If you're serious about doing a house purge - and I am - then who do you want to be at the end of it? It's a serious question but also not, since it's so self-centred in such a harsh world. Anyway, I wrote about it. Not entirely seriously. lesleykrueger.substack.com/p/who-do-you...

A note I wrote went viral--a brief piece about my husband's neurosurgery. American readers jumped on the fact the bill in Canada was precisely $0.00 So what do you do when something you write goes viral? Being a writer, I wrote about it. It’s up today on the wonderful Jane Friedman's site.

I enjoyed writing this newsletter about trying to figure out how to pace myself these days, looking back to when I seemed to have more time, even though I was living my life at a run. Isaac Asimov comes into it. Just saying. lesleykrueger.substack.com/p/the-infini...

Part three, my genocide series. Omar El Akkad's book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This centres on Gaza. What's going on there is awful. But is he right in writing that voting for Kamala Harris was worse than voting for Trump? lesleykrueger.substack.com/p/omar-el-ak...

I went searching for an old high school friend and found a wonderful documentary. My friend Derek Wilson was an artist and a hereditary chief of the Haisla nation in northwestern B.C. He helped bring a totem pole back from Europe--the first repatriation of a historic pole. Here's what I wrote.

meanwhile, prominent pundits continue to deny that there the administration adheres to a segregationist ideology

This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever read.

I recently attended a seminar that included a discussion of AI and the future of publishing. One New York editor, a guy from Penguin, predicted AI will replace ghostwriters in non-fiction. And fiction? Going to another talk by Samantha Harvey might give us some hope.

I decided to write about really screwing up -- doing a terrible job when I was interviewed. Also how I thought, Maybe that's something I can harvest for my new novel. An ancient trope: learning from your mistakes. I'm not sure how well that works in real life. But maybe you have other examples?

Witkoff was a fool for joining that chat from Moscow. But the entire charlatan national security team also chose to put him on that chat when they knew (or should have known) that he was in Moscow. A spy novel based on this level of cretinous behavior would be unbelievable.

Remedy Supported by RFK Jr. Leaves Some #Measles Patients More Ill. After the health secretary promoted vitamin A as a cure, parents in West Texas began giving their children high doses, sometimes to prevent infection, by @teddyrosenbluth.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/h... via @nytimes.com

Over 270 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since Israel resumed its attacks last week, according to Save the Children. 🔴 Follow our LIVE coverage: aje.io/2sm4kp

Dozens more pregnant and postpartum women have died in Texas hospitals since the state banned abortion, our analysis shows. As the maternal mortality rate dropped nationally, it rose in Texas by 33%.

A post about editing our ideas -- when writing, but not just writing. Look before you leap?

This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH

Amnesty International (@amnesty.org) urges new Syrian government to allow international investigation of sectarian violence, as death toll continues to rise... today.lorientlejour.com/article/1451...

New Program Grants Permanent Residency to Home Care Workers via @thetyee.ca thetyee.ca/News/2025/03...

Being a historian, people ask me if I think the US is living through Germany 1933. I answer no, analogies are always imperfect but to me it feels more like Russia 1999: a blatant theft of state assets and liberals in a fugue state, refusing to believe the arc of progress is bending against them.

! - "As Washington aligns with Moscow in seeking to lever the Ukrainian president out of his job... senior Trump allies held talks with Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko... and senior members of the party of Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s immediate predecessor as president"

Samantha Harvey published her prizewinning books below the radar—until Orbital won the Booker Prize. What does this say about the way books find an audience these days? People in publishing have told me they don’t know what sells anymore. So what do we do? lesleykrueger.substack.com/p/should-wri...

Happy Valentine's Day! I put up a freebie e-book to celebrate. www.amazon.com/dp/B09VM7KC6...

I just re-read Michael Ondaatje's classic novel, In the Skin of a Lion, after seeing it name-checked in a pair of recent books. It made me think about someone Ondaatje dedicates the book to, poet Sharon Stevenson, a mutual friend who died very sadly. So what's it like to read the novel now?

I'm new here, but I thought I'd experiment by posting something I wrote. I've been doing long walks, seeding copies of a couple of my backlist books in Little Free Libraries. Recently, I ended up calling 911 to try to help a strange, disheveled man. Here's the story on my Substack (which is free).