The Imaginary Worlds podcast reflects on how “myths like Pygmalion or Pandora reflect primal human desires and fears that have an effect on the development of AI," and talks with “audio journalist Rebecca Nolan about her experience trying to bring her father back from the underworld as a chatbot.”
Spoiler alert: Nolan thinks making chatbots of your dead loved ones is a terrible idea and spoiled the process of grieving for her long-term.
Book review: "Under the Falls," by Richard Russo
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo has turned to writing mysteries late in his career, and he is great at it. His latest, Under the Falls, hooked me in a way that fiction rarely does anymore. I finished the novel in a few days while on a recent business trip.
Russo has made a career from novels about life in small, rural, Northeastern former factory towns that are now economically depressed. The towns are in upstate New York and nearby states. The novels draw from Russo’s own life and the main characters are often men with working class upbringings, fathers who are unreliable, distant and charismatic and mothers or wives who are mentally ill. Despite these dark themes, Russo fills his books with joie de vivre and humor. They are fun reads.
The main character of “Under the Falls” is Tyler Sinclair, who left Stone Mountain, New York, a depressed, isolated hamlet in the Catskill Mountains, at age 18, carrying only a duffel bag, his guitar, and some money he swiped from his father. Twenty years later, Sinclair is a world-famous, wealthy superstar singer-songwriter. Sinclair’s band is named Stone Mountain and their songs are about life in that town. But Sinclair has cut off all ties with the town where he grew up. When he gets mail with a Stone Mountain postmark, he throws it out unopened.
Sinclair’s manager has arranged for the band to launch their world tour in Stone Mountain, with a one-night-only charity concert to pay a childhood friend’s medical bills. Sinclair reluctantly agrees.
At first, the return goes well. Sinclair reconnects with his friend. The concert seems successful at first, but quickly becomes a riot, followed by a murder. Sinclair is nearly killed himself, clinging to life in a hospital, trapped in Stone Mountain and forced to confront his past, as well as a local crime ring.
I read a few reviews of “Under the Falls” that point out multiple flaws and plot holes. I didn’t notice them when I read them and I don’t care about them now. It’s not Russo’s best work — I love his “Fool” trilogy best — “Nobody’s Fool,” “Everybody’s Fool” and “Somebody’s Fool — but “Under the Falls” is damn fine.
As I read the book, I wondered how Russo would handle the music. Russo himself has shown no musical talent in interviews and public appearances. Unlike Stephen King (whose work Russo surprisingly resembles), music is not a powerful feature of his novels. “Under the Falls” simply sidesteps the problem. We don’t get descriptions of Sinclair’s singing, his songs, or details about his songwriting process. I think that’s a wise choice — that kind of thing is tedious in fiction. As the saying goes, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Even die-hard “Lord of the Rings” fans hate the music in those books.
Like the fictional Sinclair, Russo grew up in a depressed small town, made an international reputation telling stories about the life he left behind, but mostly severed ties with the place he grew up.
I’ve been fascinated by Russo novels for more than 30 years. The town where he grew up, Gloversville, NY, is the basis of the settings for many of his novels. Interestingly, even though Gloversville is tiny and far from anywhere I’ve ever spent much time, I have known people with connections to that place. One is a woman who grew up there and has traveled the world and had multiple, exotic careers; when I learned she was from Gloversville, she was reluctant to talk about it and seemed to think it was weird for me to ask. I think she, like Tyler Sinclair, had remade herself and wants to leave her old home in the dead past. I may be just imagining that.
“The other day, I looked out my door cam and saw an 81-year-old man slowly and painstakingly carrying my heavy luggage that had been lost on a recent flight up a steep flight of stairs,” writes Erin Howell, who set up a GoFundMe to help the man. “He looked absolutely exhausted, and his steps were heavy with effort.”
The man, Donald Johnson, has had to go back to work delivering luggage so he can pay for his wife’s cancer treatments. He has been forced into this grueling work because it is the “only job that will hire me.”
81-year-old Texas man working to return lost luggage to fund wife’s cancer bills sparks community outpouring [The Independent]
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has an intriguing proposal for making content creation for the web a viable business in the AI era: Require AI bots to pay when they index a site and deliver results to users. That would require a gateway, and Cloudflare is, of course, in great position to be that gateway, Prince says.
Prince is articulate, intelligent and charming. But his proposal would be just a new generation of working for the algorithm, the same as people now trying to optimize their work for TikTok and YouTube, and the Google search algorithm.
Can Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince save the web from AI? [The Vergecast with Nilay Patel]
On the Verge’s Version History podcast, Oregon Trail designer Philip Bouchard walks through the history of the brutal edutainment adventure. I am too old to have played the game in school, but we had a similar resource game where you had to provision armies during the Civil War.
The history of Tewodros II, the mad 19th Century Emperor of Abyssinnia (present-day Ethiopia), who imprisoned dozens of British emissaries, setting off one of the most ambitious military expeditions of the British Empire. therestishistory.com/episodes/…
Minnie is physically doing well, but stoically suffering when she wears the collar. I give her a break from it every now and then because she is not scratching at the eye. At least not yet.
A friend said Minnie will adjust to the collar and by tomorrow “she’ll reach the ‘just smash into things anyway’ phase.”
She bumps into things now. I’m probably imagining that I can hear her mutter “fuck” when she does.
Talking to animals is AI’s next ethical minefield: Researchers are using AI to decipher animal calls and communications, presenting ethical dilemmas, according to Bloomberg. (subscription required).
Researchers doing the work say that “if humans better understand the interior world of other species, they are less likely to shrug at climate change, endorse industrial farming or participate in habitat loss.”
“Yet human innovation also has a long track record of using technology against animals, says César Rodríguez-Garavito, director of the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program at New York University. Twentieth century whalers used advances in sonar to drive panicked whales to the surface to be killed. Poachers have copied the tribal practice of mimicking bird calls during hunting, using automated and looped recordings to lure birds into traps…..
“‘AI has potential for greater harm at scale,’ says Rodríguez-Garavito. In a 2025 report, he and his co-authors presented a dystopian vision of how ‘nonhuman animal communication technologies (NACTs)’ could expose animals to mobs of humans wanting to chat, leverage them for military purposes like sea mine detection or even be used to capture and kill them.”
We need to redefine a productive economy as one where we make more things we need more of, rather than one where we just make more things. Cory Doctorow: “Inefficiency is bad, actually”
Minnie went to the vet today and she is improving!
Her bloodwork was better than her last visit. I didn’t think that was an option. Of course we’re delighted.
She was diagnosed with kidney failure in early June, which is fatal. We transitioned her to a prescription kidney diet, which was difficult. She stopped eating entirely. We thought we might lose her in days or weeks. But we got her eating again, and on the kidney diet and now her appetite is great and she’s energetic and happy — outwardly in all respects an unusually healthy senior dog.
The vet said in June that some dogs last 18 months to two years on the kidney diet. By then Minnie would be 15-15-1/2. A long life for a medium-sized dog.
Unrelated: Minnie has an ulcer on her right eye and she needs eye drops and she needs to wear the Cone of Shame. At first she did not seem to mind but the cone messes up her vision and navigation and she has come to hate it and is not thrilled with us either. Well remove the cone to let her eat and drink water and hopefully she’ll adjust and we can just leave the cone on her until she heals.
“Once again, a core feature of a major piece of AI technology will actually just be people working in a call center, doing work that a company says AI is doing.” Meta Tests Muse AI Agent Calls That Are Actually Made By Humans in a Call Center
Aaron Sorkin goes off-script: Sorkin on his career, why he’s drawn to uplift and romance and why he remains optimistic about America’s institutions and democracy, despite everything. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/1…
I think a large part of Sorkin’s optimism is that the institutions have worked out extremely well for him — he has achieved the pinnacle of success. Our opinions are always colored by our personal experience.
But our institutions are failing more and more people. They are collapsing.
Anyway, Sorkin is charming, thoughtful and entertaining. I’m a fan. Enjoy the podcast.
Science fiction movies often depict futuristic fashion, which is sometimes iconic and sometimes ridiculous. In the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode ‘Sci-Fi Walks the Runway," host Eric Molinsky talks with fashion historians and authors Raissi Bretaña and Thèresa Winge about “the influence of Paco Rabanne on ‘Barbarella,’ the work of Jean-Paul Gaultier on ‘The Fifth Element’ and the way Alexander McQueen was influenced by dystopian sci-fi, which informed the McQueen style in ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’. Each of these collaborations left a lasting impact on cinema and fashion, from the runway to the shopping mall.”
Charlie Jane Anders is "sick of noir"
Present-day noir is tired because it uses the esthetics of classic noir without the philosophy, she says.
“What I love about noir is the cynicism. The bleakness. The awareness that corruption is everywhere, and everyone is complicit to some degree. That violence is not something that happens to other people, but rather a key feature of the system that we all support. These notions are pretty perfect for the time we’re living through, a time of incredible corruption, blatant state-sponsored violence, and worsening levels of inequality and plutocracy.
“But… I don’t know anyone who dresses in 1940s clothes. I also don’t know any femme fatales, or dames with legs that go on for days – which sounds like something you might want to get a doctor to look at. There aren’t really any private detectives in fedoras and trench coats walking around either, and almost nobody I know smokes these days. The world is in color!”
Cory Doctorow has written about this elsewhere (I cant find the link.) The original noir novelists, writing in the 1930s, wrote about veterans who were shell-shocked from hard combat during World War I, hoped after the war to rediscover the innocence of their childhood homes, but instead found their city to be corrupt and perverted. So these antiheroes became private eyes or criminals — outlaws.
What you have to overlook when reading classic noir today (Cory says) is that much of what disgusted the noir protagonists was women’s liberation, racial equality — particularly interracial sexual relations — and homosexuality.
However, stripped of the bigotry, the central spirit of noir is sound and still relevant today. Raymond Chandler summed it up:
“… down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor–by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
I think I agree with Charlie Jane. Original noir, like “The Maltese Fountain” and “Double Indemnity,” is classic and timeless and very watchable today. But I did not care for the recent “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” episode filmed in black-and-white. And while I suppose we’ll watch “Spider-Noir” eventually, I’m in no rush.
How corporate America built a better Roach Motel: Today’s economy is founded on the belief that monopolies are efficient. If monopolies failed to make their customers happy, competitors would come along to dethrone the monopoloy. But that’s not how it works in the real world, where monopolies lock out competitors and trap customers by making it expensive and painful to switch, writes Cory Doctorow. “…. dominant businesses don’t maintain their lead by making their customers happy, but by making it harder for those customers to leave.”
For example, big business lobbied to kill the “Click to Cancel” rule, “which required companies to make it as easy to resign from a subscription service as it was to sign up for it.” Sirius XM executives celebrated the rule’s demise on a call with shareholders. “Sirius believes that its profits come in part from the fact that dissatisfied customers can’t figure out how to cancel their service.”