Novel sentence alert

MY BAD: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE QUEER 90S AND BEYOND comes out in one week and I am certainly not freaking out about it! There's still time to get 20% off the hardcover by preordering from Hachette with the code MYBAD20. All my June tour dates are below! www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hugh-...

The Internet Will Die, and So Will You by @johnwest.bsky.social ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ First! too much internet, not enough death :) www.netgalley.com/book/824047/...

RETVRN to computers with integral bench seating

Attention is precious. The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (by John West) #HereBelowBooks #CoverReveal

This is what journalism is supposed to be about.

I went to the Met (for the first time ever!). My partner and I decided to pick a piece to sit and stare at for at least 15 minutes. We picked “Old Woman Cutting Her Nails” by someone who isn’t Rembrandt. It was wild to feel how rusty my attention is—and to see how applying it still drives wonder.

I have escalated my aversion to Spotify.

This is incredible reporting from my colleague @georgiawells.bsky.social www.wsj.com/us-news/chat...

1. I'm working on EPITAB: a browser extension that helps you memorize poems. If you add poems to your browser, it quizzes you on lines each time you open a new tab. Here, for example, after I opened a new window in Firefox, it's asking me for the line "The season's ill—" I have an ask though...

1. I'm working on EPITAB: a browser extension that helps you memorize poems. If you add poems to your browser, it quizzes you on lines each time you open a new tab. Here, for example, after I opened a new window in Firefox, it's asking me for the line "The season's ill—" I have an ask though...

I’ve been practicing again. Here’s a sarabande from one of the perfect Bach cello suites played imperfectly on the recorder. (Also pictured: my 3D-printed recorder gun rack.)

I blogged again: this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/5/toge.... This time, on the many uses and abuses of poor Walter Ong.

1. In the aughts and early teens, I'd fire up Google Reader and check my blogs—and maybe even write one. Pardon the earnest-posting (-maxing?), but it was often the highlight of my day. And, well, I'm blogging again: this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/3/we-s....

The birds are in motion today.

millennial: iykyk plato: NOT SO FAST

My six-year-old daughter is in her Lion King moment, and I'm meme-ing through it.

Oh, every one is always nostalgic for the geocites era web but when somebody actually makes a platform that crashes every 10 minutes, suddenly everybody wants future technology, I see how it is.

A little post from my social media neetwork/web-based performance piece, HOMER at internaut.club

It's Seamus Heaney's birthday! In 2019, I wrote on his last text, "Noli timere." Now, the page is so dark-patterned that I can't read it. My book, THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU—out in Sept—came from it. Article: www.fastcompany.com/90311664/wha... Book: herebelowbooks.com/978080288542...

I set up a Raspberry Pi with a webcam and pointed it at my bird feeder, and I have a local ML model tell me if there's a bird every 10 minutes. I'm pretty sure this one is GLARING at my set up.

Whenever you open a new tab, wouldn't it be nice—before you make your way to some fresh patch of internet—to practice memorizing a poem? Enter EPITAB! With it, you can add poems to your library, check off lines once you've got them down cold, and drill with "flashcards." github.com/jswest/epitab

We’re raising our voices for a fair contract. 🎤 Join us in solidarity in our fight for layoff protections, AI guardrails and a clear disciplinary process: actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

Earthset from Artemis II. I am overcome.

1. Easter is both completely bizarre and totally quotidian. A divine son dies gruesomely, only to emerge from the tomb to pass along a radical message. I look out my window at the green blades of grass rising, the pink buds announcing themselves: resurrection blooms everywhere your eyes land.

As the pandemic dragged on, I (a little self-consciously) turned to the Psalms. Since I was raising a baby, each one seemed to say something about that completely quotidian miracle when we make families out of only feelings and time. I'm pumped to say that turned into THE PSALMIST, out in January.

From the index for my book THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU (out in Sept. 10). Here are some accidental poems: globalization Glück, Louise God G/O Media control of fragility of function of as human as magic as transporter Macbeth machine learning maggots

hello 👋 i have developed a new tool called blüuümpíi. blüuümpíi will convert every file on your hard drive to a .wav file without asking you, maximize your system volume, and play them on every bluetooth speaker you have ever connected to. if you offer feedback on blüuümpíi i will take legal action

1. I'm finally catching up with some open tabs, and I just got to this excellent @masnick.com piece, which you should go read. www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/a...

🤯

it's a wonderful thing when a friend does something amazing. @johnwest.bsky.social looks deeply at link rot and what it means for our lives and times. there's beauty in these words! buy it! herebelowbooks.com/978080288542...

Presenting THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU, out in September from @herebelow.bsky.social, a new imprint doing awesome things. Here's the cover, a lil' excerpt, and the tagline of the press: "Books for the subversive work of being human." herebelowbooks.com/978080288542...

Issue Five of The HTML Review is here! Get to your browser for 15 excellent new pieces of web-based literature and art thehtml.review/05/

An absolute treat to see @elan.place's perfect newsletter ESCAPE THE ALGORITHM yesterday: escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/the-studen.... And I"m not just saying that because he linked to Homer, my performance art masquerading as a social media app: internaut.club.

🚨 NERD ALERT 🚨 I built a little tool called Fluster, which clusters large corpora of documents or images. Say you have several thousand documents from a lawsuit or a FOIA or whatever: This would let you organize and explore them. It's model-agnostic! It's fast + free! github.com/jswest/fluster

Inspired by a perfect post from @marcusjmerritt.com, I built a art piece masquerading as a social media app called Homer. It uses an LLM to recursively summarize every post, again and again, until everything becomes nothing: internaut.club. Sign ups are now fully open, capped at 100!

Accidental Haiku #10650, from "Going All In on Steak Made Texas Roadhouse No. 1 in Cas…" in the Wall Street Journal: Line dancing at some point during their shifts. Peanut shells crunch underfoot. https://www.wsj.com/business/texas-roadhouse-steak-beef-costs-casual-dining-8204b179?mod=hp_lead_pos7

I just finished @garthgreenwell.bsky.social's perfect explication of James Merrill's poem "Rescue," and it makes me wish I were more committed to the act of reading and understanding poetry—entirely free of the blind urge to insturmentalize it. garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/james-merr...

Accidental Haiku #8460, from "Telluride, America’s ‘Most Luxurious Ski Town’ Is Tearing Itself Apart" in the Wall Street Journal: Down Telluride’s main street chanting, “End it now!” People were crying. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/telluride-ski-resort-dispute-6e2cc777?mod=hp_lead_pos7

I guess I just think that Albany—and actually the entire zone east of the Catskills from Westchester to Albany/Troy should be considered New England.

Accidental Haiku #8106, from "The Week the Dreaded AI Jobs Wipeout Got Real" in the Wall Street Journal: respondents said they worried AI could pose a threat to humanity. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-week-the-dreaded-ai-jobs-wipeout-got-real-3ba5057b?mod=hp_lead_pos1

My automated haiku-finding program, "The Seventeen-Point," found one for the State of the Union (it tracks what I read at the Journal, finds all the haiku in it, proposes the best ones, and then posts it with my permission).

Ever read a news article and wonder at its accidental poetry? Well, I made @seventeen-point.bsky.social, which tracks the Wall Street Journal articles I read, finds all the accidental haiku, proposes the best ones for me to approve, and then posts it for me.

IMPORTANT pls RT My online novel seed-story.com is loading sporadically/not at all The servers belonged to Google Creative Labs Sydney (now apparently defunct) If anyone reading worked there/knows someone who did pls get in touch urgently so this pioneering work of digital literature can be saved

On coffee filters and filter bubbles escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/on-coffee-...

From my colleagues at the Journal: www.wsj.com/us-news/vide...