Brendan Halpin, author of the ALA-Alex-Award-Winning Donorboy, the ALA Rainbow List titles Notes from the Blender (with Trish Cook) and Tessa Masterson Will go to Prom (with Emily Franklin) as well as a dozen other novels and memoirs, made his final sale to a traditional publishing house in 2012 with A Really Awesome Mess (with Trish Cook).

Two years later, he emerged on the New England independent wrestling scene, wrestling under the name “John Cocteau, the enfant terrible of wrestling”. His finishing move involved jumping in the air and using both left and right feet to deliver kicks to the opponent’s groin in quick succession. He dubbed this move “The Cocteau Twins.”

COVID-19 put an end to his wrestling career, but in 2022 he emerged as a member of an all-male Go-Go’s tribute band called “The Bro-Bro’s.” He is the Bro-Bro’s lead vocalist, performing under the name “Brolinda Carlisle.” The band has had great success touring the East Coast and has even drawn the attention of the original band, with Jane Weidlin posting a link to the Bro-Bro’s performing “Head Over Heels” at the “Gen X Prom” in Ho-ho-kus, NJ with the caption, “Who the hell are these assholes?”

Brendan lives in the City of Boston.

From Patricia Luca lucapatricia682@gmail.com

To: brendan@brendanhalpin.com

Subject: Invitation to Feature Shutout in Our 2026 Reading Challenge

Date: Monday, April 06, 2026 9:06 PM

Size:17 KB

Hello Brendan Halpin,

I hope you are doing well. It is a pleasure to connect with you.

My name is Luca Patricia, and I’m reaching out from the Blooming Books Reading for Growth community, an active reading challenge and book club with over 3000 engaged readers.

We are currently hosting our 2026 Reading Challenge running from January 1 to December 31 2026. This initiative highlights books that spark meaningful engagement, emotional connection, and immersive storytelling across many genres.

Here is my website for more information about the challenge: https://www.the52book.club/2026-reading-challenge/

Participating authors benefit from ongoing visibility through reader discussions, reviews, and sustained community interaction throughout the year.

At the end of the challenge, our readers will identify the most discussed books, with selected authors receiving special recognition including an official award presentation on January 2 2027. In addition, the first group of authors whose books generate strong engagement will receive early spotlight features within the community.

I recently came across your book Shutout and was immediately drawn to its heartfelt and relatable coming of age sports narrative. The story captures the emotional intensity of friendship and competition through Lena and Amanda, whose bond is tested when soccer begins to change the balance between them.

The shift from being an inseparable team to facing uncertainty after team selection creates a strong emotional core, especially as Amanda struggles with feelings of loss, comparison, and change while Lena moves forward in a new environment.

The themes of friendship, identity, and growing up make Shutout a meaningful and engaging read for audiences who enjoy realistic fiction with emotional depth and strong character relationships.

We believe your book would resonate strongly with our audience and would be a compelling addition to our reading challenge.

Would you be interested in having Shutout featured in this year-long reading experience and introduced to our engaged community?

I would be happy to share more details if this opportunity interests you.

Warm regards, Luca Patricia

Book promotion specialist

*see below for note about the image

Something about Luca, or possibly Patricia’s email didn’t feel completely right. I sent the following response:

This is an excellent scam, and I commend you for the work that obviously went into it. The AI summary of my book is integrated perfectly, and playing to the vanity of writers is a pretty solid business strategy.

I assume if I went for it, you'd tell me about the fee you're charging for participation. I'm guessing you prefer payment in crypto?

Unfortunately, the link you sent leads to a book challenge, but not the one you introduced. In fact, the only Blooming Books Reading for Growth community seems to be a group of adults who read business books.

Oh yeah, also, you do not appear to exist or to be clear on whether your name is Patricia Luca or Luca Patricia. Anyway, I wish you the worst of luck in your scamming endeavors.

They quickly replied:

Same to you

I then poked around The 52 Book Club and found this page in which they alert authors to the scam. It looks like this has caused Luca, or possibly Patricia, to change tactics and claim they represent a different organization.

So if you’ve written a book and Luca or Patricia or anybody else sends you this email, don’t let ‘em getcha!

*Alt text: a middle-aged white woman with glasses on a chain with orange beads, an orange silk flower in her hair, and an orange cardigan over a black shirt.

I haven’t done the whole Catfish reverse image thing, but I assume this image is stolen from some innocent librarian’s facebook page or something. Or maybe they just fed “librarian” to an AI image generator and it kicked this out. So I don’t think this is a real picture of the scammer. I’m including it here because WOW does this look EXACTLY like someone who would run a book challenge, so they may attach the photo to a different name because it lends their scam credibility.

Now, Alpha School is a private school charging between 40k and 70k a year, so at least they’re not trying to tap into public money. Yet. More on this later.

But there are a number of HUGE red flags about this place that folks should know about. I mean, apart from the whole “The magic of AI will transform school” nonsense, which would be a red flag for many people. If you want to read what this looks like in practice, here’s a Wired article from last year. It’s kinda harrowing stuff. (And here’s an article about the article, expanding on some extremely problematic stuff that’s only mentioned in passing in the Wired article).

But even if that doesn’t convince you that Alpha School is a bad idea, dig this:

The school was co-founded (and presumably funded) by billionaire Joe Liemandt. It should by this point be axiomatic that billionaires are people of low moral character, but in case you think Liemandt is an exception, here is an article from Forbes about how Liemandt’s second career was starting a “digital sweatshop.” Yep, he made his money by firing tons of people and replacing them with low-cost overseas workers who he subjected to constant digital surveillance.

The only way you become a billionaire is by treating people like things. Achieving billionaire status indicates an empathy deficit that is most likely pathological. Such people are simply not to be trusted around other people’s children.

Note—I am not saying Liemandt is in the Epstein Files (he’s not—I checked); I’m saying that it is extremely unlikely that he is capable of viewing Alpha School students as human beings rather than as numbers on a spreadsheet, and this cannot be good for them.

But maybe you still want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for your kids to go to a school run by a probable sociopath. Well, consider this. Speaking at the info session were Liemandt and a guy named Michael Horn that the Alpha Boston website identifies only by “Harvard GSE.”

Which is technically true, but he’s an adjunct at Harvard GSE. His main career is thought leader huckster. He is the founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, which is apparently a real thing, though it’s certainly giving “Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.’ Anyway, listing his only affiliation as Harvard GSE is techically true but also kind of deceptive, which is a bad way to start a relationship with parents.

In search of more red flags, I looked up Alpha School’s Form 990 to see how much they’re paying people and where their money comes from. And guess what? There isn’t one! That’s because each Alpha School is incorporated as a for-profit entity in the State of Texas.

This has several really bad implications. One is that these schools’ primary purpose is to generate a profit. So when doing what’s right by students conflicts with making a profit, students will lose every time.

The other concern is the complete lack of transparency that a private LLC affords. Nobody outside the company can see the financials. But it’ll probably be fine! What could possibly go wrong?

Since the ed reform grift has been always primarily been about getting access to that sweet public money, it’s a little odd to me that the new grift seems to be setting up private schools that are “disruptive innovators.” But I think this is really just a long con.

Here’s how it works. Since the SAT primarily measures household income, people who can pay 40-70k per year will probably have kids who score pretty well on it. So then the private, for-profit schools can take that data and go, “Look, our disruptive AI-centered teaching leads to high SAT scores!” and credulous local politicians will presumably fall for it and start writing them checks to run public schools. Especially since none of their other data will be public. How many kids leave the school? How many are suspended? How many English Language Learners and students with disabilities does the school serve? The public cannot know the answers to these questions, so all we’ll have is smooth talking hucksters and some anecdotal evidence in the form of testimonials.

It’s kind of funny how the “data driven education” people are now deliberately obscuring their data. Presumably because they’ve figured out that their disruptive innovation doesn’t actually work very well.

Which, of course, doesn’t matter. Because these schools are in business to generate a profit. So it ultimately doesn’t matter if the product is good, as long as you can get the marks to keep lining up to buy it.

Her response was to reach out to me and ask if I wanted to get some folks together who knew about school budgets so she could listen to us and learn. Some time later, I got people who knew a LOT about school budgeting (I was in touch with such people then because Twitter facilitated building communities of like-minded local folks to get stuff done, which is probably another reason Musk wanted to kill it) together and we met with then-councilor Wu in the meeting room at the JP Library. She took the T from City Hall and walked 15 minutes from Green Street to the library. And she really listened. And took notes.

And so this is how I came to break one of my own rules, which is “don’t stan politicians.” I volunteered for Michelle Wu’s first run for mayor and really believed that, unlike Marty Walsh, she cared about people who live in Boston, not just people who use Boston. She had all kinds of cool progressive ideas for making the city a better place, so much so that she was derided in right-wing circles as a “radical left mayor.” (This was mostly because she opposed the secret police rounding up our brown neighbors.)

And then, running for a second term, she absolutely, conclusively THUMPED Josh Kraft in the primary, which is effectively the final in Boston because we are not electing Republicans here. So now she’s been unleashed to really enact her progressive agenda!

Except…it’s not happening. She’s frozen work on a bunch of safe streets projects. (i.e. projects that may inconvenience car drivers in order to make the street better for people walking, biking, and using public transit.) The city may lose federal funding already allocated to these projects if they are frozen too long.

The new city budget (the council technically votes on the budget, but the way Boston is set up, the mayor has a ridiculous amount of power over the budgeting process, so I’m laying this at her doorstep) eviscerates the schools. Hundreds of young teachers across the city are losing their jobs. Class sizes will increase. The quality of education will decrease.

Meanwhile the Wu-appointed school committee voted to give Superintendent of Schools Mary Skipper a 15% raise. (!)

Oh yeah, and the Boston Police Department is level-funded. (The BPD’s overtime budget, which is primarly spent on having cops stand around and do nothing outside of construction sites, eats up 100 million dollars per year.)

So—keeping the city car-centric and prioritizing policing over education. Actually over pretty much everything else, as most city departments have had their budgets frozen.

Man, I’m glad we didn’t elect the billionaire!

So why, with an absolutely absurdly strong showing in the recent election, has Michelle Wu suddenly abandoned the priorities she professed? Well I have an idea.

We know she’s ambitious, which I do not hold against her. She doesn’t want to be Mayor of Boston forever, which I think is a good thing. The city certainly didn’t benefit from being Tom Menino’s personal fiefdom for 21 years. We also know she’s a mentee/former student of Elizabeth Warren, whose current term will expire in 2030, after she turns 81 years old. Perhaps Warren has given Wu the heads up that there’s going to be a vacant Senate seat in 4 years, and Wu, who is widely loathed in the suburbs, is selling out Boston in order to win over the suburbs. And the wealthy suburbanites who bankroll Senate campaigns.

The sad thing about this is that abandoning making Boston a better place to live does absolutely nothing to shore up Wu’s chances with people who will never forgive her for being “from Chicago.” (She is originally from Chicago, but has lived in Greater Boston for nearly 20 years and chose to settle and raise a family here. People who complain about her being from Chicago use it as code for other facets of her identity they’re not allowed to complain about openly, at least in Massachusetts.)

Another incredibly dumb thing about this strategy is that it follows the conventional idiocy of the Democratic Party, which seems to be “don’t do anything that might alienate Republicans.” But people are hungering for politicians they can support who seem to actually have principles and who are willing to ruffle feathers in order to get things done. Wu is a skilled politician who has the ability to explain progressive policy choices, and people like the idea of a politician who stands for something!

Instead, it looks like she’s decided to follow the failed Democratic playbook of pretending to be progressive and then being centrist. Thanks, Obama! No, literally, thanks, Obama, who won the presidency in Michelle Wu’s sophomore year of college by pretending to be progressive and then proceeded to be a moderate conservative President.

Nobody can predict the future, and it may well be that Wu’s intelligence and charisma and the fact that she’s both a woman and a Chinese American will give her the appearance of progressivism to the statewide electorate while not actually ruffling the feathers of the big money people who are ruining everything. Good luck to her, I guess.

But damn—is it so much to ask that Democratic voters actually get the candidate we voted for? People on the right vote for hatemongering theocrats and by and large get exactly that. And hatemongering theocrats who fight like hell to enact their troglodytic priorities! Where the hell is that energy from the Democratic party?

I’m going to continue to vote because I believe that it’s foolish to abandon any of the tools at my disposal to make the world better, but I have probably knocked on my last door as a campaign volunteer.

I say that, though the next time we get someone posing as a progressive running for mayor, I’ll probably support them enthusiastically as well, hoping, like Charlie Brown, that this time I’ll finally get to kick the fucking football.

Though The Croft School is a private school, I smelled “education reform” when the story came out, so I did a little research. Sure enough, Croft School founder/alleged fraudster Scott Given has deep roots in the “ed reform” community.

After getting his MBA at Harvard, where he apparently fell under the sway of then-Gates Foundation anti-public-ed person Stacey Childress, Given worked at The Parthenon Group, a consulting firm, with future “Democrats for Education Reform” guy Liam Kerr. He then was a Broad Academy fellow (this is an anti public ed program run out of Yale). He was then a teacher at Boston Collegiate Charter School, the principal of Excel Academy Charter School, and finally the founder of UP Education Network, a school management company that takes over district schools and tries to “turn them around,” usually by gutting labor protections for faculty and instituting draconian discipline procedures for students. Given “stepped down” from the organization he founded in 2016, shortly after their absolutely wild suspension numbers became public. (All this info comes from here.)

So why did I smell ed reform on the Croft School scandal? Because one thing ed reformers and the ed reform movement in general hates is transparency. In Massachusetts, Charter Schools are governed by self-appointing boards, the overwhelming majority of which have no parent representation. The only way charters are accountable to the people and communities they serve is through the charter renewal process, when the Department of Education rubber stamps a renewal every ten years. When I worked at a charter school, the board hired a new head of school who decided that this 200-student school needed 10 administrators. (Hey, he had cronies to hire!) Because there wasn’t any parent or student representation on the board, there was no pushback about this wildly irresponsible spending.

Anyway, so having one guy in charge of the money who was accountable to no one felt very ed-reformy to me, as indeed it was. (Indeed, the co-founder whose name is also all over the official paperwork for this organization is MATCH founder Michael Goldstein. He might wanna remove this section from his personal website:

And then I found out something even shadier. The Croft School, unlike the vast majority of private educational institutions in the USA, is a for-profit company. As a private company, it’s accountable to no one and is not required to be transparent about anything to anybody, except in its tax returns to the IRS, which are not publicly available. So salaries, expenses, all this stuff is a black box inside of Scott Givens’ head. Or possibly in the correct set of books he kept while showing the cooked books to the board.

Oh. About that board. Because Oxford Street Education, which operates the Croft School, is a private for-profit company, it’s not actually required to have a board. I noted that the note sent home to parents was signed by the “Board of Managers,” which sounds official but is not a legal title in Massachusetts. While said “Board of Managers” says they have fired Scott Given, they don’t have the authority to fire Scott Given and, indeed, his name is still listed as the principal (in a corporate sense, not an educational sense) on the LLC paperwork.

I do feel bad for the parents and students and faculty of The Croft School. Given insists that all of the secret debt the company is stuck with was plowed into school operations and he did not personally benefit from it. (surejan.gif) Color me skeptical because if you weren’t planning to profit, why’d you incorporate as a for profit corporation? Riddle me that!

Maybe he didn’t have any shady intentions in incorporating this way other than the arrogance and contempt for parents and students that is endemic to the ed reform movement. Why should you idiots have a say in your child’s school? I went to Harvard! Yeah, Given never said this, but also he didn’t have to. And trust me as someone who worked at a charter school, this is the sentiment behind the entire movement.

I don’t know what to conclude here other than the fact that the entire ed reform movement is shady as hell (it’s also rife with astroturf “organizations” consisting of a couple of people who pretend not to be funded by ed reform billionaires). And, if you’re enrolling your child in private school, ask about the financials. If you asked anyone in Croft School admissions if you could see their form 990 (the public financial document required of all nonprofit organizations), they’d have to tell you there isn’t one. Nor is there an annual report with any numbers because this isn’t a public company. And then you might ask them why that is. I wonder how they’d answer?

The movie is GORGEOUS. Just an absolute super-saturated feast for the eyes. Luhrmann and Elvis seem to share views about subtlety, which is to say I’m not sure either was/is familiar with the concept, so subject and filmmaker are a great match. And it’s a bold move on Luhrmann’s part to try to redeem the most widely ridiculed and derided stage of Elvis’s career. And, for the most part, he succeeds.

We see the band being loose and having fun in rehearsals, and the joy Elvis got from performing is infectious to the band, the live audience, and the movie audience. And God knows we all need a little joy these days.

So far so good, though I have one quibble with the performer and one with the filmmaker.

Elvis loved performing and would often make jokes, often at the expense of the material, to entertain the audience, as when, in EPIC, he changes the “Are You Lonesome Tonight” lyrics to “do you gaze at your forehead and wish you had hair.” This makes him a fun performer to watch, but it means that he, and therefore the audience, are kept at an ironic distance from the songs. Which is a shame because he was a gifted singer who could wring something real even out of bad material. The performance of “Suspicious Minds” in this movie shows what he can do when he’s actually trying, and it’s spectacular.

Still, if you go into this movie as a non fan trying to understand why Elvis mattered, this movie probably won’t help you understand. I encourage you to seek out the sit down shows from the comeback special—they didn’t give Elvis a guitar strap, so he had to channel all his energy into the songs. It’s stunning.

As for Luhrmann, he’s kind of mistitled this movie. I don’t think theres A single song that we get to see performed start to finish without interview voiceovers or cuts to rehearsal footage or other footage of Elvis working the crowd or fleeing the crowd or driving around Vegas, etc. So it’s not really Elvis Presley in Concert, because at a concert you get to hear the whole song.

Still, it’s been a rough week, and this movie made me happy for an hour and a half, which, in the year 2026, is about the highest recommendation I can give.

Now, I do not worship Cory Doctorow as many folks do—I think he’s a gifted nonfiction writer who, like most of these guys who run their own platform, desperately needs an editor.

But he’s a smart, insightful guy who, like most internet celebrities, is a little high on his own supply and therefore annoying, but I read him semi-regularly for his smarts and insights.

And I get where he’s coming from here—he’s repeatedly asserted that you can’t shop your way to social change, and that, furthermore, that placing all the onus on social change on individual consumers is a strategy to prevent mass movements that might actually cause real change.

So far so good. And, yes, there is, famously, no ethical consumption under capitalism, but people seem to see this and respond with “so, therefore, you shouldn’t even try,” which is how I’m reading Doctorow’s protest-too-much defense of his AI use.

I disagree with this on both a moral and political basis. We cannot, after all, perfect ourselves as human beings—we will always slip up and harm people we care about and/or do things that don’t align with our values. But I think most of us agree that we have a responsibility to keep trying, while knowing that we will never reach the goal.

And, also, while shopping (or, more accurately, refusing to shop) alone cannot bring about social change, it remains an important tool in our arsenal. For many of us our purchasing power is the most meaningful power we have. If you live in a gerrymandered “red” state, you can’t vote your way out of fascism. If you, like me, live in a “blue” state controlled by the Democratic party, you effectively get a choice in every election between people who believe we should be grateful serfs of the Epstein Class, and the collection of religious fanatics, grifters, and pedophiles that calls itself the Republican Party. Voting alone will not bring about the change I want, but I still do it. Trying to make my purchases align with my values also won’t bring about the change I want, but I’m damn sure not going to renounce the only power I have that the ruling class cares about.

Here’s what I have found about trying to reach the impossible goal of having my economic life reflect my values—every time I do it, usually by NOT buying something rather than by buying something—it makes me feel good. I’m not saying you, like me, should renounce corporate social media (though for God’s sake get off of X, what the hell are you doing on a literal Nazi site), or eating meat, or any of the things I’ve done to try to feel like somewhat less of a hypocrite. But I am suggesting that you’d be foolish to not even try to align your economic life with your ostensible values.

I don’t care if Cory Doctorow uses AI to proofread his blog. Proofreading is one of the rare tasks that AI actually excels at, which makes sense since it was trained on the purloined output of hundreds of millions of writers. And look, nobody likes a scold. The fact is that people who are trying very hard to live their values will still fall short (I have an Amazon Prime subscription and shop at Whole Foods all the freakin’ time) because we all fall short, and the fact that other people aren’t doing the same things as you doesn’t mean they’re bad people or that they’re doing nothing at all.

You’ve got a lot of tools available to make the world a better place. I urge you not to throw any of them away.

Games usually take about five minutes, so it’s a really good casual game to play on your phone. You can win without spending a ton of money, and the developers seem to really put a lot of effort into keeping the game competitive.

….and, I think it’s going to die.

Because Marvel SNAP depends on players spending money to get cool variants (the same card you already have, but with a different picture) or entirely new cards. They launch a new set of cards every four or five weeks. They call these “seasons,” and if you pay ten bucks for a season, you’re guaranteed to get some new cards.

So the primary way this game makes money is by getting players to pay money for new cards. Which presents a problem: the business model demands infinite growth, but neither the IP nor the game design will support that.

Every recognizable Marvel character already has a card. So if part of the fun of the game for you is playing cards that feature your favorite characters, you know at this point that you’re never seeing any more.

They’re starting to do new versions of old characters with slightly different abilities. So right now, for example, they’ve got Star Lord: Master of the Sun, which a) makes me start singing “Dayman” in my head and b) is the third Star Lord card they’ve released. But even as they release new cards for old characters, they’re trying to give them new abilities, but the game is simple enough that most of the good abilities have already been assigned to a card, so the card descriptions are getting longer and more intricate which directly contrasts with the simplicity of the gameplay.

The motivations for getting a new card boil down to either “this unlocks a new way to play the game” or “this strengthens my existing strategy.” There was a bit of buzz when the Marvel Zombies dropped in October, satisfying the former motivation, but nothing really essential for the second motivation.

What this means is that since October of ‘25, nobody’s had a whole lot of motivation to get new cards. And it doesn’t look like the situation is going to get any better. It used to be that they’d launch a new card and people who had that card would mop the floor with you, and you’d have to get that card or a reasonable defense for it in order to stay competitive. That’s just not the case anymore.

Which is fine! It’s still a fun game! I could happily play with just these cards more or less forever! But since the business model depends on endless growth, I think we’ve reached a crisis point.

So it’s basically a microcosm of capitalism, is what I’m saying. Trying to milk endless growth out of finite resources is a fool’s errand, and capitalism as a whole seems to be at the same place as Marvel Snap. They keep trying to convince us that we need some new thing, or that the next consumer revolution is upon us, but they haven’t introduced anything that’s a real game changer since the smartphone in ‘08.

Whereas it used to seem like the breakneck pace of advancement would never let up, there are now legal adults who’ve grown up wihout any really significant advances in technology. (Yes, I am aware of the AI “revolution” but remain unconvinced that it’s a real thing anymore than the blockchain “revolution” was. Just because a lot of credulous dopes have invested money into something doesn’t mean it’s got real value.)

The frustrating thing is that everybody knows this. Nothing grows forever, especially nothing that’s built on resources that can’t grow forever. So maybe it’s time we stop pretending that endless growth is a real thing.

At this point, I suppose it’s worth asking why I continue to write about this. I should start by saying that I really had no resentment of Danny Hillis from my time as his employee. One of the things his company did that probably led to their downfall was to hire overqualified people for low-level jobs. Which was how I found employment during the Bush The Elder recession. I rarely interacted with Hillis—he played the part of the absent-minded professor who didn’t own any professional clothing and would slouch around the joint in old t-shirts. Even then I recognized this as a flex— “I’m so important I don’t have to dress as nicely as the people who answer my phone”—but while there were some horrible people at Thinking Machines, I never thought of Hillis as one of them.

So I’m not motivated by long-simmering resentment. I am of course motivated by anger at Epstein’s crimes and the fact that he and his associates seem to have committed atrocities with utter impunity for so long. But, as I’ve said, I don’t believe Hillis participated in the crimes.

He just didn’t care about them.

And this, ultimately, is what motivates me. That a guy who has built an entire life around being a Professional Smart Guy has such an obvious void where his conscience should be. I believe that Hillis’ disregard for what most of us consider centerpieces of morality—that children should be protected, not exploited, that people with power have a responsibility to look out for the less powerful, not prey on them—calls into question pretty much everything he’s ever done or said.

Not that Hillis’ life’s work should necessarily be thrown out, but it should be re-examined with the knowledge that his moral reasoning is deficient, if not absent.

Which can’t happen unless Hillis’ association with Epstein is widely known. If you were thinking about inviting Hillis to speak at your event, his association with Epstein won’t come up immediately unless you search the two names together.

Ultimately, I’m a guy with a blog that has extremely limited reach, and so there’s only so much I can do. About 600 people have read my first post. About 150 have read the second. At this rate I’ll be lucky to get 37 views on this one.

Fortunately, though, people with far greater reach than me have an opportunity here to correct the historical record. Hillis has been written about (and interviewed) for years in exclusively complimentary ways. I’m not saying the journalists invovled should have known better—there was no way for them to have access to Hillis’ emails, and he only started consorting with Epstein around 2010, as far as the emails I’ve found suggest.

Still, now that we know, I think if you wrote a puff piece about Hillis or hosted an interview with him that helped build his reputation, you now have an opportunity to correct the historical record.

So here are some people I’ve found who wrote very nice articles on Danny Hillis in the past or hosted them on their platform. I’d like to encourage any and all of them to add to our collective knowledge about this man in the light of new information.

Podcasters:

Tim Ferriss

Steve Mersky

Kevin Scott

Suze Kundu

Youtube:

Web of Stories

The Anyas Crypto

Norman Foster Foundation

Ross School

And of course, TED

Print, web, and broacast journalists (listed by where they worked when the article came out because I do not have time to chase down journalist job changes!):

Chris Jones, Esquire.

Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe.

Po Bronson, Wired.

Steve Mirsky, Scientific American.

Steve Inskeep, Morning Edition.

Cara Maines, NBC.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Robert Matthews, New Scientist.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because there is SO MUCH friction everywhere now. My stupid TV just updated its OS and now if I don’t like, immediately choose what I want to watch, it starts an AI-generated video of a “cozy coffee shop” accompanied by soothing, AI-generated music. If any member of my family is in the room when this happens, we fly into a rage, which I don’t think is the intended effect.

Speaking of TV, it’s now rife with friction as all the services I paid for because they didn’t have ads are now showing me ads. I tried some sketchy IPTV services, but they freeze up all the damn time, which is actually more annoying than watching ads.

My phone rings: friction. I have to check it every time because there’s a small chance it’s an urgent communication regarding a loved one who’s in poor health. Between one and three times per day, it’s a spam call.

Check my texts: friction. Spam texts come in at a rate of about one per day. More if you count Democratic party fundraising texts. I’ve never once clicked on one, but they just keep coming.

Do a quick web search: friction. Wade through ads and AI slop to try and find some information, only to be fundamentally unsure if the info I’ve found is right or not.

Try to pay my bills: friction. 2-factor authentication necessary to pay most of my bills. (No idea why this is necessary. If you’d like to pay my bills, I will happily give you my login info.)

Mortgage company was just sold to another mortgage company: friction. Old login doesn’t work and neither does the new one. Have to reset my password every month. Could probably be resolved with a quick phone call, but thus far my attempts to get a phone number by talking to the AI chatbot have been unsuccessful.

I could go on—pretty much every aspect of modern life involves either being vigilant against people trying to scam you or being annoyed with ads or having to jump through stupid hoops they just put up. Sometimes it’s actually all three at once, which is a ton of fun.

I think “friction” is actually a pretty good metaphor for this stuff, because friction creates heat. And so because the things that should be easy and the things that used to be easy are no longer easy, we’re in a constant state of irritibility and discontent.

Because life is hard enough! Pretty much every family always has SOMETHING going on that is making life more difficult. And yet they’re using up all our patience on trying to log in to pay our electric bill.

Popular wisdom is that the American people are too comfortable to ever rise up en masse and demand change. Maybe that’s true. But every day we get less comfortable. Every day our overlords push us to see what they can take from us, how they can make our lives just a little bit more difficult. And so every day the fundamental level of comfort that stops revolutionary activity is eroded for everyone in this country.

Just something to think about.