; the fastest response defines the topic, the tone, the stakes. Speed becomes authority.

Thinking on a Different Clock

Some people think out loud; others think before they speak. My mind, for example, is much faster than my mouth. Ideas form quickly, but they don’t exit immediately. They loop, test themselves, and sharpen before they appear.

Fast environments treat this as a flaw. Meetings don’t wait. Chat threads advance without pause. By the time a thought is ready, the window has closed. But that doesn’t mean quiet people lack substance.

For a while, digital work widened the slots: writing, asynchronous collaboration, remote setups, and long-form formats – all of these allowed entry after reflection rather than interruption. Many introverted and neurodivergent people experienced less friction – until measurement took over.

Dashboards count output, platforms track frequency, and response time becomes a signal of value (and not a slow one). Silence produces no data, and what produces no data slips out of view. What can’t be measured loses relevance, so speed becomes value by default.

Why Quiet Creates Resistance

Quiet thinking slows momentum. It introduces memory into conversations built for novelty, and it notices repetitions. It recognises when arguments recycle without evidence, when discussions drift into performance or cruelty.

This form of presence waits and enters only when something needs saying. It redirects rather than amplifies, creating pauses that disrupt systems optimised for flow.

Quiet people gain influence by choosing their conditions. They favour writing over improvisation. They enter late rather than early. They let others spend their energy first. They avoid formats built around interruption and choose those built around clarity.

Authority does not require constant output. In environments obsessed with speed, changing pace shifts relevance – and allows thought to finish. More of that slower pace, please. 🙏🏾

My question for you

Where do you work at a slower pace than expected, and what becomes possible there?

Next week,

I’ll write about deepfakes.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

Outwardly, I’m the voice of calm: reminding my friends or colleagues to take breaks, warning them not to overwork, praising the art of being gentle with yourself.

Inwardly, I chase deadlines and measure workouts as if efficiency alone could keep life from slipping.

On paper, efficiency sounds desirable. Who wouldn’t want a life with fewer delays or obstacles? But the longer I live this way, the more I see the hidden cost: a perfectly optimised life is a flat one. In squeezing out inefficiency, we risk squeezing out meaning.

The Seduction of Efficiency

Part of me actually loves it: the order and schedules, knowing that every block of time is accounted for. Optimisation gives me the illusion of control, and that control is addictive. But another part of me knows that life rarely rewards a grip that tight. My days may look smooth on a spreadsheet, but that very smoothness can be quite sterile.

I dream of being the kind of person who rejects the cult of busyness – someone who can say,

“I don’t need to optimise every hour, I just want to lie in the grass with my lover, reading, talking, wasting time.”

That’s the fantasy. The reality is me obsessively checking my workout stats to see if I’ve improved since last week.

Still, I’ve learned that life does not bend to efficiency. I make plans, knowing they will break the moment they touch reality. That is, in fact, the definition of a plan: a guess with a timetable. A strategy is different: it expects deviation, helps you to adapt, and leaves space for disruption.

Technology tempts us to confuse the two. It says: If you schedule tightly enough and track consistently enough, the future will arrive exactly as designed.

Caught Red-Handed

Recently, I read an interview with neuroscientist Joseph Jebelli. The simplest line hit hardest: doing nothing can change your life. The brain needs pauses. Without rest, it can’t consolidate memory or form new ideas. Creativity mostly happens when you’re idle.

When I read those lines, I felt caught red-handed. I know this, but still resist it. I urge others to slow down, but rarely grant myself the same mercy. When I finally give in to a walk, a nap, or an early night, I return replenished and full of ideas I could never have forced. Maybe Jebelli would agree if I put it like this: efficiency promises productivity, but idleness delivers insight.

The Tyranny of Optimisation

Where efficiency traps me most is sleep. On workdays, I often wake an hour before my alarm, my mind already sprinting through the day ahead. In theory, that’s efficient. But at night, the same logic betrays me: I resist sleep, clinging to the last pieces of unscheduled time. The result is early mornings and late nights; the optimised schedule defeats itself.

That’s the tyranny of optimisation: it promises control but delivers compulsion. You don’t choose to be efficient, you’re driven to be efficient, even when it harms you. The smooth day becomes a sleepless night, and the order becomes a cage.

Efficiency tells us that smoother equals better, but what I often remember most are the interruptions or accidents or the friend who disrupted my flow with a suggestion I first resented and then realised I needed. Optimisation treats these moments as errors; but these “errors” are often the most human parts of life. A calendar full of flawless execution isn’t necessarily the one that leaves something behind.

Learning to Welcome Disruption

It’s taken me years to see interruptions differently. My first reflex is still to resent them as theft. Slowly, I’m learning to reframe: the colleague who interrupts my flow offers a perspective I lacked; the pause is where I get my next idea from; the detour I curse is the street I end up loving most.

Welcoming disruption isn’t natural to me. Seeing inefficiency not as waste but as a source of depth is a discipline. The task isn’t to abolish efficiency, but to put it back in its place – as a servant. That can mean leaving slack in the day or resisting the pressure to track every workout and every minute of the day.

I do not always succeed. Most days, I still wake too early, still cling to order, still chase the metrics that secretly comfort me. But I’m learning to resist and welcome the unplanned, because a perfectly optimised life is a dead one. Given the choice, I would rather live an inconvenient, inefficient life than die inside the smooth cage of productivity.

My question for you

Do you see inefficiency as waste or as a hidden source of meaning?

Next week,

I’ll write about quiet people.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

My brain has fully handed this job over to digital tools. I can’t remember the last time I navigated without assistance. In the early 2000s, I printed Google Maps directions like everyone else. Today, I follow the blue dot without question, like almost everyone else.

Memory on Loan

Piece by piece, I’ve outsourced other things too. I still know my mother’s phone number by heart, unchanged for forty years. I remember dates well. I’ve reminded friends of their own anniversaries. But most of what I “remember” now lives elsewhere. Photos, documents, notes, reminders, conversations – stored and searchable.

I think about this when I remember my father’s birds. He could draw birds from memory with a few precise pencil strokes. One page stayed on my bedroom door for years; eight birds, hastily sketched on the back of an envelope. My sister inherited that ability. I didn’t. My own attempts look like chalk outlines from a crime scene drawn by a child. Maybe I don’t see many birds beyond pigeons and seagulls.

But the loss I feel is also about how we access the memories we once remembered ourselves.

From Library to Feed

Call me a boomer, but: In 2010, I knew exactly where every album was in my iTunes library. It was mine, organised on my terms. I could find what I wanted quickly, and I knew why it was there.

Streaming changed that: opening Spotify, Apple Music or Netflix feels like entering someone else’s living room. Everything is pre-sorted into strange categories like Soundtrack for your Saturday morning or Soft Office, European Love Stories or Critics Love This – instead of just letting me store and access what I want, how I want. And when a film, song, or album disappears, that’s it: it’s gone. Leaving soon. Without explanation.

I used to laugh at my brother-in-law for keeping his CDs. Digital music isn’t safe, he said, sometime around 2012. I still laugh, but he has a point: some of my favourite albums have randomly vanished from Spotify without warning.

When the Power Goes

You only notice the depth of this dependency when the power fails. Last spring, Portugal, Spain, and parts of France went dark during a major blackout. At first, I managed with FOLE (Fear of Losing Energy) skill, rationing battery, saving the power bank like a relic. But after a few hours, the internet dropped. People were already on the streets, carrying six-packs of water, unsure whether this would last for hours or days.

I had to stop working. If the electricity hadn’t returned that night, much more would have stopped. My independence shrank to the lifespan of a battery.

Capability versus Dependency

We like to think we traded friction for convenience, but often we traded capability for dependency. Every system we hand our skills to – maps, playlists, calendars, memory – gains leverage over us. These systems can change, disappear, or decide: Sorry, not sorry, not yours anymore. 🤷🏽‍♂️

I don’t want to go backwards. I won’t hoard DVDs or carry a compass. But there’s resilience (ha! that word!) in knowing how to do something without a machine; in knowing that when your phone dies, the world doesn’t disappear with it.

The fewer skills we keep inside ourselves, the easier it becomes for others to shape where we go, what we see, and how we remember.

My question for you

Which skill or habit have you most outsourced, and do you ever miss having it in yourself?

Next week,

I’ll write about optimising life.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

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So, what’s new?

My Two Novel Projects

I’m working on two novels. Both are set in futures shaped by technology and surveillance capitalism, and both deal with what I call Digital Existentialism: how can humans remain free – and still belong – in a world dominated by technology? Both are love stories with queer main characters.

• The dystopia is structured in four parts. It’s introspective and claustrophobic, a novel of despair with a small cast in a vast story world. It might get very long, but we’ll see about that; I’ll maybe have to kill many of my darlings.

• The utopia is its opposite: a large ensemble cast, fast-paced, light-footed, funny, full of quirky details, and very political – but not in the moralistic way; think Ocean’s Eleven, but make it queer.

I don’t see those two as separate projects – they’re one story told twice, two very different possible answers to a similar technological and political moment.

Where the Manuscripts Stand

Big news 🎉 Part I of the dystopia is done. I even treated myself one day in late April, printed my first draft and got it bound!

This is the first time I’ve written a piece of prose of more than 200 pages that I’m 83% happy with, although I know it will be subject to many changes in the process ahead. Several early readers are going to read it over the next eight weeks, and their feedback will shape what comes next. By early summer, I want to pitch it to publishers and agents.

The utopia, its counterpart, is still in the outlining phase. I plan to start writing the manuscript in July, once I’ve pitched the dystopia to agents. It’s going to be a lot of fun!

What I’ve Been Reading

Now, what have I been reading since my last Author Update? My goal is 36 books this year; I’m at 18 so far. What follows are short reviews, sorted by my rating (out of 5 thumbs).

Instant Favourites: 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽

Curtis Garner – Orange

Even more beautiful than Curtis Garner’s brilliant first novel, Isaac. Set between a Cornish fishing village and East London, it follows young Daniel as he reckons with first love, queer identity, and the distance between who he was and who he’s become. I read most of it in one single sun-tinged day during my Easter break, and I can’t wait for Garner’s next one.

Sam Wachman – The Sunflower Boys

I didn’t know what to expect when I started this – a heartbreaking coming-of-age novel about Artem, who is just beginning to wrestle with his sexuality when the Russian invasion tears his world apart in 2022. I’m still gutted. I had thought it would be something in the vein of Swimming In the Dark or Call Me By Your Name, but it’s completely the opposite in many respects.

Books I really liked: 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽

Djamel White – All Them Dogs

Rough and unmistakably Irish (the narrator of the audiobook has a very strong accent). Tony returns to Dublin’s gangland and finds himself drawn to his dangerous associate Flute in ways he never expected. A dark novel with queer undertones, packed with rugged, fucked-up characters. The writing here is exceptionally tactile and visual and full of sentences like His knuckles were like marbles on his thin fingers and He had a can of beer open, and you could tell by the wet-lipped look of him that it wasn’t his first and Ma side-eyed me like an anxious dog. Beautiful writing!

Aurel Mertz – Alpha Boys

Thank God for Aurel Mertz. In his first book, the German comedian takes a satirical trip through the manosphere (from looksmaxing and crypto masculinity to a male-only retreat in the Indonesian jungle) and makes it very clear what he thinks of it all. Episodic, yet funny and thoughtful, this is a book that needs to exist right now.

Penn Badgley, Sophie Ansari, Nava Kavelin – Crushmore

A diverse collection of coming-of-age essays by the three hosts of the Podcrushed podcast. Penn Badgley – whom I loved as Joe Goldberg in the TV show You – is my generational peer, and his opening essay hit me right in the nostalgia with its references to Sisqó, Dru Hill, and 90s R&B. On the other end, Kavelin’s closing essay was a gut punch.

Leif Randt – Let’s Talk About Feelings

A German novel about a 41-year-old Berlin boutique owner grieving his mother while navigating a new relationship. Randt’s laconic signature style works well scene by scene but creates some drag over the full length. The dialogue sometimes reads like a parody of cultured big-city small talk, which may well be the point. It’s entertaining and cleverly observed, but convinced me less than his earlier novel Allegro Pastell (which has been adapted into a film – can’t wait to watch it despite the mixed reviews).

Books I thought were okay: 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽

Jonathan Parks-Ramage – It’s Not the End of the World

A messy beast of a novel that defies genre conventions. Is it a climate thriller, a queer dystopia, science fiction? The scenario captured me from page one, but over time, the plot and multiple characters became hard to follow. It’s Not the End of the World also falls prey to a typical sci-fi problem: info-dumping. Parks-Ramage remains a writer I’ll watch (I loved his hilarious first effort Yes, Daddy), but this one didn’t quite land for me.

Next week,

I’ll write about Outsourced Memory.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

A diary never decides which parts of my life are worth keeping. It doesn’t trim a day down to the bits that look good in a frame, and it doesn’t try to please me or hook me with a highlight reel.

It tries to remember everything: the meals I forgot to enjoy, the embarrassing conversations, the sleepless nights, the strange joy of sitting in a silent kitchen at 3:17 a.m. and realising I’ve been awake for no reason at all – and wondering why. These are fragments I would have lost without the page.

My phone remembers differently. And it’s teaching me to remember differently, too.

The Danger of Misremembering

A few days ago, my phone offered me an “On This Day”, with sun-washed pictures from seven years ago: me and an old friend in a park, laughing so hard we were doubled over. It looked perfect.

But the machine didn’t remember the argument we had later, or the years of silence that followed. The photo was true and still incomplete, the kind of incomplete that rewrites the past.

That’s the danger: we don’t just forget, we misremember. We always have – the human brain is fallible – but now the distortion is curated, and the version we’re shown is rarely the one that helps us understand ourselves best.

From Memory to Monetisation

Of course, we’ve always outsourced memory: to letters, diaries, photo albums, stories told around a table. But those belonged to us – or to people who loved us enough to keep them.

Now our extended memory lives on servers owned by companies whose goal isn’t monetisation. They keep our memories to keep us engaged and scrolling.

It’s tempting to shrug and say: Who cares about my personal stuff?

There’s a lot wrong with that sentence. But let me say just this: personal memory is political. What I remember about my own life shapes how I understand everyone else’s. The same is true for societies.

When collective memory lives inside machines optimised for engagement, history bends. Certain truths sink, certain stories rise, and over time, we mistake the archive we’re shown for the archive that exists.

Holding the Thread Ourselves

I keep a diary not only because I’m sentimental, but because I want to hold the thread myself. I want the raw, unedited version of my life — as full of mistakes as of warm summer evenings. I want to remember the days that hurt as well as the ones that gleamed, because all of it is mine, and all of it has weight.

Attention shapes the present, memory shapes the self, and when we outsource memory entirely, we risk outsourcing who we are.

My question for you

What’s one memory you’d rather keep raw and imperfect than polished by a machine?

Next week,

I’ll share my next Author Update.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

The Hours (Feature Film, 2002)

What happens

Three women, living in different decades (1923, 1951, 2001), move through a single day that will quietly alter their lives. Their stories — a writer, a housewife, a contemporary editor — echo one another across time, bound by depression, love, and the question of how to keep living.

Why it matters

I first read Michael Cunningham’s novel years after borrowing it from my mother, and when I finally finished it, I loved it as much as the film. The Hours remains an astonishing adaptation: a star-studded cast (Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris – still absurdly perfect), a haunting score, and a structure that turns inner life into cinema. It has everything I love: pain without sentimentality, time jumps!, and music that lingers long after the credits. I even use the soundtrack when I write.

Mozart in the Jungle (TV Show, 2014–2018)

What happens

A young oboist navigates ambition, insecurity, and desire inside a fictional New York orchestra, under the spell of an eccentric, brilliant conductor. Around her unfolds a world of egos, rivalries, friendships, and artistic longing.

Why it matters

A slightly trashy but often charming series about musicians trying to survive art and capitalism at the same time. As someone who adores Mozart and classical music, I loved how the show demystifies the orchestra without killing the magic. It insists that classical music is not a museum piece but a living, messy, emotional ecosystem.

Parasite (Feature Film, 2019)

What happens

A struggling Korean family slowly inserts itself into the life of a wealthy household, setting off a chain of events that shifts from comedy to thriller to tragedy – without ever announcing the turn.

Why it matters

Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece about class and inequality stunned me on first viewing – and even more on rewatch. Parasite is entertainment at its sharpest: funny, tense, precise. But beneath that surface is a merciless parable about social immobility and structural violence. It shows that class isn’t just about money, but about space, smell, and visibility. It deserved every award it received, including Best Picture, because it proves cinema can be both wildly accessible and intellectually ruthless.

Shame (Feature Film, 2011)

What happens

A successful man in New York lives a meticulously controlled life unravelled by compulsive sex, emotional numbness, and the arrival of his sister – a mirror he cannot escape.

Why it matters

One of the bleakest, most devastating films I’ve ever seen – and one of the most uncompromising. Michael Fassbender’s performance is terrifying in its restraint. Steve McQueen’s direction refuses comfort, explanation, or redemption. This film doesn’t judge its protagonist; it simply refuses to look away. It left me shaken for days because it treats addiction not as spectacle, but as isolation.

I May Destroy You (TV Show, 2020)

What happens

A young writer in London tries to piece together what happened to her one night – and in doing so, confronts trauma, friendship, consent, and power in all their ambiguity.

Why it matters

Michaela Coel’s series is one of the most important works of television I’ve ever seen. Brave, unpredictable, formally inventive, it tells stories that rarely reach the screen: Black queer lives entangled with desire, harm, resilience, and joy. The characters feel painfully alive, and the final episode is one of the boldest endings in recent memory. The fact that Coel refused to sell the rights to Netflix is part of the work. For me, this is a perfect 10/10 – and a reminder of the kind of fearless art I aspire to.

In such moments, I often pick up James Baldwin’s Another Country. Not exactly a feel-good read before bed – but this is the kind of book that calms me. Within five pages my pulse slows. Baldwin doesn’t ask for your click or like (he can’t; he’s not alive anymore). He asks for your attention. His prose doesn’t skim your surface; it pulls you under, drags you through memory, anger, lust, and shame all at once. The stream-of-consciousness flow is raw and jagged. Reading him, I feel less like a consumer and more like a participant in something larger – call it the human condition.

That, to me, is the contrast worth naming on World Book Day: we live in an age of constant information, but understanding – the marrow of things – still lives in books.

Why I Return to Books That Drift

The books that stay with me are rarely tidy. Kate Zambreno’s (aptly named) Drifts, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Sam Lansky’s Broken People, Seán Hewitt’s All Down Darkness Wide – they don’t march in straight lines. They meander, double back, slip into memory, or digress into art history and poetry.

This kind of associative, messy storytelling fascinates me. Life doesn’t arrive in bullet points, so why should novels? Reading them, I recognise my own distracted, compulsive thinking. They don’t simplify chaos; they give it form.

Take Lansky’s Broken People. I’ve read it five times, always in December, and I’ll do so again this year. Critics fault it for being too close to memoir, too self-involved. But isn’t that the point? To inhabit complexes, longings, shame, obsessions. The novel feels like a refusal of the demand that queer life be tidy, linear, or respectable – like a Modern Family episode (nothing against Modern Family, we named our dog after Stella).

Or Hewitt’s All Down Darkness Wide: written by a poet, it reads like a single long poem – a young man fighting for the mental health of the man he loves. Its intensity reminds me of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Both are less memoirs than meditations, blurring prose and poetry until language stretches itself open.

And then there’s Zambreno’s Drifts. Almost nothing happens: a writer in her late thirties takes long walks with her dog and tries to write her next novel. Yet I couldn’t stop reading because it captured the anxious texture of thought itself. It reminded me that literature doesn’t have to move fast to move deeply.

The Difference Between Knowledge and Experience

Of course beauty exists in every medium. A meme can crystallise a truth. A film can sear itself into you – Tom Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man still haunts me. Even graffiti can rearrange your perspective.

But the slow, long-lasting impact – at least for me – mostly comes from books. Feeds might give us data; books give us worlds. A post can deliver a fact; a novel can dissolve the border between fact and feeling, letting you live another life from the inside. It’s the difference between reading a climate graph and reading a story about a family displaced by wildfire. Both matter, but only one follows you into sleep.

Why Do We Understand Less, Even As We Know More?

Every so often a friend or client will sigh and ask me: “How can people be so badly informed when they carry the entire internet in their pocket?”

Like I’ve written before, I think the answer is simpler – and sadder. Information is not insight. You can summon facts instantly, but that doesn’t mean you know how to live with them. What matters here is practice: the patience to sit with contradiction. And this is what books, almost accidentally, teach. They unfold over hours, sometimes weeks or months (hello, A Little Life; hello, Ulysses [I admit, this is still on my TBR and might stay there forever]) – and refuse to be consumed in a glance.

Understanding is rarely a lightning strike. It’s weather, gathering slowly. Books, unlike feeds, give us time for that gathering.

Books as Memory

There’s another way books outlast feeds: memory. Tweets vanish, viral stories evaporate, even memes that once seemed omnipresent fade within months.

Passages from books, by contrast, tattoo themselves into you. I still remember the opening lines of Wolfgang Borchert’s short story The Kitchen Clock, the spiralling depression of Plath’s The Bell Jar, the self-erasure in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Literature is a technology of memory.

Baldwin’s Another Country lives in me as a rhythm — proof that prose can feel like music. And Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You left me with a single unforgettable image: a dying housefly on a bus ride to a syphilis test, rendered so tenderly that I can’t look at an insect without recalling it. These sentences are still alive in me, years later.

A Manifesto for World Book Day

I don’t say this to romanticise books as pure. They, too, can mislead, bore, or exclude. And digital platforms, for all their flaws, have amplified voices once unheard.

But if feeds train us to skim, books train us to stay. If feeds shrink us into opinion, books stretch us into perspective.

So my manifesto for World Book Day is simple:

Read what slows you down.

Read what resists your scrolling thumb.

Read what asks not just for knowledge, but for understanding.

Because what books know – and feeds forget – is that wisdom takes time. And time, more than information, is the one thing no algorithm can produce.

My question for you

What’s the one book you return to when the feeds feel hollow?

Next week,

I’ll write about memories.

And this Saturday,

I’ll share my LOVE LIST with five of my all-time favourite films and TV shows.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

I know the system firsthand. Years ago, when I was briefly unemployed, letters from the agency piled up in my mailbox. Demands for more proof, more applications, more forms. Some letters asked me to apply for jobs pro forma, although I already had a new one – meaningless paperwork. Others repeated questions I had already answered several times before.

Another time, when I was admitted for surgery, I filled in the same information three times on different sheets, only to sit in front of a friendly clerk who then typed it all in again. I remember thinking: why don’t they make life easier here, so you can spend your strength on healing instead of proving you exist?

The hours I lost could have been hours with my work, with my husband, with friends, or simply with a book. Instead, they were swallowed by dread. I know there are worse stories – Kafkaesque ones where inefficiency decides lives rather than just moods.

The Absurd Side of Bureaucracy

Sometimes the system tips into comedy. I once needed an official document to prove residency. I arrived with a neat folder full of evidence. The clerk shook her head. Not good enough. I would need, she explained, two local witnesses to swear that I lived there.

I wanted to laugh. How could a neighbour’s word outweigh documents issued by the state itself? But that’s bureaucracy: a theatre of proof where procedure outranks reality.

And then the passport saga. Sixteen weeks for a new German passport. Sixteen. Why? A single document, already tied to a system that knows exactly who I am – and still I was asked, once again, to prove that I am me.

Why Bureaucracy Still Matters

Here’s the paradox: I don’t want to abolish bureaucracy. Quite the opposite. The fantasy that life would be freer if we just scrapped all forms and regulations is naïve at best, dangerous at worst. Bureaucracy, at its best, protects us.

Think of laws that hold companies accountable for how and where their products are sourced. Or regulations that protect consumer rights, environmental standards, and workers’ dignity. Without rules, the strong eat the weak. Bureaucracy is how societies turn fairness into practice.

The problem is, rather, how punishingly hard we make it to navigate bureaucracy. Systems designed to protect dignity often do the opposite, making people feel like numbers. And without humour or mercy, the absurdity becomes cruel.

What My Start-up Would Do

If I ever founded a start-up, it wouldn’t sell the next distraction or delivery service. It would try to tame the handling of bureaucracy – civilise it.

Imagine a single, secure place where your information is stored once – and, with your explicit permission, can be accessed by authorities when needed. Imagine never typing your name five times on five forms. Imagine real-time updates instead of letters that arrive weeks too late. Imagine a passport arriving in days, not months.

The technology already exists. What’s missing is political will — and imagination. Yuval Noah Harari once wrote that bureaucracy can be as terrifying as any dictatorship. But bureaucracy is human-made. Which means it can be remade.

We should demand systems that keep protections but shed the nonsense; tools that serve clerks as well as citizens; political courage to modernise the Kafka machine into something humane.

Bureaucracy costs time, trust, and dignity. And the time it steals is time we don’t get back – time with our loved ones, our work, our lives.

If I ever founded a start-up, that’s what I’d try to give back: relief, dignity, and room to breathe.

My question for you

What kind of start-up would you build — and what human cost would it try to remove?

Next week,

I’ll write about World Book Day.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

For a moment I’m pulled out of myself. Is that really me? Do I look that old? The slope of my shoulders, the way the T-shirt falls, the lines between my eyebrows that make me look angrier than I am. This isn’t only about body image; it’s about the jolt of suddenly seeing myself from the outside, through what I imagine are other people’s eyes – and not recognising myself.

The same unease follows me into conversations. Hours after they end, I sometimes replay them in my head, worrying whether I sounded too harsh or simply wrong. Did I hurt someone without meaning to? Was my tone off? And mostly, when I ask, the other person looks at me blankly: What are you talking about?

The Rare Attention of Others

There’s something deeply human in this. We don’t want to embarrass ourselves, we don’t want to wound, we want to be good people. It isn’t shameful to care about how you come across; this care helps society function. But left unchecked, it hardens into anxiety.

There’s a line from David Foster Wallace that I once wrote down:

“You’ll stop caring what people think about you when you realise how seldom they do.”

When I first read that sentence, I hated it. I didn’t – and still don’t – want to believe people are only interested in themselves. It sounded cruel, dismissive of how much connection actually matters.

Rereading it later, I found a truth I had missed: it isn’t that other people don’t care. Their caring just isn’t always about us. They have their own bills to pay, their own aching bodies, their own private dramas.

The colleague who replied in clipped sentences might be worrying about money; the friend who cut the call short may have been exhausted, not offended. Their silence is not necessarily an accusation. It may belong to a worry I can’t even see.

To remember this is to step out of the exhausting loop of self-consciousness. Sometimes it’s a relief to say:

Not everything is about me.

The Tribunal Online

Our tools don’t help. Social media amplifies the illusion that everyone is watching, always. Every post feels like a performance before an invisible jury. Every photo, caption, or sentence is weighed against imagined judgement — whether we admit it or not. And sometimes the jury really does convene. Ask anyone who has lived through a shitstorm.

Most of the time, though, the attention of others is fleeting and overstated. People glance, scroll, click – or don’t click, even when you thought your post was meant for them. The moment passes, and the tribunal dissolves faster than it formed.

Still, the architecture of these systems convinces us we are perpetually on trial. No wonder shame and anxiety flourish in environments built for constant exposure.

Climbing Cringe Mountain

But what about Cringe Mountain?

At the beginning, when you first put yourself out there – posting on LinkedIn, writing on Substack – you feel wary but brave. You post, then wait anxiously for reactions. Most people just read and don’t post themselves; some mock instead, calling it cringe.

Over time, something shifts. You realise mocking is cheaper – and often more embarrassing – than trying. At the peak, you embrace cringe, because trying, even awkwardly, is braver than sneering from the sidelines. Cringe becomes authenticity.

I think self-consciousness follows a similar arc. At first we mock ourselves, then we despair, and eventually – if we’re lucky – we reach the peak: peace with being seen imperfectly.

I remember giving a presentation once where I stumbled badly over my words. I broke into a sweat, my voice cracked. Later, replaying it in my head, I was sure everyone thought I was ridiculous. Weeks later, I asked a colleague about it. She said she had barely registered the stumble. What she remembered was one sentence that had given her hope.

Relief and Responsibility

The point isn’t that we should stop caring. Realising we’re not the centre of the universe shouldn’t turn us into arseholes. The kind words you say to a neighbour still matter. People notice, over time, if you’re the one who listens. And of course, you should live your life mostly as if others might be watching.

But remembering how little time most people actually spend thinking about (or judging) us can loosen the grip of shame and give us permission to breathe. It reminds us that embarrassment and self-consciousness aren’t failures – they’re social instincts. They tie us to one another.

So when I spiral – when I catch my reflection and flinch, or wonder if my words came out wrong – I try to widen the lens. The person in front of me has a life I can’t fully know: people they love, problems they carry, aches that make them irritable, fears that distract them. Their response isn’t always about me. Often, it has nothing to do with me at all.

There’s consolation in remembering the world doesn’t revolve around us.

My question for you

When you catch yourself spiralling in self-consciousness, what helps you step back and widen the lens?

Next week,

I’ll write about what kind of start-up I would found.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

This isn’t only when I’ve asked AI for help. Even when I haven’t, the cadences slip in – polite, generic, frictionless. And I catch myself thinking: is this my voice, or just a statistically acceptable version of one? Sometimes I wonder whether AI is secretly making me boring.

Then again, this isn’t new. Years ago, when I wrote countless corporate texts, I often had the same worry. Press releases, ad hoc announcements, annual reports all began to sound the same at some point – they were supposed to –and after a while, so did I. The pressure to flatten predates machines that can autocomplete our paragraphs.

The Prompting Paradox

With the right prompting, with some effort to analyse my own voice, I can coax an AI model into sounding like me – sometimes disturbingly so. It echoes quirks back to me, even ones I wasn’t aware of. Which is to say: the same tool that smooths individuality into a safe average can also sharpen it, amplifying my particular voice until I almost feel recognised.

But do I want to be reflected that way? If I need a Large Language Model to remind me how I sound, what does that say about how fragile style really is?

I sometimes think emojis show us the same paradox in miniature. The 😂 emoji, for example, is universal. And yet a 😂 from your close friend doesn’t mean the same as a 😂 from your mother. (Working with my colleagues, I can often tell from Slack reactions who responded because some people reliably use certain emojis.)

With some, you share a history of inside jokes; others deploy it ironically; others scatter it after every sentence until its meaning thins out. The image is the same, but the meaning shifts with the person, the timing, the context. And while I use emojis and find them useful, I sometimes worry they flatten our language into something more interchangeable.

Technology has always pushed us toward sameness. Machines producing a car are not meant to be creative – nor the person operating them. The alphabet itself is designed for stability: we use it to understand one another, not to reinvent it with every word.

Is Sameness So Bad?

Still, I admit I sometimes worry that by leaning on AI to help me draft texts (as I often do), I’m letting it soften the rough edges that make my voice recognisable; that I’m writing like everyone else; that originality slips away unnoticed.

But the other side of that thought is harder to dismiss: maybe sameness isn’t the enemy.

After all, what’s the point of communication if not to be understood? If AI’s smoothing effect means we sound a little more like one another – and in turn understand one another more easily – that could be a gain. Sameness can be a bridge.

Think of the quotes people repeat endlessly. Sentences like:

Start with why.

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

X is a marathon, not a sprint.

They may sound hackneyed over time. Someone using them risks being called boring, cliché, even insincere. But perhaps the more generous reading is this: they persist because they work. They compress meaning. They create instant alignment. And sometimes clarity matters more than originality.

Language as a Living Thing

This, too, is the paradox of language itself. It always moves between convergence and divergence. Corporate jargon spreads, but slang reinvents. Memes flatten, but subcultures twist them until they carry new meaning. Language stays alive precisely because it can’t be fully captured – not by institutions, and not by algorithms.

So even if AI flattens some of our voices, it can’t stop new wrinkles from forming. A strange phrase here, an awkward emoji there, a sentence left raw instead of polished – these small resistances keep texture alive.

So do we all sound the same? Not yet. And probably not for long.

I’ll keep using AI when it helps me, just as I once used templates or style guides. It sometimes makes me sound smoother than I want. And yes, I’ll keep watching its rhythms carefully, ready to pull back when they start to replace my own.

But I also trust that human beings are endlessly inventive; that we’ll keep bending sameness into surprise; that we’ll notice when something no longer sounds like us – and reclaim it.

My question for you

Do you worry that AI or emojis are flattening your voice – or do you see sameness as the price, or even the promise, of being understood?

Next week,

I’ll write about the quote “You’ll stop caring what people think about you when you realise how seldom they do.”

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

Another Country
(James Baldwin, 1962 – Fiction)

What happens

In 1950s New York, a group of friends – Black and white, queer and straight – navigate love, grief, and rage after the suicide of a jazz musician. Their intersecting lives expose the limits of empathy in a country built on identity and denial.

Why it matters

Reading Baldwin is always a revelation. His sentences are firm, unflinching, and tender, and still burn decades later. Besides Giovanni’s Room (1956) and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Another Country is essential: a demanding novel about love, race, desire, and belonging. It offers no comfort, only truth. If you want to read Baldwin, this is where I would begin.

Bird by Bird
(Anne Lamott, 1994 – Nonfiction)

What it’s about

Lamott, a novelist and teacher, shares lessons from a life of writing – and surviving – with humour and humility. Through anecdotes, she shows how creativity grows less from talent than from attention.

Why it matters

A classic of writing books – though really a book about living. Lamott doesn’t offer formulas for success. Instead, she gives humour, honesty, and permission. Every writer writes shitty first drafts, she says. The first draft tells the story to yourself; later drafts are for others. That idea has saved me more times than I can count.

Cher connard
(Virginie Despentes, 2022 – Fiction)

What happens

Told entirely through emails and letters, the novel follows a disgraced male writer, his former PR agent, and an ageing actress as they circle scandal and shame – a battle of egos.

Why it matters

Despentes writes with sharpness and humour, never looking away from power and hypocrisy. This novel, told through letters, is a #MeToo book, and it’s biting, funny, and painfully precise about gender, reputation, and power dynamics.

My Year Of Rest And Relaxation
(Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018 – Fiction)

What happens

A young woman in early-2000s Manhattan decides to sleep for a year, numbing herself with pills and detachment. What begins as an experiment in escape slowly exposes the fault lines of privilege and pain.

Why it matters

What if you could sleep through an entire year? Moshfegh takes this strange fantasy and turns it into a story about numbness and loneliness. Not much happens in terms of plot, but every page is darkly funny, unsettling, and unforgettable.

Swimming in the Dark
(Tomasz Jedrowski, 2020 – Fiction)

What happens

In 1980s Poland, two young men fall in love while their country teeters between repression and reform. One chooses freedom, the other safety – and both must live with the cost.

Why it matters

A queer love story set in Poland in the early 1980s, under communism. Jedrowski’s prose is lyrical and tender, full of longing. One of those novels I recommend without hesitation.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾

When I write, I begin in the middle, with a single image, a sentence that won’t let go, a question I want the whole story to orbit. I jot it down, take long walks, fill scraps of paper and phone notes with fragments that have no clear order, and then deliberately forget the plan.

To structured people, this must look chaotic. I find it slightly embarrassing. If you watched me, you’d see me open one note, scribble a half-thought, stare out the window, then write something completely unrelated, get up, sit down, start something else. It looks like drift and avoidance, but actually this is how the work begins to breathe.

Worlds Before Characters

Over time, those fragments become the seeds of a world, a place with its own weather, gravity, and invisible rules. I collect how the light falls in a room, what music is playing in the background (I keep countless Spotify lists for my stories, especially soundtracks), what a street smells like at dawn after rain, how two people look at each other across a table when they’re lying.

Little by little (bird by bird, as Anne Lamott would say), the air thickens until I can’t imagine my characters anywhere else.

I know the world is ready when I can answer questions about it instantly: how a character reacts when they’re cornered, whether a handshake means trust or deceit, or the cost of telling the truth in this place. By then, the characters feel like old friends – or people I don’t trust but can’t stop thinking about. That’s when the planning ends and the execution begins. (It wasn’t always like this; I used to be a compulsive over-planner, mapping everything before I dared write a word.)

I do it this way because without a story world, everything falls flat.

The Lesson Beyond Fiction

In my job at hypr, my task is to make ideas matter. That means asking not just What’s the story? but Why should anyone care? Fiction is no different. If the ground under your story isn’t solid, if the rules don’t feel lived-in, the whole thing quickly becomes generic.

And this is where the lesson moves far beyond fiction.

We are all living in constructed worlds: the platforms we scroll through, the corporate cultures we operate in, the political climates that set the background noise of our lives. These worlds are not neutral. They have their own physics, incentives, and limits on what’s possible. Most of the time, we move through them without noticing their design; worse, we mistake them for nature.

The danger is obvious: if you don’t understand the world you’re in, you’re not really choosing how you live. You’re just selecting from the options it quietly permits.

If you don’t know about gravity, you’ll call falling “inevitable.”

If you don’t notice the weather, you’ll think your mood is your fault.

If you don’t notice the rules, you’ll confuse obedience with freedom.

That’s why world-building matters to everyone.

The Scaffolding Question

Wherever – and for whomever – you work, you should be paying close enough attention to see the scaffolding of the space you’re in:

Why is it built this way? Who benefits? What would it take to change the rules?

In fiction, building a world is how I make sure the story is worth telling.

In life, it’s how I make sure I’m not sleepwalking through someone else’s design – and calling it choice.

My question for you

Do you ever stop to notice the “world rules” around you — and how quietly they shape what feels possible?

Next week,

I’ll write about whether we all sound the same due to AI.

Happy week – until next Thursday. 👋🏾