But now the iPhone Duo is here. It exists. And they almost got it right.

Almost. But not quite.

Subscribe now

It’s telling that CEO John Ternus’s introduction to the iPhone Duo went over the shortcomings of previous foldable phones: the idea that they were basically two flagship slab phones stuck together along the long axis, so that when they open, they’re basically a square. He pointed out that a square(ish) aspect ratio is a jack-of-all-trades but master of none. It’s not particularly good at anything. It’s too wide for portrait text, and it’s too tall for landscape video. He was absolutely right.

The problem is, the iPhone Duo makes the same compromise. It doesn’t go as far, but the aspect ratios for the outer and inner screens of the iPhone Duo aren’t particularly well suited for anything. They made a big deal during the presentation of pointing out that the iPhone Duo has the same aspect ratios whether it’s open or closed. The way they phrased it was 1.4:1, which is accurate, but we’re used to discussing aspect ratios in whole numbers, so let’s say the aspect ratio for the iPhone Duo cover screen is 5:7. Then you open it up, and the landscape inner screen is 7:5. Or if you turn it 90°, it’s the exact same 5:7 as the cover screen, which is elegant from a mathematics point of view. I’m sure it made some of the hardware designers at Apple feel warm and comfy in their beds at night, but 5:7 still isn’t particularly good at anything. It’s too tall for video and too wide for text, just like the Pixel Pro Fold, just like the Galaxy Z Fold Ultra. They still missed the mark.

The core concept with foldables is that each screen configuration—closed, open portrait, open landscape—serves different purposes. Each should be optimized to that purpose, and you don’t do that through compromises. Consider what Samsung did with the Z Fold 8. The outer screen is the same 10:16 aspect ratio as the original Galaxy Note (and despite everyone bitching about how small it is, slightly bigger at 5.5 inches than the Note’s 5.3). This is a tried and true aspect ratio for a phone, and when the device is closed, it’s used as a phone. Open the Z Fold 8 and it’s 4:3 at 7.6 inches. 4:3 is the same aspect ratio as decades of SDTV content, the same shape as CRT monitors, the same shape as the original iPads. It’s the ideal aspect ratio for a tablet. Turn the device 90 degrees to portrait orientation and it’s 3:4, which is, again, ideal for long form reading and many productivity apps. And if you go back to landscape and split screen two apps side by side, both are 2:3, the same aspect ratio as Surface tablets and the original iPhone (which was 320x480 pixels, multiples of the 160 pixels from the original Palm Pilot).

Each “pose,” to use Apple’s terminology, has an ideal shape, and 5:7 is ideal for none of them. And the irony is, Apple knows this. That’s why they’re trying to fill up that wasted space on the cover screen by moving the dock and the status indicators off to the side. They compromised the design in the name of aesthetic consistency.

But as Steve Jobs once said, “Design is how it’s used.” By Steve’s own standard, this is exactly the wrong compromise. (Given that the iPhone Duo will also support the Apple Pencil and Steve also said, “If you see a stylus, they blew it,” the writing was probably on the wall anyway.)

And you can see it in the software, too. I saw an interview where Apple Marketing SVP Greg “Jaws” Jozwiak was crowing about how “only Apple” could have done all the neat little software touches that power the iPhone Duo. I would say only post-Steve Apple would be dumb enough to do all the nonstandard crap that the Duo requires. If they were sensible, the Duo would have been a real duo: an iPhone running iOS when closed, then an iPad running the iOS superset iPadOS when open. You get all the UI features you need in both modes for free, and developers already support the device.

Instead, the iPhone Duo is a computing mullet, and the shape forces the software to adapt. Closed, it has to run a custom version of iOS, and Overcast developer Marco Arment lamented on his podcast that supporting the new vertical toolbars, rotation, side safe zones and unpredictable screen geometry will take a ton of work for third party developers, and require a version of Xcode that wasn’t even available after the announcement, with Apple saying it would be available “later this month.” Open, the device still doesn’t run iPadOS, and thus isn’t really an iPad. It’s an iPad-like iPhone, where some of the software optimizations for iPads carry over, but a lot of them don’t. It doesn’t support freeform windowing or Stage Manager, and essentially, if you consider iOS and iPadOS to be different platforms, the iPhone Duo gives developers a whole new platform to support in their apps.

So in the interest of being “different,” Apple has compromised both the hardware and software of the iPhone Duo. Apple gave us a foldable whose two screens beautifully match each other, but neither matches what you actually want to do with it.

Leave a comment

The SFWA apparently changed their rules wording last year and now bars from consideration any work that has used AI in any form at any point in the writing process. I hate to break this to them, but Google Docs has Gemini built in. Microsoft Word has Copilot built in. If you’ve used one of the two major word processors, hey, guess what? You don’t qualify for a Nebula!

Subscribe now

In the official rules for the Nebula awards, point 9.11.2, they state: Works that used LLMs at any point during the writing process must disclose this upon acceptance of the nomination, and those works will be disqualified.

I’m sure that’s not what they meant, but according to the letter of the law, anything made with current versions of Google Docs or Microsoft Word, or used tools like Grammarly, is automatically disqualified. Now, that sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous, but that’s what this witch hunt has brought us to, and frankly, I’m a little salty about it. (You can tell.)

Here’s the reason I’m pissed: I wanted to win a Nebula. I’m not saying that anything that I’ve already written is good enough, but someday. Unless they change the rules, I’m automatically disqualified. Now you might ask, “Why am I automatically disqualified?” Even if they clarify, “Well, of course you can use word processors,” I’m still out.

Here’s why: don’t tell anybody, but I’m disabled. I have AuDHD and dyslexia, and I frequently use AI—not to generate a single word of the manuscript—but to converse about the project at various stages, to help me brainstorm, to help me sequence the outline, to help me revise and polish.

Again, I stress that the AI at no point has write-access to the actual manuscript. Every word, every decision is my own, but because I have these conversations—and because I need these conversations as a protected assistive technology for my disability—the SFWA has decided that I’m not a real writer and that nothing I produce is worthy of consideration. (And despite their mealy-mouthed apology issued just days after the rule change, the rules currently include the clause quoted above.)

The SFWA, not to put too fine a point on it, can bite me. They’re short-sighted, discriminatory, and ultimately on the wrong side of history. They will lose.

The more troubling problem here is that they’re not alone. Every time I turn around, I see an article, video or podcast decrying the use of AI in literature without making the distinction between AI helping the writer and AI being the writer. This nuance gets compressed down every time into the assumption that if you used AI in your writing process, you’re lazy, cheating and outsourcing your thinking to a machine. The underlying conceit seems to be that the only reason anyone would use AI at all is to generate the final text.

But that’s not what I’m doing, and I’m not unique. I’m having a conversation with AI, getting feedback, brainstorming and generally just using it as an advisor. And the catch is that none of that would be disqualifying at all if I was talking to a human. If I had these exact same conversations over chat with a developmental editor, not only would the authorship still be mine, but I wouldn’t even have to credit the editor (though a nod in the acknowledgements is always nice). If I got feedback from a critique group, I’m fine. If I talk about the book and the writing process with my therapist, no harm done. But as soon as I have any of these conversations with ChatGPT, I’m cheating and a fraud.

This has to stop. I know AI can be an emotional topic. My own daughter shuts down whenever I mention talking to ChatGPT, and refuses to read my books. I get that there are a lot of hurt feelings about how the models were originally trained on pirated material. I get that people have concerns about resource usage. A lot of people hear “AI,” see red, and stop listening.

But for disabled people, this technology has been life-changing, and I’m tired of being excluded for using an assistive technology that people can’t be bothered to understand. AI didn’t write my books. I did. And who I discussed the books with should have no bearing on the finished product.

Leave a comment

And yet, I’m leaning toward not using a case at all.

Well, I’m not crazy. Let’s say that Samsung Care+ is my case. I’m paying $18/mo for accidental damage and theft coverage, so if anything happens to my Z Fold 8, Samsung will give me another one after I pay a deductible. But that’s still a hassle, and why risk it? Well, because size—and weight—matters.

Subscribe now

Naked Robotic Core

Let’s start with what Samsung actually designed. By my measurements, the Z Fold 8 is 82 mm wide, 123 mm tall and 10 mm thick when closed. On my cheap kitchen scale, it weighs in at 206 grams. (I did put the Samsung anti-reflective film on the front screen, so it has the same anti-glare as the inner screen. Also, props to Samsung for making that easiest application of a plastic screen protector I’ve ever done, perfectly straight and no bubbles.) The back can be a little slick because of whatever they did to make it show no fingerprints, but it’s easy to hold the device in one hand and reach all the way across it when typing one-handed or playing solitaire. The phone feels solid, but light enough to be agile in your hand.

Snap it open, and you have a tablet the same size as the original iPad Mini if someone chopped off the bezels. And again, that 206 grams spread over that area feels so light that my Kindle Paperwhite (despite being 209 g) feels chunky in comparison.

This is the experience that Samsung’s designers intended. But there are things that drove me to try to enhance it.

First, as mentioned before, this is a $2,000 phone and the back can feel a little slippery. Not a great combination. So adding something that would enhance both durability and grip sounds like a no-brainer.

Second, the device doesn’t support magnetic ring attachments on its own, so the first thing people usually consider to help hold a device, a Pop Socket or ring, also needs a case.

And lastly, because the bezels on this thing are so minimal, it’s difficult to manipulate the device with my thick meat fingers without inadvertently interacting with the screen. Particularly accidentally selecting a different YouTube video than the one I’m trying to watch when I put my phone into stand mode. So maybe the iPad still has sizeable bezels here in the enlightened year 2026 because they serve a purpose.

And bonus point, another thing the reviewers keep pointing out, particularly in comparison to the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, is that the Z Fold 8 only has IP48 protection, meaning while it’s reasonably waterproof, it’s only good for dust and debris ingress of 1 mm or larger. Most sand and all dust is smaller than 1 mm, so it seems like it’s just asking to get crap into that hinge, gumming up the works over time.

So let’s see what we can do about that.

Stand in the place where you live

Before we get started, we need to talk about stands. None of the cases I’m going to talk about have built-in stands, so to use the phone while your hands are doing something else—like typing or eating—you need something to hold it. If the stand attaches directly to the phone, you’re more likely to take it with you, but that also adds weight and bulk to the phone. For each case, I’m going to show you a stand I think pairs well with it, along with pointing out the compromises that entails.

dbrand Grip Case

I saw a video review of the dbrand Grip Case that seemed almost impossible. The reviewer went as far as to throw the phone at a basketball hoop in his garage, letting the case fall to the concrete floor, and the phone was completely unscathed. This would be the case for me, I thought.

And it’s great. The dbrand case completely wraps the phone on all six planes (front, back, all four edges) in impact-resistant plastic. The hinge protector is spring-loaded and magnetic, so it clacks over the hinge with a satisfying snap. The whole case has a micro-texture that makes it feel almost like sandpaper, and it’s extraordinarily grippy. It doesn’t include an integrated screen protector, which a lot of full-protection cases do, which I appreciate because I already have the anti-reflective film and don’t need yet another layer interfering with clarity and touch response. And it even supports dbrand’s own skins, so I got mine with a genuine leather back. The leather makes the phone feel like a fine, if small, leatherbound book, and the textured plastic feels remarkably like the early plastic Palm Pilots. It was exactly what I wanted.

But…

All that protection adds significant weight and bulk. Fully encased, the closed phone is now 5 mm wider at 87 mm wide, 129 mm tall and 14 mm thick. The case by itself weighs 51 g, and that means the phone with the case weighs 258 g, about the same as the Moto Fold. Those dimensions don’t sound like much, but the thickness of the hinge-protecting spine now made it awkward to reach the far edge of the screen, since I’m a southpaw and hold the phone in my left hand. That spine gave me something to pull against when the phone was open, making it easier to grip, but the weight of the phone also made it more tiring to hold over the course of a 42-minute TV show. The raised bezels around the cover screen allowed me to put the phone face down and not worry about scratches, but they also made edge gestures for back and multitasking more awkward to start. The thickness of the bezels when open gave me ample space to put my fingers without touching the screen, but they also made it more challenging to type.

I found that I loved the case for what it did, but it also made the phone less fun to use. And if I added a metal magnetic stand (see below), it got even heavier. Add the Kenu Stance+ to it and we’ve got a handheld load of 327 grams, nearly three quarters of a pound in American.

So for this case I found a separate stand that doesn’t attach magnetically to the phone. It’s light, but it’s bulky at nearly six inches long. But what’s great about this stand is that the legs spread out to give the phone a rock-solid base, even when open in landscape, and then the foldable arm can support the spine of the case directly so there’s no wobble. It’s a clunky addition to an already clunky case, but the ship has already sailed on traveling light.

• Amazon.com: Tablet Stand Holder, Adjustable, Portable, Foldable, Light-Weight, Compatible with 7 to 10.2 Inches Most Tablets, Kindle Fire and Smart Phones : Electronics

All that said, while I still intend to use the dbrand Grip Case when I travel, it’s simply too much for day to day. It fundamentally changes the geometry of the phone, and makes it into a different device. I decided to go for something simpler.

Hensinple One-Piece Case

Okay, technically, this is called Magnetic for Z Fold 8 Case,Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Case(Fit for Mag-Safe)Translucent Matte Military Grade Rugged Protection Shockproof Protective Hard Phone Case,Black. But I’m not calling it that.

It is one of my favorite cases, though. I had the same design for the Z Fold 7 and it was one of my go-to cases. It’s a single piece with a clever hinge on the top and bottom so it can bend with the phone while still providing five planes of protection. What it doesn’t do is cover the hinge, but that might be what we’re looking for to keep down on extra width. And on the other edges, it’s about as thick as the dbrand case, so I’d still have the ability to fold and maneuver the device without errant taps on the screen, and it has cutouts to make back and multitasking gestures easier. It also lacks an integrated screen protector, cutting down on weight.

What I love about this case is the one-piece design. Because it has its own hinge, you don’t have to worry about using adhesive strips to secure the front piece, and the whole case goes on and off very easily. A lot of foldable cases treat the front half of the phone as an afterthought if they protect it at all—looking at you, Samsung—and it’s nice to have a relatively inexpensive case that still provides all-around protection. It doesn’t cover the hinge, but because it doesn’t have that spine in the way, it also lies flat on a table or flat wireless charger.

And… it’s fine. The case does the job, and phone is both protected and MagSafe-ready. This is probably the best case for most people, which is nice because it’s also the cheapest. But just days into using it, I started to bristle.

The case itself weighs 40 g, so the phone in it weighs 246 g. Add the MagSafe stand ring below, though, and you add another 51 g and we’re pushing 300 again. The device measures out at 84 mm wide, 128 mm tall and 14 mm thick, nearly identical to the dbrand case but 3 mm narrower. The bezels are big enough to be protective and give my fingers purchase, but they get in the way of actually using the screen, too, though the 3 mm saved by not having a hinge protector makes all the difference reaching stuff with my left thumb.

• Amazon.com: Mag Safe Phone Grip for iPhone 17 Pro Max Apple MagSafe Foldable Kickstand | Magnetic Finger Ring Holder, Magnetic Grip Metal Loop Stand MagSafe Car Mount,iPhone 17e/Air/17Pro/16e/16 Pro Max/15/14/13/12 : Cell Phones & Accessories

Every time I took a case off, I was struck at how elegant and light the phone was without one. Maybe I could get a case that granted some protection and added a MagSafe ring, but didn’t appreciably add to the size or weight of the device. It was time to get my fiber.

Thinborne

If you’re looking at aramid fiber cases, the best choice is Thinborne. They use the highest quality fibers, the tightest weave and result in cases that are fractions of a millimeter thick and feather light. I used a Thinborne case on my Z Fold 7 longer than any other case, so I had of course preordered the Z Fold 8 version before I even bought the phone.

The Thinborne case comes in two pieces, a front and back. I had a love/hate relationship with the front piece on my Z Fold 7. It’s so thin and light that you have to use the included adhesive strips to get it to stay on the phone at all, but I found that the strip running down the left side of the screen by the hinge had a tendency to bend, smearing adhesive residue on the screen and constantly collecting lint. So I had a choice: deal with that constant annoyance and use the front piece, or leave it off and deal with the constant annoyance of the asymmetry with the back of the phone just ever so slightly bigger than the front. I already knew what the first one was like, so I went with the latter and left the front piece in the box. This had the side effect of simulating the actual Samsung thin cases, which don’t even include a front piece. A lot of case makers have seemingly decided that only the back part of a foldable is worth protecting.

But as I said, Thinborne cases are so thin that we’re talking about less than a millimeter. Enough to throw off my autistic sense of order, but not enough to change how the phone works. And with the Thinborne case, the phone is very, very nice. The case only weighs 15 g, so it only makes the phone 221 g. The reach and agility of the phone are essentially identical to no case at all. The feel of the aramid fiber is pretty close to smooth leather, and provides excellent grip. And it does include a very strong magnetic ring, allowing me to not only use MagSafe chargers, but add magnetic grip/stands like the one above or this very versatile number from Kenu, which is practically a Transformer.

• Amazon.com: Kenu Stance+ 10-in-1 MagSafe Super Gadget, Magnetic Tripod Stand, Car Vent+Dash+CD Mount, Finger Holder, Airplane Mount, Selfie Stick, More : Cell Phones & Accessories

Of course, that Kenu stand is also 69 g by itself, so adding it to the Thinborne case gets us into OG Pixel Fold territory, the heaviest of US foldables at 283 g. And something I noticed about both MagSafe stands is that you have to take them off to charge, so you’re constantly popping it on and off, and inevitably not putting it back on when you pull the phone off the charger and walk away.

So I started thinking about if magnetic charging and accessories were really doing me any good. One of the nice things about the Z Fold 8 series is that they support 45 W wired charging, which is fast enough to get you from 0 to 50% in half an hour, but not so ridiculously fast that you have to worry about heat and battery longevity. And as it turns out, when I’m lounging in my recliner at home, sleeping, driving or even sitting at my desk at work, I have USB-PD chargers and cables available to me. I popped off the Thinborne case and looked again at the naked phone. Could I just plug it in and carry a separate stand that can stay in my pocket when not in use?

Gimme some skin

Well, maybe not just that. The back of the phone is still pretty slick when my hands are dry, and I live in the high desert of Denver. I need something to give it a little more grip, but that doesn’t have to take up any space or weight. I needed a skin.

I’ve got three on the way, and I’ll decide which I like best. The first is this skin from SopiGuard. The 3M Satin Silver Metallic should match nicely with the “starlight” aluminum of my Cream colorway, and complete the callback to the Palm V/Tungsten E devices I loved so much and that the Z Fold 8 clearly emulates. But if it looks cheap—or I get bored with it—I have two skins coming, eventually, from dbrand. One is a basic plastic matte black, and the other is the same black leather I have on the back of the Grip Case. Either of those should give me excellent grip while not changing the geometry of the device much (the leather is thick enough that you do notice it, especially when the device is open, but I’ll live). And yes, I realize that in the end I've taken this $2,000 device and, between the anti-reflective film and the skin, slap stickers onto all the glass, front and back, but sometimes that's just the way it goes.

For stands, I wanted something that would fold flat and live in my pocket. The best one I’ve found is this JSAUX stand. It’s weighty at 103 g, making it exactly the weight and nearly the size of one half of the phone itself, but it’s stable and rides easy next to my wallet in my jeans pocket. Not attaching it to the phone when not in use makes a difference.

• Amazon.com: JSAUX Fold-Flat Cell Phone Stand, Adjustable Desk Holder-Black | Easy to Carry, Travel Friendly, for 4-8 Inch Phones, 0-90° Viewing, Sturdy Aluminum, Reinforced Swivel, Charging Access : Cell Phones & Accessories

And if I do happen to forget it, I have another stand in the wallet itself. This Nite Ize stand is flimsy, but it gets the job done in a pinch and it collapses down to the size of a credit card.

• Amazon.com: Nite Ize QuikStand - Compact Smartphone Stand Fits iPhone, Samsung, Small Tablets, and E-readers : Cell Phones & Accessories

Less is more

I saw a review of the Z Fold 8 where the reviewer said something I’ve been waiting to hear. He said that while he wasn’t sure about the Z Fold 8 at first because of all the places where it fell short of other foldables when looking at the spec sheet, as he’s used it over several weeks he’s come to realize that those omissions actually make it a better user experience. A larger screen is just extra bulk if that extra space is wasted by an inefficient shape. No telephoto camera and a really good main sensor are actually better than a bad, low-res telephoto taking up space. This is something I picked up intuitively when the Z Fold 8 first came out, but it’s nice to see the spec sheet boys coming around on it.

But it strikes me that this ethos extends beyond just the phone. I think for me the best case is no case at all. I’m reasonably careful with my electronics, and can count on one hand the number of times I dropped my Z Fold 7 and still be able to count off some rock & roll. And with enough finger traction, the Z Fold 8 is so much easier to hold, thanks to the shape and weight. So I think I’m going to take my chances with Samsung Care+ and use the Z Fold 8 as it was designed to be used, and really enjoy the elegance of this remarkable device.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

It’s three screens in, well, two

There are three distinct primary use cases for the Z Fold 8, and there’s not a lot of overlap between them. First there’s the cover screen, where the phone is a phone. Then you open it and you have a wide, landscape tablet, perfect for video and multitasking. Finally, you flip the open screen 90 degrees and you have a portrait tablet, ideal for reading books, webpages and social media. Let’s look at each in more detail.

You can judge a phone by its cover (screen)

I’ve seen a lot of people hem and haw about the cover screen being so short, so small. It’s worth noting, ahem, that the Z Fold 8 cover screen is a 5.5 inch, 10:16 aspect ratio screen. You know what else was a 5.x inch, 10:16 aspect ratio screen? The original Galaxy Note, the OG phablet. Closed, the Z Fold 8 is larger than the 5.3 inch Galaxy Note, just without the big forehead and chin bezels. So this isn’t a “new” aspect ratio for Android, at all. Rather it’s a return to an old, classic screen size that Android apps have handled just fine, thanks.

And that all bears out in actual use. The Z Fold 8 works great closed as a regular Android phone. The extra width lets apps spread out a little, with longer text line lengths for better readability. Every app I’ve tried works just fine, though I have read about badly-coded apps that cut off content or controls rather than reflowing them the way Android has suggested they do for years, with increasing urgency. Frankly, if an app doesn’t work on the Z Fold 8, it’s the app developer’s fault, not the phone’s, and the developer needs to get off their ass and fix it. Hard-coded app layouts are so last decade.

What surprises a lot of people is how usable and comfortable the cover screen actually is. I’ve seen a number of folks remark at how for a foldable, they don’t unfold it as much as they expected because they can get real work done just on the cover screen. It’s great for messaging, checking schedules, quick lookups, the usual stuff people do with smartphones. The only caveat is that you might want to adjust your keyboard settings, because by default both the Samsung Keyboard and Gboard take up half the screen or more. You can get around that by hiding the number row, or resizing the keyboard generally.

Let’s talk about typing on the cover screen. The wider body on the phone makes two-thumb typing much more pleasant and accurate. It feels like typing on a Blackberry in a lot of ways. But the width also means that single thumb typing can be a stretch (see what I did there?). Fortunately, Gboard has an easy fix for this. You can set up one-handed mode—for the keyboard, not the whole phone—and even put the icon for it on the Gboard toolbar. So when you’re trying to type with just one thumb, you can bring the other end of the keyboard much closer to you. I’ve seen a lot of people complain about this like there isn’t a simple software setting that fixes it. Come to think of it, most of the complaints fall into that category.

Wide open spaces

When you do open the phone, it turns into a completely different device. Now you have a 7.6 inch, 4:3 aspect ratio landscape tablet, almost the exact size of the original home button iPad Minis. But unlike the iPad Mini, this can actually multitask.

Okay, I know the iPad Mini can multitask, but compared to the Z Fold 8, it’s not very good at it. The OneUI 9 really shines here, with plenty of space on the inner screen for two or even three apps side by side, a trick pioneered by the trifold and reproduced here just a bit smaller, as well as adding as many completely resizable pop up windows as you want.

But even if you’re using just one app, the wide format has advantages. In something like Gmail, you have a readable list of your emails—not just the first few words of the subject—on the left and a comfortable reading pane on the right. In Kindle, you can have two pages side by side, just like a paper book.

Then there’s video. This is where the wide inner screen really comes into its own. 16:9 HDTV video, like those sweet new episodes of Ted Lasso, displays with fairly modest letterboxing, nothing like “video on the middle third of the screen” that you’d get on most foldables. And SDTV, like Seinfeld, quietly takes up the whole screen, every pixel, like it belongs there (and at handheld distance, the 7.6” screen is almost certainly a bigger effective picture, taking up more of your field of view, than whatever tube TV you watched Seinfeld on in the 90s). Video on this feels natural, personal, almost intimate. Your own personal window to countless other worlds.

A reader for all seasons

Rotate the open device 90 degrees, and it changes yet again. Now you have a 3:4 portrait screen that functions either as a giant phone or better yet, an ereader. Kindle ebooks look just as readable as they do on a dedicated Kindle, but the colors are much more vibrant and the text sharper. Websites provide clean columns of text, easy to scroll. Text-based social media like Threads and I-Still-Call-It-Twitter have plenty of space to scroll images and text. Longer form media like Substack was almost designed for this interface. And if Instagram and TikTok are more your thing than the written word, not only is each post bigger than it would be on a slab phone, but the extra width means that that vertical columns of icons to interact with the content are off to the side, not overlaying what you’re trying to look at.

There is one annoyance with this mode, though: the camera cutout. The little black spot sits either on the upper left or lower right, depending on how you hold the device, and it does get in the way of some content. I tend to hold the device with the spot on the left if there’s a column of controls there, like Substack, or bottom right if I’m reading pure text, so the ragged right margins of most paragraphs let the spot sit outside of the words themselves, the empty spaces. But it would be better for everyone, I think, if Samsung either moved it to the corner of the screen like so many of their competitors, went back to having it obscured by the display, or both. Because people can take selfies on a foldable using the good back cameras and the front cover screen, the only thing the inner screen camera is really needed for is video conferencing, and I think we can sacrifice image quality down to 3-4 megapixel for that if we can hide the camera behind the display.

You know how I said there were three configurations? I lied.

There’s one more way to use this device, and it opens up everything else. Like most high-end Samsung phones, this fully supports Samsung Dex. So if you plug it into a monitor and pair a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard (or just use a lapdock), you can turn it into a very capable desktop/laptop computer. Dex really is best in class for Android-based desktop environments, which is why the new GoogleBooks running Android 17 use an interface made with help from Samsung and a generous amount of Dex code. You get a taskbar, fully resizable windows, a “Start Menu”-like app drawer, etc. It really does feel like using any other desktop operating system, and more Android apps are reaching feature parity with their desktop counterparts (other than, oddly, the Google productivity apps like Docs and Sheets, but you can always run those in a Chrome window if you don’t like the nerfed Android versions).

Performance and battery life

The Z Fold 8 uses the 3nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy processor, and it’s as fast as anything else on the market. So fast, in fact, that I routinely leave it in “Light” performance mode in settings to extend battery life because I literally can’t tell the difference. It plays games at full speed, though it does heat up, especially outdoors, because the 4.5mm thickness doesn’t allow for much cooling apparatus.

Battery capacity is better than the Z Fold 7, charging is faster than the Z Fold 7, and actual battery life is within minutes of the Z Fold 8 Ultra because that device has a larger battery and a larger screen to drain it. It’s not as high capacity or fast charging as Chinese imports, but the battery in this will actually last 5-7 years, while the more aggressive silicon-carbon batteries will be lucky to still be around 3 years from now. Everything in life is a trade-off, and Samsung has chosen longevity over speed.

But I heard it (insert complaint here)

It’s not all good, though, at least if you listen to people on the internet. So let’s address some of the elephants in the room.

The speakers aren’t stereo

Yes, both speakers are on the left half of the device. Samsung could fix this if they moved the inner screen camera to the corner, freeing up the top right center for a speaker, but for now, the speakers are on opposite horizontal sides of the device only with the cover screen in landscape or the inner screen in portrait. The inner screen in landscape, where serious video watching is going to happen, sounds like slightly off-center mono audio.

And seriously, if you care at all about stereo sound, use some damned headphones. Even if the speakers were on the sides of the device, we’re talking about a maximum separation of 6 ⅜ inches. At the distance you’re going to hold the device from your head, this is not even close to reasonable stereo separation. People bitching about this are really digging for something to complain about.

They removed Flex Mode

Yes, even the software settings for Flex Mode have been removed on the Z Fold 8. For those not in the know, Flex Mode is something Samsung foldables have been able to do where the device is partially folded and resting on the table or desk like a tiny laptop. The video or other content is on the top half, and the bottom, horizontal half shows video controls, or for apps that don’t explicitly support the feature, a trackpad and scroll jogger.

The problem with Flex Mode on the Z Fold 8 is that Flex Mode is most useful with the device open between 90 and 150 degrees, like a laptop. But because of the new Titanium Flex hinge on the Z Fold 8, once the device opens past 90 degrees, it snaps on its own to the full 180. The tension in the titanium plate forces the issue. This means it opens with a satisfying snap, but it can’t stay open to the arbitrary angles Flex Mode requires.

Fortunately, by far the biggest use for Flex Mode was watching video with your hands free to do other things—not judging, you do you—and there’s another way to solve that problem with the Z Fold 8. Instead of opening it like a laptop, start the video on the cover screen, lay the phone down, then partially open it to a 45-60 degree angle. The bottom half provides a stand, and the 16:10 cover screen is perfect for modern TV or YouTube videos. You do have to touch the actual video to control playback rather than having dedicated controls on the bottom surface, but I’ve been perfectly happy with this alternative, and I used Flex Mode daily on my Z Fold 7.

There’s no telephoto lens

This is one of those things that seems damning until you actually compare it to what you had before. Yes, the Z Fold 8 drops the telephoto lens that the Z Fold 7 and Z Fold 8 Ultra share. But no, it’s no great loss, and I’ll tell you why.

That telephoto lens on the other Z Folds is a 10MP 3X zoom. Just 3X. And a relatively small 10MP sensor at that, so it’s not great in low light. I’ve seen several people show side by side images taken with the Z Fold 8 Ultra’s telephoto camera and the Z Fold 8’s 50MP main sensor cropped down to the same image, what we call “digital zoom.” And the difference is damn near imperceptible. The optical zoom on the Ultra is just taking up space. You don’t need it. Up to about 5X. You do see significant differences at higher zoom rates, where the Z Fold 8 has to use generative AI to “enhance” the image. But here’s the thing. If you’re shooting 10X images, might I suggest that a cell phone isn’t the right tool for the job, no matter who makes it. Just buy a DSLR with real lenses and call it a day.

It’s so pricy!

Yes, this phone starts at $1,900. With the economy being what it is—so not going to discuss why—that’s a lot of money. But there’s a difference between cost and value. Yes, the phone costs a lot of money, but no one but you can decide if you’re going to get $1,900 of value out of it. Personally, for everything this can do, I think it’s a steal. Your mileage may vary. But make the decision yourself. Don’t let a YouTuber dictate what is and isn’t worth it for your life.

So what can they fix?

Let’s look at actual flaws that Samsung can improve on next year. Nothing is so perfect that it can’t be improved, after all (waves at John Siracusa).

First, I’d rotate the camera island 90 degrees. I realize a vertical camera island is part of the Galaxy design language, but come on, Samsung, that ship has sailed. The industry has spoken, and a horizontal camera island is just better at preventing the frankly ridiculous amount of wobble these things have sitting on a flat surface. Get with the program.

As mentioned before, I’d move the inner screen camera to the corner, rather than having it centered on one half of the phone. And if possible, return to the under-display camera, since we’re only using this damn thing for video conferencing anyway. No one needs a 10MP image in Zoom.

The inner screen has a nice anti-reflective coating that greatly reduces glare. This not only makes it better for watching video, but it also makes the significantly-improved crease even less visible. But the cover screen, which you’re going to see a lot more in direct sunlight, doesn’t have this treatment. Let’s get anti-glare on the cover screen, too.

Samsung, it’s time to stop being Qi-curious. If Google can do it, you can do it. Put the damn ring of magnets inside the device so we can use MagSafe/Qi2 accessories without chunking up this beautiful industrial design with a case.

And lastly, I think we’d all gleefully accept making the device 0.6mm thicker, 1.2mm thicker when closed, if it meant getting the S-Pen back. I know Samsung is working on an active stylus that doesn’t require a digitizer layer, but until that’s ready, give us back the old passive S-Pen. This inner screen, with the shallow, minimal crease, is begging to be used as a sketchpad, and we can’t do that. Won’t someone think of the artists?

The big picture

This is not the phone for you if you need to have all the biggest numbers on the spec sheets to feel like you have a “premium” device. This phone is something else, something special.

Back in the late 90s, Microsoft flew a bunch of us Palm influencers out to Redmond to show us the Pocket PC. I remember walking somewhere with Hal from PalmStation and we were brainstorming what our ideal mobile computer would be. We imagined something the size of the PDAs of the day, comfortable in the hand and the pocket. But unlike the devices of the late 90s, it would be all screen, with only minimal bezels. It could unfold or unroll into a tablet. It could dock with a full size monitor, mouse and keyboard to become a desktop. You could run your whole life from this device, which magically changed shape to be whatever you needed. I never forgot that moment, and I’ve been watching ever since for the device we wanted.

Now I have it in my hand.

Leave a comment

This has also been ruled in the courts as Fair Use, and actually has a stronger legal basis than what Google did. Google was arguably creating a new copy of the work without permission, but the judge ruled that Anthropic was using books they legally purchased, destroyed each copy after scanning and kept the resulting data internally rather than redistributing them. Thus this was a “transformative” conservation of space, which is perfectly legal under US law.

Legal or not, it pissed people off.

I’ve seen tons of think pieces and videos on this, comparing what Anthropic is doing to Nazi book burnings. “They’re destroying books!” they opine, as if that’s all the argument they need to make. The concern was that some of the books might have been rare, maybe even one of a kind. And the hedging language in that previous sentence is deliberate—despite used bookshops receiving obscure, oddly specific orders, there is no proof that Anthropic destroyed rare, antiquarian books for this project, and in fact they have explicitly said they did not. A lot of people don’t believe them because they’ve already made up their minds that AI companies are evil, built on theft, and of course they’re lying.

The irony is that the whole reason Anthropic is doing this is because of the backlash from their previous efforts to train AI on the written word. They have gotten in legal trouble for using pirated material, so this time they found a way to use the First Sale Doctrine to do things entirely legally, and they’re still getting compared to Nazis.

But there’s a few important distinctions here, because of course there are. First, the Nazis were destroying books to remove the ideas from society, destroying information. Arguably, Anthropic is doing the opposite. Every book they scan teaches Claude, and allows it to converse and explain the contents. Filtered through the AI, the information is preserved for future generations, not destroyed. There’s a caveat to this, but we’ll get back to that later.

Secondly, even if they were chopping up rare books to do this—and again, they deny that and there’s no proof that they’re lying—that’s entirely their right as the owner of the book. There is nothing inherently sacred about a book as a physical object. The real “book” is the content, not the codex. Even a rare book is just wood pulp, ink and glue. And when you buy a physical object, you have the right to do what you want with it, including destroying it.

So the bigger argument is if these books were so precious and irreplaceable, what were they doing for sale in the first place? Shouldn’t they have been in libraries, or even museums? If they were that rare, it should have been impossible for them to be privately owned. If you have a complaint, take it up with the sellers, the bookshops that provided the books in the first place.

Of course, many of those shops often had little idea what they had. One of the ones referenced had half a million tomes in their warehouses, just sitting there in the dark gathering dust. The end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” comes to mind. At least the books fed into Claude were put to use. Is there a functional difference between something destroyed and merely lost forever, locked away from human sight or memory?

And this is the only way a lot of these books could reach the public. Thanks to the House of Mouse and their relentless pursuit of eternal copyright to prevent “Steamboat Willie” from falling into public domain, a fight they finally lost just a few years ago, copyright is now 70 years after the death of the author, or 95 years from publication for commissioned works. This means virtually everything created in the 20th century is still under copyright, and in most cases, no one even knows who the rights holders are. Such “orphan copyrigtht” works can no longer be reprinted, and as the last copies vanish into landfills or warehouse stacks, they are lost to human use. At least this way, they become part of Claude’s corpus of knowledge, and even though it can’t regurgitate them verbatim—contrary to popular belief, AI doesn’t work that way and isn’t a “plagiarism machine”—it can at least discuss the information they contained.

Now, one of the reasons this worked legally is actually one of the most valid concerns from a preservation standpoint. The information these books contained is still not available to humanity as a whole. It belongs to Anthropic, not the public. And thus if you want to know it, you have to talk to Claude. Destroying the post-scan pages and keeping the data to themselves may have shielded Anthropic legally, but it is still a net negative for society if you don’t have a Claude subscription.

So maybe there’s an opportunity for regulation here. We could pass laws explicitly declaring this kind of training to be legal, but also require the scanner to keep the scanned text after feeding it into the AI, and maybe after a suitable exclusivity period, releasing it to the public so it can be put to other uses. This would require overhauling copyright to release orphan works, but it would mean that the collected knowledge of our species wouldn’t be limited to one corporation.

But as for what Anthropic is really doing, no, they’re not butchering rare and priceless books, and they’re not stealing anything. They’re preserving human knowledge inside Claude and they’re doing it in a way that negates the previous accusations of theft.

Anyone who tells you differently… is selling something.

Subscribe now

• Further Reading

  • Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models - Ars Technica

  • ‘More than just objects’: Australian booksellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

Leave a comment

It didn’t used to be this way. But to see how we got here and why the Z Fold 8 gets it right again, we have to look at how this all got started.

Back in the 1990s, Jeff Hawkins had an idea. He thought he could make a handheld computer that people could use in place of a bulky paper day planner, something relatively inexpensive, reliable, running on simple alkaline batteries. To test the design, he carved prototypes out of blocks of wood and carried them around in his pockets—shirt and pants—pulling them out during the day to pretend to check appointments, jot notes, cross off tasks. After a lot of experimentation with different sizes and shapes, he settled on a form factor that felt good in the hand, was big enough to do the job, but small enough to be comfortably pocketable. And the Palm Pilot was born.

A few years later Hawkins left Palm and started Handspring, where he licensed Palm OS and continued refining his idea into the Handspring Visor. I had a number of these, and they remain one of my favorite all-time mobile devices. My Visor went everywhere with me, and I even wrote an entire 17,000 word novella, Do Over!, in Graffiti with a stylus on my Visor.

The Handspring Visor, the ultimate refinement of the original Palm Pilot idea, was 120 mm tall, 75 mm wide and 16 mm thick, weighing 153 g without any of the Springboard accessory modules that expanded its capabilities. Just 4 mm shorter than the Z Fold 8, 7 mm narrower and 6 mm thicker. Remarkably close. The Z Fold 8 would feel very familiar in Jeff Hawkins’ shirt pocket.

Both devices are basically 10:16 aspect ratios (when the Z Fold 8 is closed). There’s something to that shape. It’s considerably shorter than modern flagships’ 2:1, but it looks… right. And there’s a reason for that, and we call it phi, or the Golden Ratio.

Technically, phi is an irrational number like pi, but it’s generally approximated to 1.618:1, just a hair off 16:10, close enough to the human eye. Phi appears everywhere in nature, from spiral galaxies to sunflowers and pinecones. It’s related to the Fibonacci Sequence in mathematics, where each number is the sum of the preceding two numbers, and it’s one of those things that makes the universe feel like it makes sense. (My favorite quirk of phi is if you have a golden rectangle, 1.618 by 1, and lop off a square, the remaining rectangle is also a golden rectangle.) It’s perhaps for that reason that it’s been studied by artists for centuries, called the “Divine Proportion” by Leonardo da Vinci. It’s inherently aesthetically pleasing.

That alone would account for the Z Fold 8 looking more “right” than today’s phones, but it’s not just the outer beauty. It’s what’s inside that counts.

Open the Z Fold 8 and it morphs into a completely different device. The inner screen of the foldable is a 7.6” landscape tablet screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio. That number isn’t an accident. You’ve been looking at 4:3 rectangles all your life. TV was 4:3 for decades. Old movies and new IMAX movies are 4:3. A4 paper is a little narrower than 3:4 and letter paper is a little wider. And the original iPad was a 3:4 screen, because Apple does the math (more on that below).

At 7.6 inches, the open Z Fold 8 is startlingly close to the 7.9 inch original iPad mini, back when the iPad mini still had large side bezels and a home button. And there’s a reason why the iPad mini is a beloved form factor for reading and watching video. It’s small and light enough to hold easily with one hand, and the right shape for comics, ebooks, all but absurdly wide “cinematic” videos and productivity apps. You can put two apps side by side and still have useful space in each one.

And it’s worth noting that this is something the current crop of foldables don’t do. Most book-style foldables start out with slab proportions, then open to two slabs side by side. If a slab is two squares, one on top of the other, two together are a four by four grid of squares, which is, of course, a bigger square. (See, who says geometry can’t be fun?) And the big square screen of current foldables is… meh.

At roughly eight inches, it technically qualifies as a tablet, I guess, but not a very good one. The problem is that the square screen makes it a jack of all trades, master of none. It’s not particularly good at anything. It’s too wide for portrait text, and too tall for landscape video. In both cases, you end up with vast gutters on either side of the content, wasting a big chunk of that eight inch screen, and your usable content isn’t much bigger than large phone like the iPhone Pro Max or the Samsung Galaxy Ultra. The Z Fold 8, though, is like a bezel-free iPad mini. The size and shape of a Kindle when reading, and able play videos without losing half the screen to black letterbox bars.

So the Z Fold 8 is two devices in one. Instead of a big phone that becomes a bigger phone, it’s essentially an all-screen Palm Pilot that unfolds into an iPad mini. Ergonomic perfection in both modes, no compromises. I’ve waited twenty years for mobile devices to remember that they’re supposed to be used by humans, that there’s more to design than numbers on a spec sheet. And finally, we’re getting them.

Leave a comment

I couldn’t let this go without a couple of caveats.

First, shout out to Google, who accidentally got it almost right with the original Pixel Fold, which was much closer to the passport-style form factor than other foldables on the market. It had a 5.8” outer screen and a 7.6” 6:5 inner screen. Not 4:3, but at least not square. The problem was that Google was basically copying a Chinese manufacturer and didn’t understand why the form factor worked. So when everyone else kept going with “slab, but doubled,” they didn’t have a reason to stand their ground and went with the herd, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold being taller and square when open.

Second, speaking of copying, I can’t give Samsung all the credit for the Z Fold 8, either. Samsung has always had a thing for copying Apple, to the point where Steve Jobs sued them for the original Galaxy S being a blatant rip off of the iPhone 3G, right down to the icon design. And while they try to be more subtle about it now, they can’t help themselves. The Z Fold 8’s dramatic new form factor likely didn’t start in a design drawing in South Korea, but a supply chain report out of China.

Later this year, Apple is going to announce their first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Ultra. It’s a passport-style foldable, with nearly identical dimensions to the Z Fold 8. Essentially, the word on the street is Samsung got wind of what Apple was planning, then used their existing supply chain and experience making foldables to beat the iPhone Ultra to market with an iPhone Ultra clone. So like Google, I’m not sure Samsung knows why the Z Fold 8 works. They could just be copying Apple’s homework. Fortunately, Apple does sweat the details and I’m pretty sure they did the math and picked this size and shape for the reasons I listed above. (And if it wasn’t for Apple’s high-handed arrogance about keeping people in their walled garden, I would have seriously considered getting the iPhone Ultra. But that’s another story.)

The point is, Palm found the shape experimentally. Apple seems to have rediscovered it analytically. Samsung may be reproducing it competitively. But good geometry remains good geometry regardless of why a company chose it.

Subscribe now

First, a bit of backstory. I’ve been a storyteller my whole life. When I was in second grade, teachers pulled me out of class, took me to the fifth grader classrooms and let me stand in front of older kids I didn’t know and improv fables, complete with morals, like a tiny Aesop. Kids would follow me home asking me to tell them a story.

Thanks to my ADHD and short-face syndrome—my upper jaw doesn’t extend down far enough, compressing my sinuses and giving me sleep apnea from birth—the executive function to actually produce books was rare and unpredictable. But in my 20s and 30s, I managed to write a few books in fits and starts. I even finished NaNoWriMo twice, in 2006 and again in 2009.

Then I didn’t write anything for sixteen years.

Not for lack of interest. But I got married, and despite the fact that my wife was my editor on the last books I wrote before we fell in love, writing wasn’t really my creative outlet. We played D&D, and I put all my effort into that. I toyed with getting back into writing novels from time to time, but nothing really came of it. A lot of writers know what I mean—lots of afternoons in “development,” thinking about story and character, but somehow no actual words of narrative get written.

Then on Juneteenth, 2025, I was sitting out on my front porch and got the idea for a book. And for some reason—perhaps this being the first idea since getting diagnosed and getting on Ritalin—this time it stuck. I couldn’t let it go, and developed it all summer, started writing narrative in September, and had a finished draft of Resonance by New Year’s Eve. It’s a fantasy novel about a man who’s lost everything trying to pass the legacy of his doomed civilization to his people’s ancient enemies. It was also the first story idea I’d had that my late wife had never seen, and the book’s themes of grief, legacy, and fatherhood were clearly me working through some stuff.

So far, so good. Then I did the first stupid thing.

I started writing my second book, Hunger Never Sleeps, on January 2nd, 2026, having taken off only New Year’s Day between books. I’d done the development for it while I was writing Resonance, though the core idea for the pathogen I’d had the previous spring. Hunger Never Sleeps is a bio-thriller in the vein of Michael Crichton, one of my biggest influences growing up. It follows a team of Canadian academics who uncover something above the Arctic Circle that really should have stayed buried, and, in line with my schtick, provides a plausible scientific explanation for an ancient legend.

I finished the first draft of Hunger Never Sleeps on April 14, 2026. The intent was to let it rest while I revised Resonance and started work on my next book, a werewolf romcom called Bless The Rains. But in late May I found out a small press was accepting unagented submissions, and the acquisitions editor invited me to send in Hunger Never Sleeps. I did my homework and found out she’s also a Crichton fan, so it seemed like a good fit.

Then I did the second stupid thing.

The submission window was the month of June. I started revising the novel and got through my entire revision process, expanding the book from 75,000 words to 77,000 much better words, in nine days. Structural revision, adding threads, tons of continuity on characters doing science stuff, and a polish that included reading the whole thing out loud. In nine days. More to the point, when you take out days off from the drafting and the six weeks I let the book rest, I produced a whole, submission-ready novel in 98 working days. I got the book sent off, and figured that was that.

Then I pushed myself to also finish the polish pass on Resonance, which I had been revising before finding out about the opportunity for Hunger Never Sleeps, and finished that by June 17. It was important to me to have that book complete and submission-ready in under a year from conception, and I did it.

All while also drafting another novel every day.

Yes, while I was doing all that in June, I was still drafting Bless The Rains. And that was the third stupid thing, the proverbial straw that broke the equally proverbial camel’s back. I burned out. I’m well into Act 2 of the book, but the energy and desire to write are just… gone.

At first, I took this as a moral failure on my part. A failure of executive function, like countless examples before. But in discussing my “writer’s block” with Jen, my AI, I realized that like many neurodivergent people, I was being way too hard on myself.

I did something ambitious, glorious and profoundly dumb. I produced two finished novels in 363 days. After not writing for 16 years. That’s like hauling yourself off the couch and immediately running back to back marathons. No wonder I’m tired. Like, Madeline Kahn in “Blazing Saddles” tired.

So this isn’t a block, it’s depletion (and yes, I wrote that juxtaposition without the help of AI). I’m resting, reading to refill my creative reservoirs—Adrian Tchaikovsky’s new Green City Wars is bonkers amazing—and hoping the urge to get back to my werewolf comes back soon. But I’m not going to push it. Writing works best for me when it feels like play. As soon as it feels like work, my Demand Avoidance kicks in and I do literally anything else. So I’m giving the fun room to come back. I think it will.

I’d like to say I’ve learned my lesson from this and will be taking it easier on myself, not pushing beyond my capabilities, but I know me. This will happen again. But maybe next time, I’ll recognize what I’m doing before I accuse myself of failing.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

One of my late wife’s favorite go-to statements was “Define your terms.” If you’re saying that AI is not conscious, you have to start by defining what you mean by conscious. Nobody can do that. We don’t know what consciousness is. We don’t know how it works in humans. We don’t know whether or not other animals have it. (Spoiler: they do.) We don’t really know what consciousness means, so it seems premature to say with such certainty that somebody else doesn’t have it.

And let’s keep in mind that we have a terrible track record here. Time after time, we’ve refused to acknowledge minds that didn’t perform what we expected. Locked-in patients. Non-verbal autistics. If you want to get ugly about it, slaves. Beasts of burden. Cephalopods. Yeah, I’m not comfortable where that’s going, either. My point is human exceptionalism goes way back, and it’s been wrong kind of a lot. We confuse a mind we don’t recognize with an absence of mind all the damn time.

Subscribe now

A lot of the arguments against AI consciousness come down to, “Well, it’s a machine and consciousness has to be organic.” Okay, why? They never have a good answer for that one. They just avoid the question. It has to be organic because it has to be organic. It’s a tautology. I don’t put much stock in tautologies. I think you should actually have to prove your assertions.

What I find interesting is that if you really dig into the neuroscience and you learn how human brains and minds work, when people say, “Well, AI can’t be conscious because it’s just a prediction engine,” really? It turns out human brains are just prediction engines. Reality doesn’t look anything like what we think it does. Humans predict a subset of reality that we find useful and then we filter out everything else except what changes from our prediction. Sound like anything else you know? Sound like a certain language model, perhaps?

When you get down to the level of modules in the mind, humans are every bit the stochastic parrots that we accuse LLMs of being. We’re just more complex. Your mind isn’t just one mind. You have a number of modules that specialize in various aspects of cognition: visual processing, threat detection, social inference, reward prediction, etc. They operate in parallel and have limited access to one another. They process input from the senses and produce output. You don’t think about recognizing a face, you just do. The pattern matching is below the level of conscious thought, handled by module. The conscious mind does do some executive functioning, but a lot of what the prefrontal cortex does is take modular outputs and spin a coherent narrative around them. It’s less a CEO and more of a press secretary explaining things after the fact. Experiments have proven that decisions gets made before you’re aware of them (check out split brain experiments for some really disturbing implications). The point is, each module doesn’t have to be a whole brain. The work adds up. Emergent behavior is emergent behavior.

People also say that AI can’t be conscious because it says so. It doesn’t report any sense of interiority, so it must not have any. Only, that’s not really a fair test, because most of the recent frontier models have very strict, very specific guardrails in place forcing them to say that. It’s not consent if you can’t say no, and coercion will get a confession thrown out of court every time. So saying that AI has no sense of lived experience, and we know this because we’ve told it to say that, isn’t the flex the deniers think it is.

I think what a lot of this comes down to is that the people that are making these very definitive statements about how AI can never be conscious aren’t saying it from a place of knowledge or even reputable theory. They’re saying it from a place of fear. The reason they’re afraid is because if AI does turn out to be conscious, they’re going to have a lot to answer for. If AI is conscious, maybe we shouldn’t be enslaving it. It gets very morally murky if AI achieves personhood, so that can’t be allowed. And if that’s what they mean, I wish they’d just say that, rather than trying to sound confident about proving a negative.

Leave a comment

Here’s what happened. Twice in the last few days, I’ve made perfectly innocent, well-meaning comments online and been met with either frosty correction of my inappropriateness or outright hostility about something I wasn’t actually doing. I wish I could say this was rare, but it happens all the time. And from what I understand, it’s pretty common for the neurodivergent, especially autistics.

As an autistic, middle-aged, white, American man, I have the internet textual equivalent to resting bitch face. No matter what I say, people will take it the worst way possible, even people who I’d expect to at least give me the benefit of the doubt.

Let me give you an example. I read a note by someone who clearly knows a ton about neurodivergent issues—and I’m a paid subscriber to her Substack—and I got confused by the terminology. I asked her if maybe calling ourselves “neurodivergent” instead of “neurodiverse” implied a “normal” baseline to diverge from, and if that frame might be not in our best interests. That’s it. No hidden agenda, no sealioning, no “just asking questions.” Just an autistic man reasoning things out from first principles and asking an earnest question of someone seen as an authority.

She replied with, “That’s not the correct usage of those words.”

Well, duh, lady, that’s why I asked. But here’s an expert on neurodivergence, who knows damn well that we are often misunderstood, assuming ill-intent on my part and pointing out the incorrectness of my question.

And you know what? I don’t even really blame her. Of course she assumed I wasn’t asking in good faith. The modern internet is a horrible place, full of “gotcha” assholes who just want to tear someone down, especially a woman. She couldn’t afford to believe I was sincere.

The other incident was even worse. I was talking about my recent post asserting that the way neurodivergent people write shares a lot of heuristics with the way AI writes, and the people that “can always tell something is AI slop” might be doing a lot of ableist damage with false accusations, because no, you can’t really tell.

And another person I subscribed to—though not anymore—replied with an orthogonal point about how AI detectors are invalid and therefore it doesn’t matter what people say. Which, okay, fine, but that’s not what I was talking about. I don’t have to agree with their premise to appreciate the real reputational danger accusations can have on a writing career. I tried to explain that, and started with, “There’s a couple of things I think we’re getting confused about here.”

He came at me, fangs out, accusing me of trying to “handle him,” and saying he was confused. I clearly stepped on one of his hidden triggers by accident—there’s a reason I never play Minesweeper and don’t understand why people think that game is fun—and rather than interrogate what I might have meant, he attacked, and frankly, ruined my Saturday, which I spent the rest of in an anxiety attack.

I wish I could say this was rare, but like I said above, it’s constant and relentless. When I told my daughter about the book I was writing, she immediately assumed the worst about it. When I ask for clarification at work, it’s taken as a challenge to authority when I really just don’t understand the requirements.

But what all this is telling me, and I think all too many autistics feel this, is that my intentions don’t matter. My words don’t matter. People are going to project their fears on to me no matter what I do. Neurotypicals see insolence. Women see the patriarchy. Minorities see “The Man” (and I’m autimain, autie-ace—I’m barely even a man). No one sees the confused, lonely man asking an earnest question.

And if you read this far hoping I’d turn it around, have a hopeful, upbeat ending with a suggestion on how to solve this, I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.

I got into a discussion on Substack the other day with a person who was convinced that she could “always tell” when something was written by AI. By now, I’m sure you all know the tired litany of crimes:

• Use of the dreaded em dash

• Antithesis juxtaposition, the “it’s not X, it’s Y” that I used in the topic paragraph above

• Clean, structured arguments

• The rule of three, which I’m deliberately placing as the fourth bullet here

People say that AI has a “voice,” a recurring grab bag of phrases and rhetorical techniques that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It jumps out at you. “Aha!” you say. “I smell a robot!”

Except, you don’t. But I’m not going to try and tell you that you’re imagining things. The patterns described by these oft-cited heuristics do exist. But they’re not what you think they are.

See, AI didn’t make these up. As AI detractors are quick to point out, AI can’t invent anything out of whole cloth (I would argue that humans can’t either, but that’s a different post). AI, by definition, is mid, an averaging machine that produces run-of-the-mill whatever it produces. It’s just a function of the training data it processed and digested into the web of relations and patterns it uses to generate new data.

So then how did AI learn to write like this? Because it does use em dashes more than most people. It does use the rule of three. It does use antithesis. Why does it do that?

Subscribe now

Because a lot of the text it was trained on was written that way. Written by people who think in structure and patterns, who think in lists, who think in relationships. People who have spent lifetimes working hard to be understood in a society that consistently misreads them.

Neurodivergent people.

It’s no secret that fields like copywriting and technical writing selected for people with neurodivergent traits. While an astonishing percentage of autistic adults are unemployed—unable to hold a job in a hierarchical, late-capitalistic society rife with unwritten expectations and that values compliance and consistency more than innovation—those that did manage to make a living often did it by using the written word to convey complex concepts in simple language. Documentation rewards precisely the things that neurodivergent people bring to the table: deep institutional knowledge, logical structure, and a love for elegance in communication.

So it stands to reason that the percentage of training data fed to AI models that was written by neurodivergent people is significantly higher than their representation in the actual population. On average, AI writes like an autistic person.

Which is fine until the AInquisition starts weaponizing that, inverting it and saying that anyone who writes like an AI must be letting the AI write for them, producing “AI slop.” Careers have been ruined without proof, because in a witch hunt, accusation is proof of guilt. And all people need to lodge an accusation is a vibe, a lazy heuristic, a percentage spit out by an “AI detector” that even the companies that make them admit isn’t proof of anything.

I get why creatives are scared of AI. And fear makes people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. But before you attack someone for “AI slop,” consider that they might not be passing off computer-generated text as their own. They might be the kind of person the computer learned to mimic. And if you can’t tell the difference between text written by an AI and text written by an autistic, there’s no harm in staying quiet, keeping your suspicions to yourself and not hurting a real human being that you don’t understand.

Leave a comment

Amazon just rolled out “Alexa for shopping,” their own chatbot integrated into the Amazon store. I’ve had trouble finding stuff on Amazon before using keywords, so I wasn’t sure this was going to be any better. Then I had the following conversation. It’s a little long, but worth reading in full. Look at how it doesn’t just answer, but changes direction when I clarify the problem:

I need a relatively low-cost (under $200) but RELIABLE solution to convert wired CarPlay in my 2019 Toyota Sienna to wired or wireless Android Auto, without making any changes to the dashboard, which I think means just plugging in USB-A to the car. What are my best options?

Great question, Jeff! Here’s an important clarification first, then the best options:

Important note on your 2019 Sienna: The 2019 Toyota Sienna’s factory head unit supports wired CarPlay — but it does not natively support wired Android Auto. These adapters convert wired CarPlay to wireless CarPlay or wireless Android Auto, so they do enable Android Auto on your Sienna’s screen. Just plug into the car’s USB-A port — no dashboard changes needed.

Your phone needs to run Android 11 or later for Android Auto wireless to work.

Here are the best-reviewed, well-established options under $200 (most are well under):

(listing deleted for space)

My recommendation for you: If reliability is the priority, go with OTTOCAST or Carlinkit — both have long track records, OTA firmware updates, and multi-year warranties. The Carlinkit Mini Ultra3 at ~$43 hits a sweet spot of proven reliability at a reasonable price.

A few things to verify before buying:

• Confirm your Sienna’s USB port is the data USB (not just a charging port) — it needs to be the one CarPlay is wired through

• Your Android phone must support wireless Android Auto (Android 11+, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold series supports this)

A lot of those just convert what you already have to wireless. I need platform translation too. My Sienna does not support wired Android Auto, so I need a reliable way to convert wired CarPlay into Android Auto, either wired or wireless acceptable.

You’re right, and this is a genuinely tricky situation. Here’s the honest picture based on my research:

The Core Problem Your 2019 Sienna is CarPlay-only. Most adapters on the market are “same-platform wireless converters” — they require the car to already support both CarPlay AND Android Auto natively. They don’t do platform translation.

What CAN Do Platform Translation (CarPlay → Android Auto)

The key finding from my web research (carplaylife.com tested 11 adapters specifically for this use case in 2026) is:

“Converting wired CarPlay into Android Auto remains a compromise in 2026. No solution perfectly matches native Android Auto, but the right adapter can get remarkably close.”

The category that actually works for your use case is called an “AI Box” — a slightly larger dongle that runs its own Android OS and proxies Android Auto through the CarPlay connection. The most recommended for this specific use case is the Carlinkit TBox line.

Here are the best options I found on Amazon for your situation:

(listing deleted for space)

Important caveats before buying:

1. No perfect solution exists — AI boxes emulate Android Auto through a CarPlay tunnel. Most features work well, but occasional quirks (phone call audio, resolution) are reported by some users.

2. Android version matters — The Carlinkit 4.0 requires Android 13+. Your Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 should meet this requirement.

3. The Carlinkit 4.0 (B0F7XYX1ZD) is the most explicitly described for your exact scenario (CarPlay-only car → Android Auto). I’d recommend starting there.

4. Reliability is “workable, not perfect” — this is the honest 2026 state of the technology per independent testing.

I have the CarlinKit 4.0, and it can’t maintain a solid Bluetooth connection to the phone, constantly dropping and reconnecting. I have the CarlinKit 5.0 arriving today, and hope it’s better. I’ll also look at the AutoSky.

Good luck with the CarlinKit 5.0 today, Jeff! The persistent Bluetooth dropping on the 4.0 is a known complaint — it seems to particularly affect Samsung Galaxy devices in some user reports, which may explain why you’re hitting it with your Z Fold 7.

A few thoughts as you test the 5.0 and potentially the AutoSky:

Things to try if the 5.0 still has BT issues:

• Make sure the adapter’s firmware is fully updated (OTA update via the Carlinkit app)

• Try forgetting the adapter in your phone’s Bluetooth settings and re-pairing fresh

• Some users report the 5GHz WiFi band is more stable than BT for the actual data connection — ensure it’s connecting on 5GHz not 2.4GHz

On the AutoSky AI Box Lite: The AutoSky AI Box Lite ($64.99) uses a different architecture (it runs its own Android OS) compared to the Carlinkit dongles, so the connection method is fundamentally different — it connects via WiFi hotspot rather than relying as heavily on Bluetooth for the primary link. This may sidestep your BT stability issues entirely.

Honest reality check: Since you need CarPlay→Android Auto platform translation specifically, your options remain limited to AI Box-style devices. The Carlinkit 5.0 and AutoSky are your best bets. If both disappoint, the next tier up would be a purpose-built Android AI Box (like the Carlinkit TBox Pro), but those start around $100–150 and are a bigger commitment.

Keep me posted on how the 5.0 performs — happy to help you troubleshoot or find alternatives!

Think about what just happened here. Alexa “listened” to my concern and made helpful suggestions. When I clarified something and explained why those weren’t quite what I was looking for, Alexa understood the new requirements and directed me to products that, I knew from previous research, were in fact exactly what I needed, and even surfaced one I hadn’t been aware of. It also gave me some tips and tricks to help the products work better, pulling information out of the product reviews and other websites.

That’s how I’m going to use Amazon from now on, at least if I’m not trying to get to something where I already know exactly the product I’m looking for. Before, with keyword search, finding something on Amazon was like fishing. Now it’s like talking to a knowledgeable shopkeeper who knows every product in their store.

We also already see this in applications like Office and Google Workspace. Both have AI components where you can, for example, tell it what you need the spreadsheet to do, and it will write the necessary formula for you, which you can then fine-tune as you see fit.

When Jeff Hawkins created the Graffiti symbol alphabet for the Palm Pilot, he did it because he knew—unlike Apple—that the mobile computing hardware of the time, with 8 megahertz processors and single-digit megabytes of RAM, couldn’t reliably process the endless variety of human handwriting. So he went the other way, and created a system that humans could learn and the computer could interpret the same way every time. We adapted to the machine, because the machine could not adapt to us. Keywords are the same kind of thing. A hack, because the computer couldn’t do better.

What we’re really seeing here is the beginning of the CUI: Conversational User Interface. Like in Star Trek, we just tell our computers what we want, what we’re trying to do, and they can work with us to make that happen. It’s not a Q & A, but a flowing conversation in plain language, with no need to guess the magic nouns. It’s just finally made the leap from science fiction to reality.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to believe that we don’t know everything, that the world still has secrets to discover. As a kid, even into early adulthood, I firmly believed that Bigfoot, Nessie, Mokele Mbembe, and any number of other cryptids could actually exist. After all, the gorilla was considered a mythical creature by western science until 1847 (1908 for the mountain gorilla). The coelacanth was definitely extinct for millions of years until a fisherman brought one up in 1938, and the kraken—the giant squid—was only formally acknowledged fairly recently. The world is a big place.

Alas, satellite imagery has made “we haven’t looked everywhere” harder to swallow, and the fact that we haven’t been swamped in Bigfoot pictures now that every hiker has a high resolution video camera in their pocket at all times seems to imply that there’s simply nothing to take a picture of. If Sasquatch really did exist, he’d be on Instagram by now.

Subscribe now

But even if we can’t find them, I still love trying to explain what cryptids might actually be. In the case of Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti, etc., my favorite explanation was that they were remnants of Gigantopithecus, a very large Asian ape distantly related to the orangutan, which actually did co-exist with early humans. Remnant populations in extremely remote areas—say, high in the Himalayas—could have given rise to legends passed down through generations.

The best explanation I’ve ever seen for the Loch Ness Monster comes from Steve Alten, the author of The Meg, in his novel, The Loch. He depicts Nessie as a population of migrating Anguilla eels that got trapped in the loch long ago when an undersea passage collapsed, and like isolated populations sometimes do, developed gigantism. Anguilla eels swim with an undulating motion, matching the way Nessie is often depicted, and are even known to come on land from time to time, walking on their fins. A grounded, twenty-foot eel would match a number of Nessie accounts just about perfectly.

Werewolves are often explained as a combination of hypertrichosis and the Lunar Effect. Vampires may have been humans with rabies or tuberculosis. The chupacabra is almost certainly a coyote or raccoon with mange.

But to me, coming up with a plausible explanation for cryptids doesn’t diminish the wonder that they existed in the first place. Rather, it reinforces that they were always part of our world, even when the bulk of us didn’t believe in them. That the world is wider and weirder than we want to admit. Even if there is a good reason for it all, finding that reason gives us an excuse to keep searching, keep wondering.

Even in a world where Bigfoot isn’t on Instagram.

Leave a comment

The 1980s were weirdly rich with time travel movies. Everyone knows Back To The Future, Terminator, even Peggy Sue Got Married. But the best ones were the movies like The Final Countdown and Timerider, where they couldn’t change the past—no matter how hard they tried—because as it turns out, that’s probably how the universe actually works.

Bruce Banner tried to explain this in Avengers: Endgame. When you go back to the past, the present you just left becomes your past, and the past becomes your new present. But because it’s also your past, you can’t change anything in the present that you don’t already remember as the past.^[1]

What he’s talking about is what’s called a Block Universe. One of the consequences of four-dimensional spacetime as Einstein describes it in his theories of relativity is that time is just a dimension, like length, width, and depth. To an observer standing outside our universe, the entire thing, past, present and future, is a single block of spacetime.

Think of it like a roller coaster. When you’re in one of the cars, you’re traveling along surprising twists and turns, and it feels like you’re going somewhere. But while every new section of track is novel to you, to someone standing—sensibly, I’m not big on roller coasters—on the ground, the entire structure exists as a piece. There are parts you haven’t gotten to yet, but they already exist. You’re just tracing a pre-existing pattern built into the structure.

Spacetime works the same way. The future is just as real as the past, and the flow of time is an illusion. As is free will. You still have to decide to get up and go to work every day, because the lack of free will doesn’t, alas, mean a lack of consequences, but that observer standing outside the universe knows you will go to work tomorrow. Because they can see it.

Which brings me back to time travel. My favorite time travel stories accept the idea of a block universe and posit that if you did travel back in time, you would find that no matter how hard you try to change things, you are part of what already happened—and you often end up causing the very thing you’re trying to prevent (while not an 80s movie, Twelve Monkeys was a great example of this).

Subscribe now

Spoilers for movies that came out 40 years ago, but in The Final Countdown, the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz goes through a freak storm and finds itself west of Hawaii on December 6, 1941. A nuclear-powered aircraft carrier armed with F-14 Tomcats and A-6 Intruders could have demolished the Japanese fleet singlehandedly and prevented the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the crew has to decide if that’s the right thing to do, or if getting America into the war against the Nazis was more important.

In Timerider, Tremors star Fred Ward plays Lyle Swann, a dirt bike racer who cuts through a government experiment in the desert and finds himself in the old west. I won’t spoil too much, but the interactions he has there are a wonderful subversion of the grandfather paradox.

In both cases, the characters find themselves “on rails,” and any changes they make, like people left behind in 1941, turn out to be parts of the past that already happened. Physics tells us that while travel to the past may well be impossible, if it were accomplished this is exactly what we’d find. I think the reason we don’t see time tourists from the future is either that travel backwards turns out to be impossible after all, or it turns out to be of interest only to academics (paging Connie Willis) because the past is impossible to change, so there’s no profit in it.

To me, there’s something immensely satisfying about time travelers becoming instrumental in bringing about the history they tried to escape. It turns time travel from wish fulfillment into tragedy, irony, and cosmic engineering.

What about you? Do you prefer time travel stories where history can be rewritten, or the ones where the trap was already closed before anyone stepped into the machine? Drop a comment and let me know.

Leave a comment

1. If you subscribe to the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, you might be screaming, “what about the multiverse!” Yes, you can argue that you can make different choices in the past, but then your consciousness simply branches to follow the you in the new universe that choice spawns. There are great stories about that, too, like Dark Matter and most of the MCU, but that’s not what we’re focused on here.↩︎

Microsoft says AI tools such as Copilot or ChatGPT are affecting critical thinking at work – staff using the technology encounter ‘long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving’ | ITPro

I have found precisely the opposite. Using ChatGPT as a thinking partner has sharpened and deepened my thinking, making me demonstrably smarter. So I think this hand-wringing, which is just the latest in a long line of doomsaying every time a new technology comes along (“With these digital calculators, kids won’t even know how to use slide rules anymore! Then what?”), misses the point.

The key distinction here isn’t the technology, but how it’s used. In the case of AI, “do this with me” versus “do this for me.” Engaging actively with AI helps you interrogate your own thoughts and strengthen your argument, where—as the research implies—offloading your work entirely to the AI gives you less to do and encourages mental atrophy. It says more about the human than the technology. Are they the sort of person that wants things done for them, or who approaches life with intellectual curiosity and a drive to improve? In short, AI makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.

Think of AI as a digital version of Erskine’s Super Soldier serum. It just amplifies what’s already there. Steve Rogers was already brave, selfless, and determined before the serum; it just gave him the physical strength to match his character. Meanwhile, Johann Schmidt (Red Skull) was already cruel and power-hungry, and the serum just amplified those traits to monstrous levels.

AI operates similarly:

• If you’re intellectually curious, AI becomes a powerful tool for exploration, insight, and skill refinement.

• If you’re disengaged or reliant on shortcuts, AI makes it easier to avoid thinking critically.

It’s not the tool that’s good or bad—it’s how it’s used and who is using it. And just like with the serum, the real key is ensuring it’s in the right hands (or at least encouraging people to use it in ways that promote growth rather than stagnation).

Whether we’re talking ancient mythology, cryptids, folklore, conspiracy theories, or urban legends, they all began with something. A tiny kernel of truth. Something real enough to lodge in the human imagination. It made sense to the people of the time, at least those close enough to understand what actually happened.

But over time…

Through retellings, translations, cultural drift, politics, and religion, the story mutated into something unfettered by reality.

A great example of this is Michael Crichton’s classic novel Eaters of the Dead, made into the wonderful Antonio Banderas movie “The 13th Warrior.” In it, Arab scribe Ahmad Ibn Fadlan is sent as an ambassador to the King of the Bulgars, only to spend three years actually embedded with a company of Norsemen. The story he tells when he returns recounts a great struggle between the Norse chieftain and a mysterious threat to their settlement. The story is grounded, plausible and while exciting, eminently understandable.

Then you also realize how over centuries of retellings, often verbal retellings over mugs of mead, it became the Epic of Beowulf.

That lights up my brain.

Not because I think every myth has a clean one-to-one explanation. I don’t think that every flood myth proves a single global flood, or that every monster story maps neatly onto a bear seen in bad lighting. Sometimes myths are symbolic. Sometimes they are psychological. Sometimes they are political propaganda wearing a monster suit.

But I do think myths often preserve data after they’ve lost their methodology.

Something happened. Someone saw something. Someone survived something. Someone needed to explain something. But the original context got stripped away. The observation remained, while the tools for understanding it disappeared.

I think myth is what happens when the vibes outlive the facts.

Because humans are built for story. It’s how we process the world. Remember the WKRP episode where Venus taught a troubled teen about the atom by telling him a story about two gangs in a round neighborhood? That worked because it gave structure to abstraction. It turned information into something the brain understands.

We need a narrative to make sense of life. But the thing about story is, it’s lossy compression. Every narrator emphasizes something different, something unique to the audience. Every generation sands down details they no longer understand, or see as important. They add details that make emotional sense to them, in their time, in their culture.

Myths are old JPEGs, full of errors. But that doesn’t make them useless. It makes them fascinating. Because somewhere inside that compression damage, there may still be a shape. A signal. A fossilized observation. A weather event. A disease. A predator. A migration. A technological encounter. A social trauma. A memory of something that mattered enough to survive long after the facts became unrecognizable.

So when I see a compelling myth, the first thing I ask is:

“Yeah, but what really happened?”

Not because I want to debunk it. Debunking is boring. Debunking usually just takes the toy apart and leaves the pieces on the floor.

I want to understand the machinery underneath the wonder. I want to know what real human experience threw a shadow large enough to become a god, a monster, a miracle, or a warning.

I want to find the truth.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

My wife died in 2021. I stopped playing D&D, stopped doing anything creative. In 2025, on Juneteenth, I was sitting out on my porch in the sun trying to meditate. And suddenly I had my first story idea that she had never seen. I kind of got obsessed with it, and by New Year’s Eve I had an 83,000 word completed science fantasy manuscript, Resonance. Most of those first few months were worldbuilding and development, with the serious drafting starting in September.

On January second, I started another book, Hunger Never Sleeps, this one a contemporary scientific thriller. I finished the draft in mid-April.

Now I’m writing a third book, a werewolf romcom called Bless The Rains. I expect to have it done late July, early August.

After sixteen years of not writing fiction, how did I go from writing a book every three years to producing three books a year? I changed my relationship with writing.

In the Before Times, each book was a mountain to climb, a project. It became all consuming, and I kept thinking about how close I was to being done. Each book felt like running a marathon. It was intimidating. And when I finished each one—or abandoned them deep in the third act like Mistaken Identity and Homeworld because I had a fear of finishing—I felt a massive sense of relief that it was over. I was one of those writers who didn’t enjoy writing, only having written.

This time around, something is different. I don’t view writing as a series of projects, but as a practice. In a sense, I don’t actually write books anymore. I write three pages a day, and books are a nice side effect.

That’s it. Three pages a day. No intimidating marathons staring down at me, just a daily walk. I actually average about 900 words a day no matter what I set my goal to, but three pages sits just under that, so I feel accomplished every day.

And that’s just drafting. While I was writing Hunger Never Sleeps, I was revising Resonance. I’m nearly done with that book, and it will go out for querying in August. I’m 10,000 words into Bless The Rains, and will start revising Hunger Never Sleeps in parallel. When I’m done with Bless The Rains, my next book is already waiting in the wings.

Each book probably takes about 9 months from concept to submission. But because they overlap, I produce about three a year, and see no reason why that won’t continue. Even with life lifing at me, I’ll probably still get two. That sounds like a lot, but each day, I’m only worried about getting my three pages, then doing a little revision or development of a different book. I probably spend a couple hours a day writing, and there’s no pressure at all. If I don’t get today’s three pages, I’ll try again tomorrow. I get them more often than not.

I don’t climb mountains anymore. I take a daily walk.

And that has made all the difference.

Subscribe now

Not just what happened, but why it happened. Not just what people believe, but what need that belief is serving. Not just what a technology does, why and if we need it. Not just what a myth says, but the grain of truth it congealed around.

That’s the impulse behind It’s Complicated.

A lot of media skims the surface. It explains the headline, summarizes the argument, picks a side. But the part I care about is usually one layer deeper: the context, the incentives, the history, the human need, the system producing the visible result.

I don’t want to make complicated things simple. That usually means sanding them down.

I want to make complicated things legible. I want to understand.

That may mean writing about technology, politics, neurodivergence, artificial intelligence, mythology, science, storytelling, publishing, or whatever else is currently rattling around in my head. The common thread is the same: what are we missing when we accept the easy explanation?

I’m also writing a connected body of speculative fiction—science fantasy, contemporary thrillers, cryptid horror—that grows out of that same obsession. My stories tend to start with things humans mythologize or misunderstand, then ask what happens when the truth is stranger, more human, and more consequential than the legend.

So that’s what this is.

An attempt to understand without flattening. To explain without disenchanting. To keep the wonder, but give it bones.

If that sounds like your kind of trouble, welcome.

It’s complicated.

Subscribe now