Be a Cactus Podcast

Victoria Waddle
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Help for resistant writers, working to bloom. Library censorship news. victoriawaddle.substack.com

  1. 5d ago

    Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and Why I Can’t Stop Reading Nonfiction

    The Future of Nonfiction? Over the next few months, I’d like to discuss some ‘of the moment’ nonfiction I’ve been reading. I say discuss rather than review because I find them all to be good, worthwhile books. Yet, I’ve borrowed these books from the library rather than bought them because I know about their subjects from reading legacy media stories and some paid-subscription to political Substacks. But I want a peek behind the curtain at the players (politicians and billionaires), which these books offer. I still buy other kinds of nonfiction frequently, usually books that look at a historical moment (think Erik Larson’s work as a type— a few of my reviews are here, here, and here) or something newsworthy that I’m not seeing in legacy media (think John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis as a type). Recently, I’ve realized that another reason I put all these current issues books on hold—and then stop reading whatever else I am making my way through (right now The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai)—is because I’m looking for the part where they discuss the possibility that things will be all right. Of course, action—letters, phone calls, canvassing, donations—is what moves the needle, but reading is, I suppose, a way of holding the constant state of anxiety in check. Of taking a measure. I know nonfiction sales are trending downward. Last week, author Leigh Stein discussed in her post “losers v. victims: on declining nonfiction book sales” how authors and publishers should market work by asking what is the book going to give the reader that they can’t already get on the internet for free? I pay for lots of legacy media and several political Substacks, so I’m not getting the info for free on the internet. But I’m not buying the books I borrow from the library. I wonder if my behavior is common. (Do you do this? Leave a comment, please!) Last week in her newsletter The Bottom Line (analysis of the publishing business, partly free, partly paywalled), Jane Friedman included the premium article “Where Nonfiction Is Struggling Right Now and Where It Can Grow.” She summarizes thoughts from Circana’s Kristen McLean at the Association of American Literary Agents’ People of Publishing conference. McLean notes that some of the decline in nonfiction is just cyclical, but that some of the interest has gone elsewhere. “‘[T]he sustained decline in print adult nonfiction reflects volume that has gone to audio, podcasts, short-form news, and other types of reference.’” This is in line with my serious increase of consuming short-form news over the last ten years. Kathleen Schmidt also took up the topic in her Publishing Confidential newsletter this past week with Nonfiction isn’t the Problem: Publishers must understand how and why audiences consume information. The goalposts are constantly shifting. (I’m not sure whether this is paywalled.) If the industry wants the nonfiction market to recover, they must change the way they publish it. This requires analyzing how nonfiction audiences consume entertainment. It also requires an open mind: Maybe it’s not about fully rejecting a nonfiction proposal/memoir, but about molding the content so it aligns with how consumers will discover it. Microdramas have done this with short video episodes, and podcasts have found they’re more likely to be seen and heard through social media clips. The publishing industry’s response to weak nonfiction sales can’t be, “We’ll publish less of it.” or “We’ll only publish celebrity memoirs or people with huge platforms.” If other entertainment sectors can figure this out, so can publishing. I encourage you to read the entire article. Schmidt has some interesting and useful thoughts on memoir, which is the nonfiction most writers I know are working on. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams As most readers know, the title of Wynn-Williams’s book comes from a famous line of The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” At our current moment, most everyone I know relates to the idea that the ultra rich are smashing up the world and the people in it. They deplore Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook) among others. So Careless People was destined to sell well; however, Meta itself seems to have catapulted it to the bestseller list by leaning on a nondisclosure agreement and not allowing Wynn-Williams to speak about the book at any of her promotional events. This created a lot of buzz and interest. (See Brooke Warner’s post A Field Guide to Increasing Book Sales by 300%: Facebook’s Massive Backfire Maneuver in Its Efforts to Silence Author Sarah Wynn-Williams.) We want to get the book to find out what it is that Meta folks don’t want Wynn-Williams saying. Not Just Careless: Weird, Ethically Empty, and Morally Vacuous Wynn-Williams’s bosses at Facebook are so weird, ethically empty, and morally vacuous that I found myself absorbed in the details of their personalities when the truly significant element of the book is how Facebook has harmed people globally, including those in the United States: * Facebook employees were embedded in the Trump campaign in 2016. They targeted potential voters and sent ads that were, quite simply, full of lies. There were no Facebook employees embedded in the Clinton campaign because they didn’t allow it. * In 2017, lies on Facebook helped to incite a genocide against the minority ethnic group of Rohingya. * Facebook worked to get unblocked in China, according to Wynn-Williams, by proposing China-based partnerships, data collection of the Chinese people that would be handed over to the government, and censorship tools. There’s an entire chapter about this, and it’s worth borrowing the book just to read that. The details about Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan (an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who becomes Wynn-Williams’s boss) are, unfortunately, riveting. Zuckerberg is so completely conscienceless and free of all consequences that he can blame his assistants even when he forgets his own passport while traveling. He transforms from someone who doesn’t want attention to someone who craves it. The success of helping Trump campaign in 2016 leads him to consider his own run for president, but he can’t actually be bothered with ‘the people.’ He basically shrugs when an employee in another country ends up in jail due to company policy. He feels like a person who has no human feeling for others. Sheryl Sandberg comes off as bizarre and infantile. She has an assistant buy lingerie for the two of them. She demands that other people take care of her as if she were some sort of baby. She requires employees to sleep with her (by which I mean sleep, not have sex). In one sitting, she fires two makeup artists in China, leaving both in tears. She appears to exist in a perpetual tantrum. Wynn-Williams, who had previously known Sandberg by her ‘Lean In’ persona, soon sees that everyone else needs to lean in to Sandberg with obedience and “closeness.” Sandberg owes nothing in return. In the sexual harassment category of creepy coworkers/bosses, Wynn-Williams gives us the vice president of global policy and her manager, Joel Kaplan. (Kaplan is well-connected politically to Justice Antonin Scalia and George W. Bush.) He pushes up against Wynn-Williams at a work party and makes weird sexual comments. When she is recovering from a particularly traumatic childbirth experience that included a near-death-dealing amniotic fluid embolism, Kaplan emails her and demands weekly videoconferences, asking her where she’s bleeding from. In an internal Facebook investigation he is cleared of any wrongdoing. When Wynn-Williams ends up with a negative performance review, she comments that in her defense, she was in a coma for some of the period when she wasn’t quickly responsive. It’s these sort of workplace details that make this a can’t-look-away reading experience. At one point, Wynn-Williams says that she sees a woman having a seizure on the office floor while the bosses around her ignore her. So—it’s hard to overstate how outrageous the Facebook workplace is. One thing I wondered about was Wynn-William’s defense of working at Facebook. She believed it would be a positive, world-changing company, a powerful force for good. But how could she believe that—or, at least, continue to believe it? Is she just making excuses for herself? I let this question go after being gobsmacked by the narrative. I later read a review By Jessica Traynor in The Dial, (“I Quit Big Tech.” So What?”) that deals with the question. [Note: Traynor’s review also deals with Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil, a book about Google.] “As a story of how Facebook’s moral core was whittled away by its entanglements with foreign governments it is also a salutary tale, but it raises the question — did Facebook have a moral core to begin with? How much can really be expected from a social media network established to rank women’s looks? But Wynn-Williams seems to have seen something entirely different. She deserves kudos for her foresight on the crucial nature of the company in shaping global affairs in the hellish decade that would follow, but I am still at a loss to understand her initial optimism.” “Without victim blaming (and Stapleton in particular pinpoints this as a tool of Google’s control of its workers), it’s hard not to ask: What did you expect? Who joins a tech company, or any corporation for that matter, expecting goodwill? Who moves, as Wynn-Williams did, from the UN into the private se

  2. Oct 11

    Banned in the USA Report; The Use of AI to Ban Books Including Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

    Hello Friends, It’s our week for ‘Library and Banned Books News,’ to which I don’t usually add an audio record. However, I’d like to make an exception this week because I want to include a book review in the discussion. We just finished up Banned Books Week yesterday with “Let Freedom Read Day.” During the week, PEN America published Banned in the USA: National Findings for the 2025-2026 School Year. I encourage you to have a look at it. Meanwhile, I’d like to highlight some of the findings—including the fact that some school districts are using AI to select books to ban. We’ll discuss one of those books after looking at an AI prompt used in the McAllen Independent School District in Texas. Okay, let’s go. A Spotlight on School Book Bans from PEN America Banned in the USA: National Findings for the 2025-2026 School Year Show Continued Assault on Books in Public Schools Some of the key findings * Nearly 12,000 (11,982) books were banned in public schools during the 2025-2026 school year, according to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans. * The majority are YA books * 87% are fiction * The vast majority of recorded book bans this school year came from just two states: Texas and Florida. These states also have by far the most complete record of book bans, owing to public records requests from grassroots organizations, the Florida Freedom to Read Project and the Texas Freedom to Read Project. * This year saw a record number of unique titles banned — 7,370 titles — impacting the creative works of over 4,000 authors, illustrators and translators. * Over 4,500 of these were titles not previously recorded in PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans, the most new titles added to the index in a single year, illustrating the continued expansion of the book banning crisis. * This school year also saw the highest number of school districts (114) banning books in a single school year. Please read the report to see the additional political trends, the data and methodology used in the study, and the list of books banned for the first time (which, oddly, includes Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë). Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The Use of AI in Banning Books The report includes mention of the trend of using AI to ban books. Let’s look at that and at one specific book mentioned in the report: Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell. Here is an AI prompt provided by McAllen Independent School District in Texas in response to a public records request: Note that the novel passes the three-prongs of the Miller Test: it doesn’t appeal to prurient interests, does not depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive manner, and it has literary value. But it appears the AI is scraping any old opinion out there and then deeming it a necessary ban. Eleanor and Park was published in 2012. It was popular in my school library and we had tens of copies. I wrote the following in January 2014, partly because of the feedback some student ‘romance readers’ gave us. Although I called it a romance, I have found since that a closer genre is ‘love story,’ which doesn’t demand the couple be together at the end. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell Eleanor and Park is already popular with some of our readers of realistic teen fiction, but before Valentine’s Day rolls around, I’d like to introduce it to the rest of you who are looking for a good romance. It’s 1986 and the new school year has begun. When Eleanor tries to find a seat on the school bus, she is shut out. People seem to hate her for her appearance—she’s heavy, has long, wild, curly red hair, and dresses weird. People will go on to call her “Big Red” and mercilessly bully her in PE class. But on that first day, Park, who also thinks of himself as different-looking because he is half white and half Korean, finally lets Eleanor sit next to him, although he is very rude to her as he does, using the f-word. And so begins a lovely romance. No, you wouldn’t think so, but both Eleanor and Park are smart kids and can see past the exterior shells. Park realizes that Eleanor likes the comics he reads on the bus in the morning, so he sets copies on her seat each day. He knows that she would like the same punk music he does, if she could afford to buy it. So he makes tapes for her. And they talk about everything they have in common, growing close. What it takes Park much longer to realize is that Eleanor’s home life is a nightmare. Eleanor’s dad is out of the picture. He just doesn’t have any interest in his many children. Eleanor’s beautiful but egoless and beaten-down mom has married Richie—an abusive, perverted, foul-mouthed jerk who won’t allow a door on the bathroom (for starters). They are poor, and Eleanor’s strange taste in clothes is partly due to the fact that there is no money to buy anything except ill-fitting thrift-shop attire. She, her brothers and sister all walk on thin ice daily, hiding from Richie and waiting for him to explode. Which he does with some frequency. The thing about this novel that is so sweet—and so tough—is that Park and Eleanor know that their love has come very early in life. It’s not likely to last ‘forever.’ But what they share is worth having, even if they seem destined for unavoidable heartache. High school housekeeping: One of my coworkers made the astute observation that there are two camps of teen readers when it comes to Eleanor and Park. Although this is a bestseller and super-popular book, we have had several teens bring it back and tell us they couldn’t get into it, didn’t like it. These are mostly girls who are looking for romance books. In talking to them, we generally find that they like formula romance—they liked Simone Elkeles’ and Susane Colasanti’s books. They want the forever part and sometimes more—teens who stay together forever while becoming brilliant artists or scientists. Oh, and rich, of course. If you are a romance reader, I want to encourage you to try Eleanor and Park (and The Fault in Our Stars, of course). Seeing examples of teens who treat one another well in difficult circumstances is a way of becoming that kind of person—of finding an example of love that respects the individual with all his or her quirks. It’s also a way of facing reality and learning that, painful though it is, to have loved and have lost is often worth it. In fact, it may well enrich your life. *** Notice the try ‘something a bit uncomfortable’ suggestion at the end of the review. Having these kinds of books in the school library matters! Teens are becoming adults; they will arrive at that milestone very soon. (Girls will be going to colleges and universities with their own versions of the Cornell 7, for god’s sake.) They have to deal with difficult issues and need to have an awareness of danger in the world. They need to look for the helpers, as Mr. Rogers (and his mom) remind us. Books and Navigating Tough Topics This is a theme I come back to a lot. Here’s a link to an easy-to-read article that hits the main point and has a nice analogy comparing YA novels to being inoculated against a disease. Books Can Help Teens Navigate Tough Topics in Ways Their Parents Can’t (Exclusive Essay) from People Magazine Like many adults, I’d assumed teenagers must be protected from the world’s cruelties as long as possible. But teenagers are already living with hard things, and it’s this reality that makes young adult literature so necessary — and why it’s under siege. The same topics that would earn an adult novel praise as serious and important can be viewed as gratuitous or even irresponsible in Young Adult. I’m not the only pearl-clutching parent, as countless book-banning campaigns can attest. But this response is a fundamental misreading of the genre and of its audience. YA books that depict death, mental illness, sexual violence and predatory relationships aren’t lurid pulp, and they aren’t tainting childhoods. It’s the opposite. They are protective. When we are inoculated against a disease, we are exposed to a small, harmless dose of something dangerous. From this exposure, our bodies learn how to effectively respond to the real thing. In the same way, YA lets teenagers encounter dangerous situations and hard truths in a safe, controlled environment. These books trust their readers. A little break for fun: This article (It’s Banned Books Week. Here’s what Indiana author John Green had to say about it) has a fun embedded video on weird book bans. (In fairness, I’ll add that some of the books were only challenged and then kept on the shelves, so not banned. But the reasons for the challenges are pretty funny.) Includes The Wizard of Oz and Charlotte’s Web. The Individual States California Fresno leaders sound alarm over possible privatization of county libraries from ABC News Residents are being encouraged to attend the Oct. 20 Board of Supervisors meeting to express their feelings about the privatization option. Colorado As Book Bans Persist Nationwide, Anythink Libraries Keeps Challenged Books Accessible Across Colorado from Business Wire During Banned Books Week, Oct. 4-10, Anythink is highlighting its Freedom to Read Collection, a free digital collection that gives Colorado residents ages 13 and older access to ebooks and audiobooks that have been banned, challenged or restricted in schools and libraries nationwide. Indiana It’s Banned Books Week. Here’s what Indiana author John Green had to say about it “Banned Book Week is super important because it brings awareness to the cause of intellectual freedom in the United States, which I think is core to civic life. Authors get a lot of credit for fighting against censorship, but the real heroes of the story are always the teachers and librarians who are working very hard to curate colle

  3. Oct 4

    Banned Books Week! Good News; Sold by Patricia McCormick; Keep Sweet

    Hello Friends, This is not our scheduled week for ‘Library and Banned Books News’. It is, however, Banned Books Week, an annual event highlighting the freedom to read. In the U.S., it’s promoted by the American Library Association. (Is there a Banned Books Read-in near you this week? Check the map.) I know that Amnesty International also promotes it elsewhere. If you are outside the U.S., is it a thing where you are? I’m not going to give the run down of state library news and book challenges now since that’s scheduled for next week, but I want us to take a fun quiz, look at some good news concerning libraries and bans, and then discuss the most banned book of 2025, Sold by Patricia McCormack. (Careless People by Sarah Wynn- Williams has to wait until next time.) And then I’d like to follow up on how my own novel, Keep Sweet is connected to Sold’s theme as well as to the rise of patriarchy in the U.S. While it’s Not Good News, it’s a Fun Quiz PEN America posted an Instagram carousel on Jeopardy’s recent “Restricted Reading in America” category, and we’ll see here how many we can name. If you are an Instagram user, you can use the link and then follow PEN there. Since I’ve read many YA books and follow book bans, this quiz was pretty low-hanging fruit for me. I’ll add the answers in a footnote. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The U.S. Legislative Bills to Ban Books Nationwide are Probably Going to Fizzle Out Could Congress Create a National Book Ban? From School Library Journal Misleading titles H.R. 7661: Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, H.R. 2616: Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act, and H.R. 8705: CHARLIE Act. The good news is noted at the end of the article: While all three measures represent a concerted effort by House Republicans to codify conservative federal restrictions on K–12 education, none has an easy path to becoming law. With the 2026 midterm elections approaching and most Senate legislation requiring 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, the proposals face significant hurdles before they could become national policy. Librarians are Getting the Opportunity to Tell Their Own Stories in Print and on Film LIBRARIANS on LIBRARIES from the New York Times (gift article) We asked dozens of librarians about America’s libraries — what they provide, what they need to survive. These librarians want you to know that they don’t sit around reading all day. They want you to know about book bans and budget cuts, but also about career counseling and crafting groups and pop-up medical clinics. They want you to worry, the way they worry, about artificial intelligence, looming legislation and harassment of their staff. But most of all, they want you to know what the library really is: a safe place for people to gather around books, ideas and one another. Librarians Hit the Road from I Love Libraries Roadtrip Nation, the PBS documentary series that sends three people across the United States in an RV to explore what it means to build a career—and more importantly, a life—around the things you love, has dropped its new season, and libraries are at the forefront for a portion. In the two-episode arc, “Beyond Books,” three aspiring librarians take a road trip to explore all the surprising, powerful, and essential roles libraries play in our communities today—online, in rural areas, and more. Along the way, they learn from community leaders and caretakers of knowledge just how vibrant and dynamic a career in libraries can be and discover the unique impact they each can bring when it comes to creating a space that’s truly for everyone. … “There’s a public misconception that librarians are gatekeepers of information because, historically, stacks had been closed and that’s how it was,“ Sam said. “But libraries haven’t been that way for many years now. In reality, we’re thought partners, we’re friends, and we’re in this together. Librarians are here to help the public wayfind, not to hold information back. That’s the message we’re still working to establish culturally.” And: I enjoyed this post on Banned Books Week by Julie Snider. Sold by patricia mccormick As I was a high school librarian for many years, I read a lot of young adult (YA) fiction so that I could ‘book talk’ it to students and classes who were coming in to check out books. It’s strange that Patricia McCormack’s Sold was the top banned book in 2025 because it was published in 2006. Nearly twenty years of helping and not hurting. (Huh. What could this really be about?) In a previous post, I discussed the novel in detail: what it’s about, how I came to read it, and why it belongs in the school library: * Trafficking of girls (and boys) is a topic that seems to interest conservatives, a thing they claim to want to put an end to. (Remember the Pizzagate conspiracy theory?) * Information is power. The author interviewed trafficked girls and activists fighting for them to present this realistic portrayal. * Knowledge of these terrible but very real circumstances engenders empathy. * Empathy may engender action. Many high school students form clubs, get a teacher to be their advisor, bring guest speakers, and raise funds to fight for good in the world. * High school activism is a foundation for a life of concern and goodwill for humankind. Even if a student doesn’t get to this step, they’ve done the first step: read the book. This week book critic Ron Charles posted “What’s So Scary about This Book?” In which he includes a bit of chat with McCormick. Even while reading scores decline and teenagers drift away from books, activists have whipped up a moral panic about pornography in schools. As McCormick suggests, it’s a movement based on a particularly destructive kind of misreading. “Books aren’t being banned because of their content or their quality or their message,” she says. “People are taking a single page — and in the case of this book, it’s the page where the main character is sexually assaulted — and reading that out of context in a way that triggers or troubles people.” “I always say, ‘It’s supposed to be upsetting!’ You can’t write a book about child trafficking without having a scene like that in there. But it’s written from the point of view of a 13-year-old, so her language is not graphic. … and it isn’t pornographic.” “I can’t tell you how many schools have launched fundraising efforts after having read the book. It activates kids. It turns them into activists. And so we’re shutting off that opportunity.” Even more important, McCormick says that when she visits high schools to talk about Sold, a student will frequently take her aside or stand up in front of the group and say, “Something like this has happened to me.” “There’s a way in which reading about a girl in Nepal — like six degrees of separation — allows kids to see their own situation with empathy. And those kids can get help. … And when you think about what’s happening at Cornell right now, this is a book everybody needs to read.” Yes, I Did My Own Take— Keep Sweet I had a brief interview with Marla Miller about how I came to write Keep Sweet, the title of which I’d picked before the Netflix series on the FLDS cult and Warren Jeffs. I decided to stick with the title because, at that point, it was a good indicator of what the novel was about. (Please check it out!) I was told by agents that I needed to make the book less ‘adult’ (the protagonist being sexual abuse victim might be too much) and that I should give her a boyfriend. Ugh. That wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. Luckily, I found a small press publisher. This makes it hard to promote, but it’s an honest book, which matters to me. Everyone is probably thinking of the Cornell 7 just about now. The similarities are in the privileged men dominating women and girls. But there is also the concern about our government becoming enmeshed with Christian Nationalism. And we can see how mixing up the church and the state harms women. Check this article published only a few weeks ago: A Gender War Explodes in Utah Over the Courts, Abortion and Representation from the New York Times (gift article) But Utah is unique; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is patriarchal and dominates state politics. And as Utah’s women have spoken up, its male politicians, including Gov. Spencer Cox, who has made a national reputation on “disagreeing better,” have punished them. The women so far are unbowed. Emma Petty Addams, the co-executive director of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, quoted church doctrine on the proper exercise of power to explain her group’s mission: “We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.” For all the images of tradwives and momfluencers flooding television and social media from Utah, the reality playing out in the Beehive State is something quite different. Four years ago, Mormon Women sued the Legislature for refusing to enact a law that voters had passed banning gerrymandering. As Salt Lake City grew bigger and bluer, that law was all but certain to yield a Democratic member in the state’s four-person House delegation. The state’s Supreme Court, with its first female majority, consistently and unanimously sided with the women. Utah’s Republican leaders, who command every statewide office and a supermajority in the Legislature, responded first with threats, and then by remaking the court. That’s right, they added men and took away the women’s voices. That’s current stuff, friends. Next, please grab Keep Sweet from your favorite bookseller. That supports me and my work here. Please li

  4. Sep 21

    Two Balms and One Alert: Into the Wood Chipper by Nicholas Enrich

    Hello Friends, This is our week to talk about books. (Audio included.) I feel I have so many books I’d like to discuss after reading people’s comments on Theo of Golden. For now, I’ll mention a few ‘feel good’ books that I enjoyed and then focus on Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID by Nicholas Enrich. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. On a personal note, I participated in a Walk to End Alzheimer’s this weekend. When I was a bit younger, I did marathons for causes. This walk was a lot shorter, but there were so many participants and folks cheering us on. Very good vibes. The sponsors were handing out flower-shaped wind spinners. There were different colors, and we were to choose the one that represented our relationship to dementia. There was blue for caretakers. When the volunteer explained that, I was going to pick one, but then she went on to say that purple was for those who’d lost a loved one to dementia. I picked that, as I started to explain myself: with my sisters, I cared for my mom as she declined and lost her memory, but she’s gone now, so I’ll take the purple. A sudden wave of grief smashed into me and I started to tear up, losing it. I didn’t want to distress the volunteer and was trying to pull it together. Just then, a young woman began to sing the national anthem to kick off the day’s program. I turned to face her, to stand in respectful silence. Isn’t it wild the way grief arrives without warning? Good Books for Uplifting Reading In the past few weeks, in response to numerous comments about the need for books that make us feel good, I’ve mentioned that Ann Patchett’s Whistler fits the bill. I also want to mention two books that I found very heartening: Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton and Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven. Both are nonfiction about women who find themselves in unusually close connection with a wild animal. These creatures are neither pets nor people and the authors are careful not to interfere with their wild natures nor to anthropomorphize them: there is no sentimentality in the narratives. And yet by coming into close contact with the animals, the authors come to have a deeper understanding of their own humanity and a greater connection to the natural world. These intimate tales of very different natural settings are quietly gorgeous. A true balm, and perhaps what you need now. My sister-in-law is something of an animal whisperer and English as well, so I sent her my copy of Raising Hare, which takes place in the English countryside. Hare read like an alternative version of her life. I still have my copy of Fox and I. I hope to reread it, but I can’t keep up with new books, much less go back to those I love. Does anyone else have this problem? Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! This post is public so feel free to share it. Thanks for the recommendation I also want to thank jen parker for recommending The Road to Dalton by Shannon Bowring. Richard Russo blurbed it and it definitely has a Russo vibe—small town folks dealing with big issues, so I enjoyed reading it. A tragic event leads everyone in town to question whether they had unknowingly contributed to the outcome. But they also have to find their way forward. Here’s the publisher’s back copy: In most small towns, the private is also public. In the town of Dalton, one local makes an unthinkable decision that leaves the community reeling. In the aftermath, their problems, both small and large, reveal a deeper understanding of the lives of their neighbors, and remind us all that no one is exactly who we think they are. It’s 1990. In Dalton, Maine, life goes on. Rose goes to work at the diner every day, her bruises hidden from both the customers and her two young boys. At a table she waits, Dr. Richard Haskell looks back on the one choice that’s charted his entire life, before his thoughts wander back to his wife, Trudy, and her best friend. Trudy and Bev have been friends for longer than they can count, and something more than lovers to each other for some time now—a fact both accepted and ignored by their husbands. Across town, new mother Bridget lives with her high school sweetheart Nate, and is struggling with postpartum after a traumatic birth. And nearer still is teenager Greg, trying to define the complicated feelings he has about himself and his two close friends. The Road to Dalton offers valuable understandings of what it means to be alive in the world—of pain and joy, conflict and love, and the endurance that comes from living. Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID by Nicholas Enrich “Elon Musk tweeted on Monday, February 3 at 1:54 AM. ‘We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead.’” Author Nicholas Enrich worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under four administrations. He was the Bureau of Global Health’s director of policy, programs, and planning until January 2025 when he was designated as USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health. “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” Into the Wood Chipper’s epigraph, quoting Timothy Snyder In Into the Wood Chipper he details the history of USAID, its value to both Americans and communities around the world, and its demise at the hands of Elon Musk and the Trump administration. The title brings to mind the infamous image of a gleeful Musk holding up a live chain saw as if he were the star of a horror flick. “My distress had intensified as I watched Musk flagrantly lie. Standing next to Trump in the Oval Office, he assured the gathered journalists and their live TV audiences that USAID’s programs to prevent the spread of deadly diseases like Ebola and HIV were still operating. They weren’t. DOGE was dismantling them piece by piece. At the same time, Secretary Rubio and his team were blaming me and my colleagues for the undeniable and deadly mess, accusing us of intentionally creating bureaucratic hurdles to block delivery of food and medicine. Rubio called USAID’s career staff ‘completely uncooperative’ and ‘insubordinate,’ even as his own political team stonewalled our desperate efforts to restart life-saving aid. Trump then piled on, claiming that USAID was run by ‘radical lunatics’ and pushing absurd lies about our work.” Enrich’s goal is to bear witness to the thing he could not prevent. He is perfectly situated to do so. And while the book is well written, it is content rather than style that concerns him. If you have been following the Trump II cycle, doubtless you know that USAID was dismantled. But if you want to see how this affected both employees of the organization as well as healthcare around the world, I recommend Into the Wood Chipper. If you feel that you can’t spare the thirty dollars for a book on a topic you’re already familiar with through the news cycle, I encourage you to do as I did—borrow it from your local public library. USAID was established because President Kennedy understood that the Soviet Union was pouring billions into support for newly independent nations across the globe. The United States needed to provide a counterweight. (Perhaps we’ve forgotten that we still do.) President George W. Bush also understood the value of USAID. In 2003 he signed legislation to combat AIDS, saying that every day of delay meant 8000 more AIDS deaths in Africa and 14,000 more infections. President Obama reminded us: “To many people around the world, USAID is the United States.” According to peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet, in the two decades previous to its shutdown, USAID prevented 92 million deaths. And, as Enrich reminds us, “It benefits Americans. Tuberculosis and HIV don’t stop international borders. Neither do other infectious diseases, as we all know having recently endured a global pandemic. Even if you’re not convinced of the value of goodwill and partnership built through decades of American generosity, USAID’s work to enable countries’ health systems to detect outbreaks before they spread makes us safer here at home.” “Russell Vought, the incoming Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, made no secret of this planned assault on the federal workforce: ‘We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,’ he said. ‘When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down.’ In case that wasn’t clear he added: ‘We want to put them in trauma.’” So why was USAID a primary target of the DOGE dismantling party? Its employees hoped, rather naively, that it was all a misunderstanding of their work, that if they could educate DOGE ‘officials’ (I’m not sure what to call them) about USAID’s work, it would survive. They kept trying. They figured that in Trump’s previous term, his administration supported most of USAID’s global health investments. They felt the value of their work to global health was indisputable and non-partisan. They also knew that Project 2025 did not call for the elimination of USAID, but rather mentioned the critical value of the agency. However, DOGE never met with a career staff, but simply decided for themselves what needed to be cut without any information or knowledge of the work. The firings were so bad that people were simply emailed at night and told not to come into the office in the morning. These

  5. Sep 6

    The Fallen by Louise Brangan; The Real Story Behind the Magdalene Laundries

    Hello Friends, I’d like to discuss some books at length. Don’t forget you can choose to listen to the audio (located above). I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize , Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, The Irish Times Best Book of the 21st Century) and wanted to learn more about the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland. Small Things Like These If you’re unfamiliar with Small Things Like These, you are in for a beautiful reading experience! Oh to be able to write like Keegan. What a voice. The novella takes place in a small Irish town in the 1980s during the Christmas season. When a coal merchant delivers an order to a Catholic convent that runs a Magdalene Laundry, he discovers a freezing girl who has been locked in the coal shed overnight. In returning her to the convent, he finds a world of abuse and imprisonment for the girls and young women who are pregnant and new mothers. As he questions what his response should be, the frightening political and social power of the nuns and the Church are made clear. This is a tale of a test of moral courage. The Fallen So powerful was this little novella that it inspired me to find The Fallen by Louise Brangan, a research-based book on the twentieth-century history of the Laundries told through the stories of six young women and girls who were inmates there. I purchased the audiobook version. Again, the story was powerful and shocking. I decided to get the print version from interlibrary loan to have a closer look. Just as my copy was available, it was announced that The Fallen had made the The 2026 Cundill History Prize Shortlist. The two epigraphs at the beginning of The Fallen indicate that Brangan plans to bring the truth to light and force a reckoning: In some instances, one may not talk of forgetfulness, for one cannot forget what one has never attempted to know. —Gordon Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us. —Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie The Women and Girls of the Laundries The prologue discusses a fifteen-year-old girl named Eileen who disappeared from her job as a maid at a bed-and-breakfast in Dublin in February 1954. She enjoyed the job. However, one night when her friends were out and she was on her own, two women appeared in the townhouse and decided that Eileen was destined to become a fallen woman. They told her she had to go with them. Like all Irish children, she was raised to unquestioningly obey adults, and so she did. The women dropped her into a Magdalene Laundry, stealing her freedom and ruining her life. She’s given as an example of the kind of girl who ended up in the laundry. She was born in a Mother and Daughter Home, which means that she was considered illegitimate. She lived with relatives who weren’t very kind to her until she finally got away and found her job in the bed and breakfast. She was not pregnant, nor was she an unwed mother. This is one of the important things Brangan clarifies about the Magdalene Laundries. They were not really for ‘fallen women,’ even though people assume that they were and Small Things Like These indicates as much. In fact, Brangan must also correct the record about information that rolls at the end of the Small Things film, which is based on the novella. It states that there were 56,000 young women who were sent to the Laundries and the children born there were taken from them. The government‘s official calculation of women and girls in the Laundries is 10,012; informed historians consider this an underestimation. However 56,000 seems high. It is, in fact, a figure from an official state investigation into something different—the inmates held in Mother and Baby Homes during the 20th century. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The Magdalene Laundries What actually happened in the Laundries belied the serenity of the Irish countryside of the twentieth century, where the general population was considered to be quite moral. From the period of Irish independence in the 1920s, there weren’t very many people in prison. Brangan argues that this doesn’t mean many people, particularly women and girls, weren’t imprisoned. They lived in various “psychiatric hospitals (known then as mental asylums), industrial and reformatory schools for poor orphan children, county homes (formally work houses that were rebranded after Irish independence) and Mother and Baby Homes, where women and girls who were pregnant outside marriage were sequestered. Then there were the Magdalene Laundries.” Brangan points out that these institutions housed over 1% of the total Irish population, an incredible rate, and that people there became “ensnared rather than supported.” The Magdalene Laundries were Ireland’s main carceral institution. While they had initially been run by ordinary people both Catholic and Protestant, they eventually became regimented and religious places of punishment. However, the state colluded with the church in running them. There were ten Magdalene Laundries, which circled the island, run by four religious orders of nuns. The inmates there did everyone’s laundry: priestly vestments, prisoners’ uniforms, hotel and restaurant linens, family laundry, everything. They were not allowed to speak to one another—complete silence at all times was the rule—much less form friendships. Outside of cleaning laundry, what happened there was a dark secret before activists demanded a reckoning in the mid 2000s. Former inmates were interviewed, particularly between 2009-2015. While the Laundries were active, some women managed to escape, but the tales they told at the time were generally not believed. People couldn’t imagine the nuns running the Laundries because they had not had the same kind of experiences with women religious, who might have been very kind to their families, helping them with alms and with their family troubles. Punishment for Uncommitted Sins Brangan tracks six women and girls were confined to the Laundries. One was imprisoned for truancy from school; another because strangers considered her pre-delinquent; yet another to save a family’s reputation. While each of their stories is different, all of them were unwanted, homeless, abused, or rejected. Their stories are unique and utterly compelling, deserving the full treatment they receive in the book. After reading about them, I had nightmares about inescapable places. In 2009, when there had been a period of pronounced hand ringing about the horrors of the past, the author John Banville wrote what remains one of the most eloquent and uncompromising statements on the topic of Irish silence. ‘Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watch word. Everyone knew, but no one said.’” Immediately upon entrance into the Laundries, inmates’ names were taken away, and they were given pseudonyms. They were not allowed to speak to each other; they were not allowed to form friendships. This meant that girls who were new didn’t know where they were. They started rumors that the women around them were prostitutes or women who had illegitimate babies. Yet they learned this didn’t make sense because there were also much older women there. The others were like them: abandoned, abused, neglected, rejected by their families. They had to work long hours in very hot and horrible environments. For example, girls who worked in the sorting rooms found it absolutely disgusting. One woman described it as “‘all filthy dirty and the smell of it and everything was awful.’ None of them could adjust to the fetid air. It was ‘wreaking, stinking, bleach, smell of piss, urine, always had that smell, always.’” The food was also described as a nasty watery swamp of stew. There was no toilet paper, just crumpled up newspapers. Ironically, the girls had to wash their own laundry on their own time, at the sinks in their dormitory. They weren’t even allowed to use the laundry equipment, and so, sometimes, they would bring their “wet underwear into the bed with them and lie on top of it as they slept hoping that the heat of their bodies would wick enough of the wet from them so they could be worn again the next morning.” The girls and women were insulted and they were told things like “You’re here because no one wants you.” “You’re dirt.” “Your mother didn’t want you.” “Your father won’t come for you.” “No wonder your family doesn’t want you, look at you.” “You are illegitimate; you’ll end up like your mother.” “You are nobody, and you have nobody.” They were required to say the same prayers that the nuns did as part of their devotional life, but they didn’t have any of the nuns’ social capital, and all their years of devotion didn’t earn it for them. Disobedience could result in inmates having their hair cut off. Talking might result in a dinnertime punishment of being forced to sit on the floor in front of the group with a bowl, eating their food while saying “I am nobody. I am nobody. I am nobody.” When these girls and women finally had a chance to venture back into society, they often couldn’t negotiate the world. They have not been well educated or educated at all in the Laundries. Brangan declares this was only possible because the Irish people gave “unfettered deference” to the church. “Irish people genuflected, lit their candles, muttered their novenas, and undertook their penitential obligations. … the logic of the laundries was the logic of Irish life.” Twentieth-Century Ireland To help the reader understand why, she dives into Irish history and politi

  6. Aug 24

    Theo of Golden: Worst Book I’ve Read in 20 Years

    Background I knew nothing about the novel Theo of Golden, but I wanted to read it because I was heartened by the story of an older writer going viral with a debut after self-publication and then being picked up by Simon & Schuster. I asked for it for my birthday, and I received it (along with several other birthday books; I have a lovely family and friends). As a general rule, I only discuss books I think are worth reading. If I read something I don’t like, well, I’m a librarian who believes in books for everyone. Though I’m the wrong reader, the book will find the right one. An author, especially one who is published by a small press, can be hurt by criticism, so why engage in it? Better to lift each other up. However, a novel like Theo of Golden and its author, Allen Levi, can’t be harmed by a small voice like mine--and probably not by a booming voice, either. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has been scheduled for a film starring Tom Hanks. So, I want to discuss it because it leaves me wondering about the future of fiction. Warning: I’m likely to include spoilers because I don’t think you should read the book. Theo of Golden Though the prefix ‘Theo’ means god, as a name it means a gift of God, and that is clearly what our protagonist is meant to be. Though he is 86 years old, this mystery man is healthy, wealthy, and wise, ready to solve others’ life problems. Theo is a curious stranger, making his list and checking it twice. He arrives in Golden just before Easter and departs a year later in my least favorite author ‘Get Me Out of This Book’ trick—defenestration. By which I do not mean that another character tosses Theo off the balcony, but that Levi does it. One of the first things we learn in this novel is the hours of operation of the local coffee shop, the Chalice. (Get it? Get it? Because we have to have very clear religious metaphors in case the name Theo and the fact that he arrives just before Easter escape us.). So I thought the book would be a murder mystery and the hours would have something to do with solving it. But no, it’s just a beginning writer’s story with all the hallmarks of a self-published book. The excess of useless info dumps continues throughout the book, which would benefit from a good editor. At the Chalice, Theo finds that the coffee competes with the best of Europe. And he would know because he’s been everywhere, beginning with his native Portugal. The walls of the shop are covered with original pencil portraits of the town’s inhabitants. Masterpieces. This, too, Theo knows. In fact, he’s quite the expert on lots of things. Wine, liquor, art, music--you name it, Theo can birdwalk about it, as the novel roams over diverse topics that don’t drive the plot forward. The one thing that’s not discussed until after Theo’s death is who he really is and what he is doing in Golden. But this city of Golden, Georgia is one of the best he’s ever been to, a quaint, loving community in the God-Blessed American South. Theo decides to buy the pencil portraits from the Chalice, a few at a time, and then give them to the models. He sends each person a mysterious letter asking them to meet him in the park, tell him their stories, and receive the portraits. And while the town knows little about this man, including his last name, they do know that he has beautiful penmanship and a set of expensive stationery, so they trust him. Well, except one very bad man, who will also be easily dispensed with. The episodic structure of these meetings affords Levi the opportunity to include stories that are completely disconnected. Instead of incorporating necessary character development into the narrative, Levi often relies on info dumps by making a character read, say, a magazine article. The entirety of its contents is then included in the narrative. By page seventeen (of a grueling 384 pages), I was sorry to see Theo’s first letter to a portrait recipient, fearing that the book would be filled with the letters to all 92 of his beneficiaries. At least I was saved from that fate. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Eventually Theo will play (unlicensed) psychologist to a number of the town’s inhabitants merely by listening and always knowing the right questions to ask and the right things to say. These inhabitants are as onion skin thin as he is. Levi tries to round out one of them—a Vietnam War veteran—by eventually detailing his trauma and PTSD. The problem is that the episode and its dialogue feel very unnatural and it doesn’t come off. It’s just another info dump. The man, a bookseller, is supposed to be seen as a kindly curmudgeon, but Levi is unable to manage it. The character is mostly irritating, his better nature never surfacing. Other briefly-appearing characters are cringeworthy. A Black man—other than a Nigerian doctor, he appears to be the single Black person in the novel (in Georgia, remember)—speaks in dialect. Another “little man” who is an “illegal,” causes a car accident that kills a woman. (No worries--everything is forgiven in the end.) Where, oh where, is the editor? The single three-dimensional character in the novel is Ellen, the self-described homeless woman. We learn about her worries over her bicycle and the chance that it might be stolen, her creative talents and how she employs them, and her grammar policing. As the novel mercifully ends, there are explicit comparisons between Theo and Jesus, including Theo’s springtime (Easter) death. And this is the deeper reason why I’m repelled by this novel. Here we have a savior who does not embody radical notions of love and sacrifice, never mind one who flips a bird to the religious and political authorities of his day. What Levi gives the reader is a man he finds as a better iteration of a savior: Santa Claus, with limitless resources to bestow just the right gifts to all the childish adults in his sphere. Ultimately, the publishing industry is not a meritocracy. It’s a business and the purpose is to make money. While I can’t be sure, I suspect Simon & Schuster knew Theo would be a cash cow ‘as is’ and didn’t bother with an editor. Still, I admire any author who is able to make a living from writing. As my mother used to say, when Levi is criticized, I’m sure he’s crying all the way to the bank. I imagine we will hear more from him. I saw this reported in Deadline: Warner Bros Locking Down Film Rights To Allen Levi Bestseller ‘Theo Of Golden’ With Tom Hanks To Star “The book was published wide by Simon & Schuster last October and has sold over 3.5 million copies stateside. It has been published in 43 languages and was a No. 1 bestseller in places like the Netherlands, Italy and the UK. Now it will be headed for the big screen, following the trajectory of books like Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County and a few others. Like that novel, Theo of Golden is particularly popular with a mature crowd of readers.” Hanks is the perfect vehicle for the character of Theo, especially if he can bring off a Portuguese accent. But one thing this article made me consider is that the novel is a worldwide hit. It’s not just Americans, then, who read like children. I couldn’t find professional reviews of Theo except a commentary published on Slate. Most of the things I had thought about were echoed there. I, too, thought that the vast response to this moralizing and saccharine Christianity could be compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I read Stowe’s novel as an adult already knowing that it wasn’t a great piece of literature. However, Uncle Tom has historical value as a force in the abolitionist movement, having had a profound effect on readers of its time. Theo won’t be driving a political movement for human rights and will not be remembered in the future. When I thought about Theo being the worst book I’ve read in twenty years, the previous worst was Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, published in 2006 and recommended to me by a coworker and friend. Rebecca Onion, author of the Slate commentary, says the books are not alike because Theo has a plot. However, the plot is resolved in a sort of afterthought to the bloated book. So the two books linked in my mind as plotless. At least Five People was short. I mentioned a few weeks back that Joe Ponepinto wrote about the fact that people enjoy reading poorly written books. While not suggesting that Theo is an AI-authored book (it isn’t), he briefly suggests that it’s as bad as an AI book. And if that’s what we like, then maybe AI will take over publications. Reading Theo pushed me to a thought experiment. Let’s all bring forward our recollections of The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner, a novel written over 100 years ago for elementary school readers. I believe just about everyone has read it or has had it read to them. To jog your memory: Four orphaned kids decide to live in the forest because they are afraid of their grandfather, whom they believe to be cruel. They find an abandoned boxcar that they make into a home. After one of them falls ill, a local doctor figures out that they are his friend’s grandchildren and he gives grandpa, who is actually wealthy and kind, the heads up. The kids then live with gramps. They miss the boxcar, so he has it moved to his backyard. Afterwards, the kids use it as a clubhouse. They live happily ever after with the nice rich guy and have many thrilling adventures. Now: if the boxcar children were adults, would you read and enjoy the story? Because it seems that is what we are spending our lives doing—reading The Boxcar Children over and over again, looking for that same warm feeling of being cared for by the miraculously appearing rich relative. A particular paragraph in Theo struck me as I thought about this: “‘It’s

  7. Aug 9

    Authors and AI: Where Do We Go From Here?

    Hello Friends, I’m putting on my librarian hat today and, rather than writing an essay, I’m providing some sources that discuss what’s next for the publishing industry concerning AI. I hope my organization of the articles means that one leads into another. Before I get into today’s topic, I figured we could all use some good news, so I’m linking to a recent article on Reasons to Be Cheerful. (Is there any better creature than a dog?) Lastly, I have some reading recommendations. Please click the title to view the whole article or listen to the audio. Good News Meet India’s Four-Legged Wildlife Detectives from Reasons to be Cheerful “Sniffer dogs are emerging as the secret weapon of Indian wildlife authorities,” says Nitin Desai, director (Central India) at WPSI. “When there are no eyewitnesses, dogs find evidence that no human eye can detect.” Since 2008, WWF-India … has trained more than 120 wildlife sniffer dog squads … . Deployed across 22 states, they assist forest departments in detecting poaching and wildlife trafficking, helping seize tiger skins, pangolin scales, ivory and live animals while also deterring poachers in vulnerable landscapes. The Drama and Trauma Caused by AI-generated Writing I’m going to make some assumptions here, primarily that you have heard of book deals being canceled over suspicions that the author used generative AI to write. Readers and writers have been worried that the bookish culture we love will be replaced with AI texts. Now I’m wondering what we are all going to do about it. So, here are some recent articles that (sort of, kind of) seek answers. As to the articles’ mention that people enjoy crappy writing: I want to explore that soon by diving into a book whose author I can’t harm by commenting (a blockbuster bestseller that will probably get a film deal). I asked for Theo of Golden for my birthday because it’s so wildly popular, and someone I know loved it. And, man, is it a pile of stink. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Writers Combat AI with Style More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’ From Wired Ellena Savage, an Australian novelist and academic … says … “AI has stolen several syntactical conventions I once held dear. I miss over-deploying the em dash. I miss the rule of three, which was so satisfying.” Across magazines and digital publications, this anti-AI counterstyle is reshaping in-house style and editorial practice too. Richard Fisher, an honorary professor at University College London and editor at online culture magazine Aeon, says AI has prompted him to encourage writers “to be more human” and write more conversationally. “We don’t want to sand out the rough edges, because AI cannot write prose as spiky or idiosyncratic as humans.” … [R]enewed appreciation for good writing might be one of the unexpected benefits of the AI writing era. Last April, John Warner, a veteran writing teacher, published More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, in which he argued that rather than replacing writers, AI might actually come to reinstate the value of good writing and the style and process therein. LLMs have introduced a new paranoia about style, and lack thereof, that might, at least in the short term, be a good thing. … it could provide a new incentive to improve in order to avoid being made redundant by LLMs. But as AI keeps pace with human writing, potentially being trained on a corpus of anti-AI writing styles as they develop, it could soon necessitate the invention of an anti-anti-anti-AI style. “Whatever cosmetic counterstyle is created in response to AI, AI could mimic,” says McGarry. “The only true counterstyle is good writing.” And Yet…Do People Prefer AI Writing? AI stories preferred to human-written ones - study from the BBC The study, published by Cambridge University Press, tested to see whether people aged 18 to 81 could tell the difference between human-written and AI-generated short stories. Led by researchers at Villanova University (VU), USA, it found that participants could not tell which was which. … In their first experiment, 1,682 participants read a story and were either correctly or incorrectly told it had been written by AI or a human. They then rated how engaging it was and its quality. In a second and third experiment, 424 and 481 people received one human-written story and one by AI, and were not told the author. After reading, they were asked to identify them. Weisberg said: “In our study, participants gave the highest ratings to stories that they had been told were written by humans but which were actually written by AI. … I’d argue that this reveals a bias towards narratives written by real people.” … “AI writing tends to be clearer, more direct and easier to process,” said Weisberg. “By contrast, human-written stories are often more subtle and complex. … Perhaps people generally prefer predictability, because difficult or subtle material requires more brain power.” How A.I. Books Sneak Their Way Into Stores from the New York Times (gift link) A few years into the A.I. era, there is sobering evidence that a significant and growing portion of the novels being sold are written with or by chatbots, and that readers are buying them. If True, is This the End of Creativity? If the average person can’t tell the difference between human-created and AI-generated art, then people and companies and corporations will use AI-generated art because it incurs no human costs, for example health or retirement benefits. … Why bother to write anything truly creative if you can make money just asking AI to churn out a couple hundred pages of garbage and design a cover to match? … [I]t only takes a few greedy abusers to change the system… . Remember, the average reader usually can’t tell the difference. If they could, books like Fifty Shades of Grey and Theo of Golden would never have become popular. And AI has no trouble replicating bad books like that. … Young people will no longer aspire to be artists, because they’ll know it will not be them producing the art, but the AI assistant that they are forced to work with. Forced? Yes, because corporations will find a way to acquire the AI technology that produces almost all the art in our country, and they will provide most of the jobs in that field. With AI as the standard, more creative artists will be forced to abandon their more adventurous impulses [in order to] to survive. Preserving the ‘Wholly-Human’ Author Why is Anthropic destroying books? From The Guardian The AI company apparently found destructively scanning ‘all the books in the world’ easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training data Should we destroy all the books in the world? An answer to this question can be found in the court documents of Bartz v Anthropic PBC. The northern California district court case, decided in late July this year, highlighted the improbably named “Project Panama”, one of the AI company Anthropic’s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. “What is Project Panama?” court exhibit 21 asks, in an internal memo. The answer: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The memo advises discretion: “Why use a codename? … [B]ecause we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” Destructive scanning was Anthropic’s solution to a problem: in order to “train” Claude, Anthropic had to procure a large, high-quality language dataset, preferably one created before 2022 and the corrupting influence of generative AI on contemporary text. … As the court’s decision relates, Anthropic hoped that books’ “well-curated facts, well-organized analyses, and captivating fictional narratives” would help “Claude write as accurately and as compellingly as Authors”. Anthropic had a choice: it could have secured copyright permission to use existing e-books. This would have required the “legal/practice/business slog”, as Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO phrased it, of managing copyright. … In the context of the court’s decision in Bartz v Anthropic PBC, destructive scanning is an effective mechanism to strip authorial involvement from printed texts, in order to use the content of those works to improve the functions of an LLM. It is both legal and less regulated than strip mining. … If we take seriously the 2022 threshold, as a moment when AI-generated text began to make significant entry into the textual record, should we start to think of the “wholly human author” as an emergent category of collections preservation and stewardship? … The risk with generative AI, as this single instance with Anthropic indicates, is that we cede the means of production of our large language lives: that we turn from creators to consumers, and hand the generative promise of our work to large language models and their proprietors. The Fight Continues in Court Book Publishers Sue Google Over AI Training, Escalating a Legal Standoff from ADWEEK The most striking allegation in the suit holds that Google trained its AI models on books that publishers handed over to build Google Books. That agreement permitted Google to display snippets, the complaint argues, not to repurpose the material into training data for a competing business. An Article Title that Suggests an Answer That Isn’t There After the Cancellation of ‘Call Me, I’ll Hide The Body,’ What Comes Next? from Publisher’s Weekly [Nigerian author Jerry Adedayo] Falade, who is currently a graduate student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas working towards a PhD, felt that he had won the literary lottery. His book starred a Nigerian immigrant protagonist, reflecting his research interest in Black masculinity in contemporary Africa

  8. Jul 13

    Lucky by Alice Sebold Removed for Wrong Reason. Last Night at the Telegraph Club: Banning the Perfect YA Novel

    Hello Friends, Today, I’d like to discuss a few banned and often challenged books: Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, a YA multiple award winner and Lucky by Alice Sebold, which should be withdrawn from libraries, but not for the reasons it is being banned. Before we dive into these books, I want to note that this week Utah banned another book in all of its public schools: Stephen King’s Different Seasons which contains four novellas, two of which were adapted for the films The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. Anyone who has read “The Body” or seen Stand By Me will understand why schools were using the collection in the classroom. It’s quite possible that this was the only story in the collection that was assigned. And now the students have lost access to studying it. When such works are removed, it’s unclear that the goal is to protect the teens or tweens. What is clear is that relatable stories are disappearing from the curriculum. Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo Over the past few years, I have been discussing banned books most of which were published a decade or more ago. I thought it would be fun to read a more recent one and see what the issues are. I recently picked up Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo because it is so highly regarded and so often vilified. I wanted to know why. Last Night at the Telegraph Club won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (2021), the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Michael L. Printz Honor, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Wow. And so deserving. Lily Hu is a Chinese American teen living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s. While she deals with prejudice because of her race, her family is also afraid of the McCarthy-era milieu in which all people of Chinese heritage are suspected of having Communist sympathies. In fact, Lily’s father, a doctor, has been targeted by the FBI for not naming one of his patients as a Communist and his citizenship papers have been confiscated. As a rising high school senior, Lily is awakening to her sexuality and thrills to an ad for a performance by Tommy Andrews, a male impersonator, at the Telegraph Club. She later learns that a classmate—smart and kind Kath Miller—has been to the lesbian night club. The two strike up a friendship over their common academic interests and later become romantically involved. They sneak out of their houses a few times to go to the Telegraph Club late at night. Eventually, the club is raided and Lily must decide whether to tell her parents the truth and support Kath, or live a lie. I’m sure the reason Telegraph Club is so often censored is that, at one point, the two girls have a sexual encounter that is briefly described. It’s a natural development of their relationship and only a few paragraphs of the entire novel, which is full of: great character development; a keen perception of the racial prejudice and Communist hysteria of the 1950s; and a very moving first-love story. After reading Telegraph Club, it’s hard to say how sorry I am that this novel is so often banned. It’s not only a great book, but its emotional pull will benefit all readers. I want to say that it’s very dear, but I’m not sure that conveys my sense of the book. The main characters are sweet, kind to one another, and fumbling through adolescence in the most real way. We love them and root for their happiness. All of which is to say that the novel has an uncommon tenderness. It’s just nuts to keep this excellent work of YA fiction away from teens. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Utah Banning of Alice Sebold’s Lucky. Apparently, Utah’s school districts are working backward in time to ban books. The recently banned Lucky by Alice Sebold was published way back in 1999. It’s the author’s story about an extremely violent rape and what followed—the arrest and conviction of a Black man for the assault. While the rape in fact did happen, the man convicted was innocent. This was only proven long after the memoir was published, long after Sebold became a bestselling author with her novel The Lovely Bones. When the alleged rapist was exonerated, the publisher, Scribner, pulled the memoir from distribution. Back in the day, I used to ‘booktalk’ Lucky to high school classes who came in looking for memoirs. I also posted a review on School Library Lady, discussing why I thought the book was a good choice for high school students. Once the convicted man was exonerated, I removed the review from public view. So the banning of the book in all public schools in Utah (along with 36 other titles) has me thinking about how book curation and weeding in school libraries actually works. Librarians remove books all the time. Otherwise, there would be no room for new ones. Common reasons for removal are the physical condition of the book (falling apart), lack of interest as shown by checkout stats, and outdated information. The outdated information usually pertains to the sciences (Someday, man will go to the moon!), but it can also be that the information in the book proves to be incorrect. The easiest example I can give of books with bad info, one that everyone will understand, is memoirs and biographies by or about Lance Armstrong. Think of it—in my high school library, we had LOTS of Lance. Since our population included ESL students, we had biographies beginning at the third grade reading level and going through adult level. Lots of companies that published books specifically for schools sold Lance. He was included in all sorts of series—American heroes, top athletes, role models for our time, etc. And again, these were written at various reading and lexile levels. We talked these books up; they circulated well. And then we had to weed them all. Our role model into the recycle bin. Lucky is a book with the same fate. Not because Sebold was a liar as was Armstrong—her story of being raped at knifepoint and beaten and the aftermath is true and horrifying. But the book is inaccurate because it tells us that the rapist was caught and imprisoned. So it belongs in the recycle bin. Even though Utah schools had the book in the last 25 years, if it was still in the collection, I’d be surprised. Maybe the schools don’t have a level of staffing that allows time for weeding. (This is a very common problem and was true of my job as a teacher librarian.) The story surrounding Sebold’s rape and the conviction and later exoneration of Anthony Broadwater, is tragic. Broadwater was wrongfully imprisoned for 16 years and spent 22 years as a registered sexual offender. There are so many missteps and genuinely bad police work. If read together, two articles give us a solid overview of the situation. One was published in the New Yorker in May 2023 “The Tortured Bond of Alice Sebold and the Man Wrongfully Convicted of Her Rape” by Rachel Aviv. A second came out a few weeks ago (June 30, 2026), That Guy is Still Out There by Joaquin Sapien in ProPublica. The New Yorker article may be password protected (no gift link available to me, sorry.) The ProPublica article is free to all readers. They are pretty long, but I highly recommend reading them. Meanwhile, below I paraphrase and quote from each. These are only a few of the points the articles make, but they will give you a sense of what happened. From the New Yorker * During a police lineup, Sebold identified a different man—not Broadwater. After signing a form that confirmed her decision, she felt a wave of nausea. She sensed that she’d made the wrong choice. * The assistant district attorney, Gail Uebelhoer, was a thirty-one-year-old pregnant woman whom Sebold saw as a role model, her guide through a court system dominated by men. Considering the terrible track record of the Syracuse (New York) PD in solving rape crimes, Uebelhoer was looking for a win and for a chance to help a young girl. She told Sebold that the reason she’d picked the young man in the lineup was that Broadwater had asked “an almost identical-looking friend from jail to stand in the No. 5 spot and stare at her, to scare and fluster her. (In fact, Broadwater was not friends with the man in the No. 5 spot, and they did not look the same.)” * On the stand in a grand jury trial, Sebold said she wasn’t sure she picked the right man. * Police and prosecutors pushed forward with the charges against Broadwater anyway, and Sebold ultimately identified him as her attacker in the 1982 trial. * Broadwater was convicted primarily based on Sebold’s testimony and microscopic hair analysis. The hair analysis was a forensic technique that the U.S. Department of Justice later debunked as “junk science.” * Following tireless efforts by his lawyers and the discovery of serious prosecutorial flaws, Broadwater’s conviction was officially vacated by Judge Gordon Cuffy in November 2021. He concluded that the conviction rested on a debunked hair analysis and a tainted lineup. * Sebold released a public statement expressing deep remorse. She stated, “I will forever be sorry for what was done to him” and expressed regret that her pursuit of justice resulted in an innocent young man being brutalized by a flawed legal system. * In March 2023, the State of New York reached a $5.5 million settlement with Broadwater for his wrongful conviction. From ProPublica The article “That Guy is Still Out There,” includes more recent discoveries, including the facts that there was at least one serial rapist operating in and around Syracuse University at the time Sebold was assaulted and that the police and the university attempted to hide this fact. “What’s clear is that no part of the system in Syracuse at the time could be depended on. Police brushed off rapes. Prosecutors bungled confessions or were defeated at trial. Judges

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Help for resistant writers, working to bloom. Library censorship news. victoriawaddle.substack.com

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  • Creator
    Victoria Waddle
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    81
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Victoria Waddle
  • Show Website
    Be a Cactus Podcast

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