Enshittification Part 2, Plus 2 Good Novels

The Fiction of Pulitzer Prize Winner Daniel Kraus.

Hello Friends, While this is not our “Library and Banned Books News” week, (that’s next week), I do want to mention that the Knox County, TN schools reversed the banning of Alex Haley’s Roots. And that was because of community and national blow back. Fighting back matters! Good job, book ‘freadom’ fighters! I had another cataract surgery last week, and wasn’t seeing clearly again, so I had the chance to listen to several audiobooks. One of them was Daniel Kraus’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Angel Down. I read some remarks about the book questioning whether the Pulitzer committee was biased toward experimental work. Apparently, some critics found all the finalists to be similar in their approach. I don’t know—I haven’t read most of the books up for the award. However, Angel Down is unusual (I wouldn’t go so far as to say experimental) in that it is a single sentence. But, at least in audiobook form, it flows well. Pauses can be felt; there are chapter breaks (each starts with the word “and”). Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Angel Down Angel is easy to follow and reminded me—in form, not in content— of the Academy Award winning film 1917 (Directed by Sam Mendes) which feels like it was filmed in one continuous shot. I haven’t read any interviews with Kraus, so I don’t know whether he was influenced by the film. Angel is the story of a group of five American soldiers trying to stay alive during the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I. A weird lamentation is coming from the No Man’s Land between them and the Germans. The pitch and endlessness of the cry is driving the men mad. Their commanding officer—Major General Reis, a very bad guy—commands them to take care of the man, who is probably caught in barbed wire. He means they are to kill the sufferer. No one wants to risk their life in No Man’s Land. Private Cyril Bagger, a con man and draft dodger who only landed in the war because he was caught in an illegal scheme, knows he can con his way out of being chosen for the risky mission. However, when the task falls to a teenage soldier named Arno, a mere boy who lied about his age in order to join the army, Bagger decides to accompany him. He has a soft spot for the poor kid after reading “The Son of Tarzan” to him. For a while, he believes he can make sure that Arno makes it home alive. When the two venture out to find the suffering soldier, they are surprised to find instead what they think is an angel, a woman who is unable to walk but who emanates a beam of heavenly light. It seems she protects them as they rescue her. But once they arrive back with the others, the angel brings out both the worst impulses of each of them as well as their illusory dreams. Bagger and Arno make it their mission to protect the angel and deliver her to safety. The story is full of vivid descriptions of the gore and horror of war—severed limbs, erupting guts, rotting teeth, pus and infections, burnt flesh—one atop the other, giving the reader a sense of the futility and darkness of the enterprise. As a high school teacher librarian, I read many YA books that I would later ‘book talk’ to students. The way the horror and gore were described in Angel were familiar to me. Is this the Daniel Kraus who wrote YA novels that I used to book talk? I checked—and yes, he is the same man. This Pulitzer winning novel has much in common with two novels I read for book talks—Rotters and Scowler. Perhaps this will lead some readers to think ‘how did Angel win the Pulitzer, then?’ But maybe another way to look at it is that some YA books are very good, and Kraus’s are among them. Maybe he was building the skills that landed that Pulitzer. If you enjoy horror, you might enjoy those novels. You could recommend them to teens you know. Teens could impress their teachers with the fact that they’ve read books by Kraus. Here are some thoughts I had when I read the YA books. Scowler My thoughts in October 2013: Scowler is a great October read, one in a YA branch of the true horror family. So—this is NOT your love triangle with some supernatural creatures thrown in ala Twilight and its progeny. Scowler is Dark. Scowler is Disturbing. After nine years in prison, a psychopath returns to the family farm with one thing on his mind—revenge against his son, now nineteen years old, for having him locked up all those years ago. That father, Marvin Burke, has escaped when meteorites fall throughout the county. One hits the prison and chaos ensues. Though Burke is supposed to be in a more distant lock-up, another escaped prisoner comes to the farm and warns Ry that his father is out for his blood. Ry had bested his father nine years earlier after climbing through a window and discovering his mother locked in her room, unable to flee. Her immobility is due to the twisted torture that her husband had devised for her in response to the fact that she has secretly done work to support the failing farm. (I can’t tell you—don’t want to kill the creep factor when you read it.) Though the family—Ry, his mom and his little sister Sarah—nearly escape, Marvin Burke catches them. It is up to ten-year-old Ry to be a decoy, to risk himself through a freezing night. He has no jacket, none of the right clothing, in fact. No light. No nothing, except three toys that fall from his pockets. As his mental state breaks under pressure of his father stalking him in order to murder him, these toys come to life and direct him through his living hell. One of Ry’s toys—Scowler—is an old cast-off, homemade from pipes, husks and shells. Hideously ugly. It may prove his salvation more than once. High school housekeeping: I think any teen might enjoy Scowler for a Halloween fright. Though there are several flashbacks, it takes place over a few days, just before the meteorite hits and then just after. Here, the reader finds himself in the mind of a sadistic psychopath as well as in the mind of his son, who, having suffered beyond ordinary human endurance, may well become a psychopath himself. The language is colorful, so if cursing offends you, you might take a pass. But this gives a sense of reality both to the brother-sister relationship and to the dire situation of the family. It’s a book of average length and average difficulty that will give you a taste of what adult horror fans read in the lengthier works of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and their ilk. Rotters My thoughts in June 2013: Such a weird story! The combination of bullying and horror story compelled me to finish the book, and I think it will appeal to anyone who likes really quirky stuff. Joey Crouch has lived with his mother all of his life in Chicago. They don’t go out much and he’s never been over the Illinois state line. But when his mother is hit by a bus and killed, Joey is removed to a small town in Iowa to live with a father he’s never known. Things are very bad from the start. Ken Harnett, Joey’s dad, doesn’t bother to pick him up at the depot. He immediately leaves the house upon Joey’s arrival and doesn’t return for three days. Meanwhile, Joey sleeps on the floor, has nothing to eat and notices a strange, nasty odor in the shack that he can’t identify. Dressed poorly, hungry and stinking, Joey immediately becomes a target of bullying in his new high school—not only by jocks but by a sadistic biology teacher as well, one who daily makes Joey stand in front of the class and then uses him to point out body parts and their functions. (Just a note here from the teacher in me: I had a hard time believing that any teacher anywhere could get away with treating a student the way Joey was treated—but if one tried, I would hope that someone in the class would speak up and tell outsiders.) The situation only gets worse when we discover what that terrific stink is: Ken is a modern-day grave robber. With nothing to lose at school, Joey decides to learn the trade, and we enter the bizarre brotherhood of this underworld. They are criminals with a strange code of honor, and the one of them who has broken the code is terrorizing all the others. He may have the power to use Joey to get at the whole group. Rotters are people—because all people will die, and then they will rot if they are not cremated. The descriptions of grave robbing, of disintegrating corpses, are the stuff of nightmares. (So beware.) Yet the story is oddly original and well-written. There are a lot of interesting facts about the history of grave robbing and the ‘resurrection men’ who dug up corpses for scientists and professors to use in study. (Remember Jerry Cruncher in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities?) When Joey has been bullied beyond endurance and he seeks revenge—well, imagine what a grave robber could do. Reading 15 Essential Works of American Literature [https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/100421-15-essential-works-of-american-literature.html]from Publishers Weekly The most vital books published in the U.S. since 1776 as voted on by critics. Of these 15 books, I’ve read 13. Which of them have you read? AI and Writing Awards ‘Obvious markers of AI’: doubts raised over winner of short story prize [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/19/commonwealth-short-story-prize-winner-doubts-ai-artificial-intelligence?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwdGRleAR6kO9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA8xNzM4NDc2NDI2NzAzNzAAAR56ui-lNeVSi1igU4TmZlX0RlTPNprCzxYwY_zMjyO9uPUYTqqGe0T1_s-lzw_aem_RlkeXr27NvWmSaQiqi8_fQ#Echobox=1779272390] from the Guardian Granta publisher says ‘perhaps we never will know’ true authorship of work that won Commonwealth prize A few syntactical tics – and the verdict of an AI detection platform – have sparked a furore over the possibility that a short story given a prestigious literary award was written by AI. The foundation that awarded the prize and Granta, the magazine that published the winning story [https://granta.com/the-serpent-in-the-grove/], said they had considered the allegations but had not reached a conclusion as to whether they were true. … The Commonwealth Foundation and Granta have said there is a limit to their ability to detect whether the allegations around Nazir’s possible use of AI are true. The foundation said it did not use AI checkers in its judging process because supplying unpublished work to them “would raise significant concerns surrounding consent and artistic ownership”. It said all entrants to the prize had avowed that their submissions were their own work and “personally stated that no AI was used”, something it confirmed with “further consultation”. It added that AI checkers were “not unfailing and infallible”. ands this article in Wired adds: [https://www.wired.com/story/commonwealth-short-story-prize-ai-allegations/] Besides Nazir, two more winning authors have drawn allegations [https://x.com/frontier_foid/status/2056500794237890693] of using AI in their work. Pangram finds that “The Bastion’s Shadow,” by Maltese writer John Edward DeMicoli, winner for the Canada and Europe region, is fully AI-generated; it scans “Mehendi Nights,” by Indian writer Sharon Aruparayil, winner for the Asia region, as partly AI-generated. Neither DeMicoli nor Aruparayil immediately returned requests for comment when reached through their respective social media accounts. The other two short-listed stories, by Holly Ann Miller of New Zealand and Lisa-Anne Julien of South Africa, deliver “fully human-written” results from Pangram. In a further twist, the Jamaican author Sharma Taylor, a judge for this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize, has been accused of using AI [https://x.com/OngoingGoblin/status/2056507257433493555] to craft her descriptive blurb that accompanied the listing of “The Serpent in the Grove” as a regional winner. Pangram evaluates Taylor’s text as “AI-assisted.” She did not immediately return a request for comment. For fun, check out “The Prehistory of A.I. Slop” in the New Yorker [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/25/the-prehistory-of-ai-slop] Before ChatGPT, there was the Plot Robot, Auto-Beatnik, and a century’s worth of schemes for automating authorship. Writers I saw this cross-posted on Narratively —a great list. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com [https://victoriawaddle.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Books! Magdalene Laundries, A World Appears by Michael Pollan, Here’s to you Jesusa! …

Hello Friends, I hope you are feeling and doing well. I have several bookish things going on lately that I hope you’ll find interesting. But first, because life is rough, here’s something I found very hopeful on Reasons to Be Cheerful. Endangered Butterflies Are Thriving Behind Bars [https://reasonstobecheerful.world/prison-conservation-butterflies/?utm_source=Reasons+to+be+Cheerful&utm_campaign=f9e670c691-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_01_14_04_31_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-858671eea4-518361225] In the tender, methodical work of rescuing an imperiled butterfly species, incarcerated women are finding a sense of purpose. My pandemic pups turned six years old. Hard to believe, but here they are thriving, and this is another thing that soothes these challenging days. I was moving into a period of despair when they came into my life and helped me rally. I wrote about it in my chapbook The Mortality of Dogs and Humans [https://www.bamboodartpress.com/store/victoria_waddle-the_mortality_of_dogs_and_humans.html]. I promised on my ‘About’ page to post about the dogs once in a while, so here are a few nap time photos. On Mother’s Day night, I decided to watch The Maltese Falcon because, somehow, I’d neither seen it nor read the book. This post from DocTalk, Allan N Schwartz PhD [https://substack.com/profile/23568510-doctalk-allan-n-schwartz-phd] steered me to it: As a retired psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, I cannot help but view this film through the lens of symbolism and human motivation. The black bird itself, the Maltese Falcon, is not merely an object. It becomes almost mythical. Everyone in the story is obsessed with possessing it. Men and women lie, betray, manipulate, and kill in pursuit of it. Yet what fascinates me most is that the falcon has power not because of what it truly is, but because of what people imagine it to be. That is one of the great truths about human psychology. People often chase symbols rather than realities. Books I had the chance to talk to Marla Miller [https://substack.com/profile/211281961-marla-miller] about how my work as a teacher and librarian influenced my novel Keep Sweet [https://bookshop.org/p/books/keep-sweet/9b700ad875ee778f?ean=9781955969482&next=t]. So much depends on what happens away from the desk! Sci-Fi Authors and Latino/Latine Writers I’m reading speculative fiction for a special (extra) issue of the Inlandia Journal right now. Submissions are open [https://inlandiaaliteraryjourney.submittable.com/submit] through May 31. (Side note: Submissions are also open through June 14 for their Eliud Martínez Prize. If you are a Latine writer seeking publication of a full-length manuscript [150-300 pages], have a look.) Review of Scouts’ Honor And I wrote a book review for the teen issue of Inlandia, “ [https://inlandiajournal.net/spring-2026-vol-17-victoria-waddle/]A Vow to Hide the Truth [https://inlandiajournal.net/spring-2026-vol-17-victoria-waddle/],” [https://inlandiajournal.net/spring-2026-vol-17-victoria-waddle/] about Scouts’ Honor by Carlos Cortés. In general, the teen issue is all teens except the managing editor—the readers, the editors, the submitters/writers/artists. If you know a teen writer, have them look for the next submission period next winter. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Books on My TBR List How the Fanatical Legion of Mary Secreted Young Girls Away to Toil in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries [https://lithub.com/how-the-fanatical-legion-of-mary-secreted-young-girls-away-to-toil-in-irelands-magdalene-laundries/?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_medium=campaign&utm_id=01KR4DWW3S6W47BQQRGP1WW3JB&_kx=hjVdRLw1xlYW_BpUjBeHJT66ygHozgEpktNNW_FHWQc.U5D8ER] LOUISE BRANGAN ON THE GIRLS WHO DISAPPEARED IN 20TH-CENTURY IRELAND Excerpted from The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence [https://bookshop.org/a/1688/9781668079744] by Louise Brangan I read the above linked excerpt on LitHub, and now I need to read the book. Or at least listen to the audiobook. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was my introduction to the Magdalene Laundries. The power of this slim book/novella cannot be overstated. If you haven’t read it, you must. It’s the best thing I’ve read in the last several years. I’ve been checking out some recent ‘Best Of’ lists. I’m always hoping that I’ve read many of the books, maybe because it’ll make me feel like I have fine sensibilities. But honestly, there are many excellent books that critics, cuddled up in their sleeping bags in the Big Five tent, are wholly unaware of. 25 Books That Capture This American Moment [https://time.com/collection/our-america-250/2026/books-that-define-america/] Time Magazine Of these, one that I haven’t read and look forward to is The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. I read and enjoyed (so to speak—I mean I found it powerful) her novel Kindred. 100 Best Novels [https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/may/12/the-100-best-novels-of-all-time] The Guardian The Guardian is posting “a countdown of the greatest literature ever published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide.” They add 20 books per week. So far they have posted 100-61. Another 20 will post on Thursday. No unexpected titles, but I have to say, I’m surprised that Pedro Páramo is only # 96. I think it might belong in the top 50. What I’m Reading I just finished Michael Pollan’s A World Appears, a nonfiction exploration of consciousness. I thought my kids might also want to read it, but they have a point: the final outcome of all books about consciousness is that we don’t understand it. Nevertheless, Pollan’s exploration is very interesting and wide-ranging. He interviews many scientists, philosophers, writers, and spiritual seekers and also incorporates his own experiences with consciousness-altering psychedelics. “When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.” I also just finished Here’s to You, Jesusa! which is a translation of the testimonial novel Hasta no verte Jesús Mío by Elena Poniatowska. The original Spanish was published in 1969. I was interested in reading Jesusa because I’m trying to get a sense of Mexico during the Cristero Wars. (Research for my own writing.) I can’t say it helped me much, but it is a strange book with a frustrating protagonist who is nonetheless admirable for her insights into politics and her ability to survive a variety of hells, including desperate poverty. If you want to read about a woman who fought in the Mexican Revolution and also survived the Cristero Wars, this is it. “Jesusa is a tough, fiery character based on a real working-class Mexican woman whose life spanned some of the seminal events of early twentieth-century Mexican history. Having joined a cavalry unit during the Mexican Revolution, she finds herself at the Revolution’s end in Mexico City, far from her native Oaxaca, abandoned by her husband and working menial jobs. So begins Jesusa’s long history of encounters with the police and struggles against authority. Mystical yet practical, undaunted by hardship, Jesusa faces the obstacles in her path with gritty determination.” Although No Way Home by T. C. Boyle is very good, I stopped reading it because I had to finish my library books and return them. I hope to get back to No Way soon. What are you reading? Anything you’d like to recommend? Please like and share. Thanks! I hope you have a good week. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com [https://victoriawaddle.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Iran and Exit Prohibited; AI-Generated Writing; Cesar Chavez Fallout

Hello Friends, There are some things I wanted to discuss about this crazy week, so I’ll put off the final discussion of Enshittification. Next week we’re starting the new schedule of alternating the “Library and Banned Books News” with these review posts rather than having both within one week. So—next Sunday is about libraries and censorship. ¡Sí, se puede! Yes, we can! I read in two newspapers that California is changing its Cesar Chavez holiday to “Farmworker Day/El Día del Campesino.” I’m glad my state is continuing with the honor. I’m over being heartbroken over the loss of idols. I think it’s best to celebrate ideas and movements that have helped people rather than any particular man. If you need some helpful reading on the Chavez abuse news, these may be useful: This guest post on the [https://open.substack.com/pub/contrarian/p/a-reckoning-long-overdue?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email]Contrarian [https://open.substack.com/pub/contrarian/p/a-reckoning-long-overdue?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email] by Maria Cardona. [https://open.substack.com/pub/contrarian/p/a-reckoning-long-overdue?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email] Let us be absolutely clear: none of these horrific revelations erase the very real gains made in farmworkers’ rights through years of grueling, backbreaking organizing. Those victories belong to an entire movement. Yes, Chávez was a leader — but so much of the unacknowledged credit belongs to Dolores Huerta and to the women who powered that movement from behind the curtain. And this [https://open.substack.com/pub/contrarian/p/hard-truths?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web]: However, the farmworkers movement is not defined by an individual — and never has been. As Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi noted [https://substack.com/redirect/3e800c92-064e-4319-9437-c084b8ded65f?j=eyJ1IjoiNmMyd3gifQ.zahhb5Zy_nKrMGVIP9NLdNdnNUVXEaONXjzpYN-1mjU], “A movement is about the people — not any one person — and its strength lies in the values it upholds. We can honor the farmworker movement — and the generations who sacrificed to build it — while also confronting painful truths. No legacy is above accountability.” While we are shaken to our core, we continue to honor the tens of thousands of farm labor activists. Anne Lamott gives us hope, as always. [https://open.substack.com/pub/annelamott/p/sand?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web] Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. And here’s some good news from this week’s Reasons to be Cheerful because it’s important to remember that everyday people work to correct past mistakes, even devastating ones. The Native Seed Farm Safeguarding California’s Future [https://reasonstobecheerful.world/heritage-growers-california-future/] At Heritage Growers, every acre is being cultivated to repair ecosystems and help the Golden State meet its ambitious conservation goals. California is widely recognized as one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, supporting thousands of endemic plant and animal species, more than any other US state. However, California’s Biodiversity Initiative [https://www.californiabiodiversityinitiative.org/pdf/california-biodiversity-action-plan.pdf] notes that its wetlands, riparian woodlands and forests have “suffered extensive losses,” with “an estimated 80–90 percent” of its biologically diverse landscapes altered or lost in the past 150 years. Development, agriculture, invasive species, climate change and increasingly intense wildfires are among the culprits. Reestablishing native vegetation is crucial to reversing those trends. Right after I posted Friday’s “Library and Banned Books News,” the librarian in Rutherford, TN said she will not move those 190 YA (mostly LGBTQIA) books out of the teen section because it violates the First Amendment Rights of the teens. We’ll see what ensues, but it’s a reminder that good people are out there fighting. Iran and Its People I read a couple of articles this week about the choices Iranians are now having to make. Iranians Weigh Tough Choice: Stay or Flee [http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=ab62ddaf-c4d9-4a9d-a937-f05cbe6e959e] from the LA Times What the War Has Done to Iranians [https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/what-the-war-has-done-to-iranians] from the New Yorker And one closer and more personal, a text convo between the New Yorker Journalist Cora Engelbrecht and “Hadi” in Tehran. There’s Hadi’s early sense of hope about the war, the fulfillment of a lifelong wish for the death of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which later turns to despair when the regime itself stays in place. I’m not sure whether you can access the article if you’re not a subscriber, but it’s very worthwhile. Here [https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/what-the-war-has-done-to-iranians]. “As for me, my situation is clear,” he added. “I want to remain close to what’s happening. I’m staying here in the middle of the war until the very end, until my home, what I consider my home, is taken away from me.” After reading these, I thought of a wonderful memoir about Iranian culture and history, about leaving Iran after the 1979-80 revolution. Exit Prohibited deals with the same question: should we stay or should we go? I know the author, Ellen Estilai, through the Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit. Opening the Door on Iranian Culture Exit Prohibited by Ellen Estilai [https://substack.com/profile/15666684-ellen-estilai] At the end of July 1980, Ellen Estilai, her husband, and their two daughters are leaving Iran. The decision isn’t easy. Ellen met and married her husband, Ali, in Davis, California, a decade earlier when they both attended university. Ali always planned to return to his homeland after earning his PhD in genetics. As a “first student,” his foreign education was paid for by the Iranian government on the promise to return and with his father’s house as collateral. After Ali graduates, Ellen goes with him, later giving birth to their children. Though she plans to spend her life in Iran, the 1979 revolution and its repressions make staying impossible. And while all four members of the family have permission to leave, Ali is detained at the airport. His passport is confiscated, and he is told he’s on the mamnou’ol khorudj — exit prohibited — list.Ellen and her daughters take off for Switzerland with plans to continue on to the United States. But they’ve no idea when they will see Ali again. She wonders: “Who would want to prevent Ali from leaving Iran? Which officious bureaucrat, which backbiting colleague, which sly neighbor could have written the letter or made the phone call? And just what is Ali being accused of? Having an American wife? Not being Islamic enough? Working on saffron?”The author moves from these thoughts to an examination of her life in Iran. Though hijab is not required under the shah’s rule, many Iranian women continue to wear headscarves, knee-length coats with long sleeves, and pants underneath. Those that don’t are eyed suspiciously as too westernized. As one of them, and a foreigner to boot, the author is sometimes distrusted. Yet she immerses herself in the culture and learns Persian. Her in-laws are a large, happy group who welcome her without hesitation. Their open-heartedness and gatherings, “a celebration of connectedness, of old roots and new growth,” satisfy a need that is not met in her small family of origin. Unlike her mother’s anxiety over hosting gatherings or guests, Iranians believe that a guest is God’s gift.Life in Iran is far different from what the author is used to. With few convenience foods available, she finds herself cooking much of the day. Itinerant street vendors call through the neighborhood selling coats and pants, watermelon, crystal dishes, and more. Though she is not convalescing, Ellen feels like Jimmy Stewart’s character in Rear Window. As she watches the drama in the courtyard and on the balconies, she discovers a good deal about her neighbors’ lives. The author also learns cultural norms. Taarof is the necessary offering of compliments and ceremonial courtesies (“these endless streams of pleasantries took so much valuable time”). The fatalistic worldview that everyone has their own ghesmat (kismet) prevails. Nonetheless, this view allows for a tradition of warding off the evil eye by preparing hot coals in a brazier and tossing in esfand (wild rye) seeds. And, of course, there is the ever-present samovar because tea is a part of all interactions, business or pleasure.Ali lands his dream position as a professor in the Biology Department at the University of Tehran. He secures funds to create a new department, the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology, and to purchase new equipment. Though his hopes of improving Iranian education appear to be coming true, some people are envious of him.Meanwhile, Ellen completes her education in English Language and Literature and begins working at the new Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as Manager of Education. The author’s discussion of the museum — architecturally, it’s a paean to Iranian culture, but the artwork has dual foci in Iranian and western art — peeks into, and is a harbinger of, the cultural conflict that comes to consume Iran a few years later.As the author learns about Iranian culture, readers do as well. They are immersed in the beauty of Isfahan, its art and its “exquisite, sublime, and ethereal” interlocking patterns. The friendliness of Kerman, Ali’s hometown, is on display as is the routine of daily life, of being a working mother and being part of “a large, boisterous family that was endlessly interested in one another’s business.” The narrative is infused with humor. (“As dull as it was, Days of Our Lives provided me with many random but potentially useful phrases, such as ‘Mickey aqim-e?’ [Mickey is sterile?]”) Like most Westerners, Ellen knew little about the modern political situation in Iran. Along the way, she unearthed historical imperialism. During the previous century, both Britain and Russia/the USSR had meddled in Iranian politics. The CIA led a coup in 1953 that overthrew a democratically elected prime minister. After moving to Iran, the author hears stories of the SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, and its engagement in political repression. With her newfound knowledge, she wonders — along with everyone she knows — how life under Khomeini could be any worse.During Ali’s sabbatical of 1978–79, Ellen and Ali travel back to the home of their alma mater and their meeting place, Davis, California. Thus, they are out of the country during the fall of the shah and the installation of Khomeini. Uncertain of the reality of daily life in Iran, they choose to return to Iran at the end of the sabbatical.Still, overall, readers understand the melancholy of Ellen’s departure from Iran. While she has enriched her life in a new landscape, with a new language and new traditions, and with a large, loving family, there’s no doubt she must exit. She’s worried about the future of women with talent and energy in the Islamic Republic, including her own daughters. “I knew what I wanted for them. I wanted them to know their foremothers. I wanted their voices to be heard. I wanted them to have a place at the table.”With their dreams no longer attainable, the Estilais have a new challenge in negotiating Ali’s exit. The complexity of the author’s experience and her relationship to Iran before and after the revolution makes a compelling memoir. Readers learn not only about a culture and its history but also about the dual immigrant experiences of Ellen and Ali and their inspirational ability to restart their lives. Writer Issues, Reader Issues AI The NYT posted a little quiz with five sets of two paragraphs. The object is to pick the one of the two paragraphs in each set that you think is better. One is AI-generated. One is from a fairly well-known writer. It’s interesting to see how good AI paragraphs are—keeping in mind that they are generated from a vast store of real human writing. But I wonder if AI generation could sustain a complete short story, an essay, a novel, memoir, or any nonfiction book. What’s the cumulative effect? Apparently Hachette found a horror novel worthy of publication which it has now canceled after reports that parts were AI-generated. The author claims that someone she hired to edit the self-published version used AI. She is pursuing legal action. Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/books/shy-girl-book-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.U1A.X8zu.LvB_1P2nszcs&smid=url-share] from NYT (Gift link) On Thursday, a day after The New York Times approached Hachette citing evidence that the novel appeared to be A.I.-generated, the company said it was pulling the book from publication. By Thursday afternoon, the novel was removed from Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/Shy-Girl-femgore-revenge-EVERYONE-ebook/dp/B0F8NY374P] and the Hachette website [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/mia-ballard/shy-girl/9780316603836/]. And Here’s the quiz if you’d like to try it. (Gift link) [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/09/business/ai-writing-quiz.html?unlocked_article_code=1.U1A.Lv5R.3mdwkhCUSA_M&smid=url-share] Great literature may not strike us as the best reading in a single paragraph: Thanks for reading! Take heart. I believe the old ‘darkest before the dawn’ proverb. We’ll see you out on the streets on Saturday. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com [https://victoriawaddle.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Enshittification Part 2, Plus 2 Good Novels

Hello Friends, While the frightening and exhausting aspects of life seem to overtake us, let’s not forget that good people do good work and we should keep up with that, too. Remember, every Sunday, Jess Craven posts lots of good things happening. Here’s a little thanks I got for giving blood in 2025. That felt good.  Although I am still mostly reading research books for a novel I’m working on, I’ve had a chance to listen to a few wonderful novels. I finished A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. It’s that story of Nomi Nickel, whose life in the Mennonite colony of East Village, Manitoba is without fun and without prospects (unless slaughtering chickens as a job counts). Both her sister and her mother were excommunicated and left three years earlier. Full of grief for her missing family members, Nomi breaks all the rules, numbs herself to pain, and longs for escape. I also listened to Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb thanks to a recommendation by Beth Peyton [https://substack.com/profile/330746695-beth-peyton]. It’s a realistic look at farmworkers’ lives in the Great Depression. The characters in this novel flee the Dust Bowl and find an equally difficult situation on California. While the novel I’m working on has characters coming from Mexico during the same time period, they share some of the same issues with an abusive labor system. Sadly for Babb, her book was scheduled to be published, but just before, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath launched and was a runaway best seller. Babb’s book was finally published in 2004. Enshittification Part Two For Part One, check last week’s post [https://victoriawaddle.substack.com/p/enshittification-by-cory-doctorow?r=6c2wx]. Let’s look at Cory Doctorow’s discussion of how we ended up in the internet platform mess. There are obvious issues with companies that can act as monopolies with no serious oversight (lax government regulation). But additionally, various companies figured out how to override the interoperability of computers at the same time that their work force became less valuable to them. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Getting Past the Interoperability of Computers Pretty much every computer in existence is capable of running every computer program that people know how to write. This has been beneficial to industries and customers with computer technology becoming faster. Computer chips also became faster and cheaper. Great stuff until companies started planting chips in everything including your car, your thermostat, your medical implant, even in the ink that goes into your printer. Suddenly, they can control your options in relation to that product. An example: You can’t buy a third-party ink cartridge that’s safe for an HP printer because it has a computer chip installed that will only read its own cartridges. Doctorow says that this allows HP to charge $10,000 a gallon for ink. While this sounds like hyperbole, he appears to be serious about that cost. Changes in the Work Force When companies like Google and Facebook were new, tech workers had a lot of power because if they quit, they could easily find a job elsewhere. This is no longer true. These workers had a sense of mission and were spending all of their time at work, dedicating their lives to companies whose mottos were “Don’t be evil” (Google) and “Connect every person in the world” (Facebook). Today workers don’t feel any sense of ownership over the products. They are more likely to feel betrayed. Enough Money to Acquire Everything The root of the problem goes back further than these companies to the 1970s when Democrats and Republicans both declined to enforce antitrust laws. (Joe Biden embraced the ‘consumer welfare standards theory’ of antitrust law, but then he was out of office.) Unregulated, companies like Amazon are able to create monopolies in many areas. For example, diapers.com was an e-commerce leader. To put them out of business, Amazon sold diapers significantly below cost, losing $200 million over a single month on these products. Diapers.com went bankrupt. Amazon picked it up and then shut it down. So now they exercise a great deal of control over the diaper market. This takeover also sent a message to companies: if Amazon makes you an offer, you have to sell or else you’ll go broke. While Google has only made one great product (a search engine), they have been able to acquire many other people’s inventions. So Google Docs, Google Maps, their navigation system, their satellite images, their server management, and their customer service were all other people’s or other companies’ inventions that Google bought and integrated into their own company. Enshittifying That One Great Product The great product that Google created, its search engine, has been enshittified. According to Google internal documents displayed by lawyer Megan Gray in the Google DOJ trial in October 2023, Google uses a semantics-matching technology to invisibly append brand names to queries. An example Doctorow gives is a search for kids’ snow pants. The customer query is “kids’ snow pants.” Google would add the words “North Face,” unseen by the customer. Ads for North Face come up first. North Face pays Google a lot of money to have their ads triggered when their name is searched. Google gets paid. “Depending on your point of view, this is either merely very sleazy, or it’s actual fraud.” (79) Google claims that this is not true and that Gray misunderstood what was going on; however, they refused to explain themselves any further. Google also makes a lot of money by selling its search engines to other companies. This matters if you are an Apple user who believes you are not being tracked when you use Apple products. If you search using Safari, you’re actually using Google search. “Google has a non-consensual dossier on the behavior, social ties, purchases, economic status, employment history, and physical location of virtually every Internet user.” (81-82) Google gets $20 billion a year for this service. “It turned out that ‘If you are not paying for the product, you’re the product’ was wishful thinking. It is true to say, ‘Even if you pay for the product, you’re the product if the company can get away with treating you as the product. ‘” (83) There’s no end to bad actors running similar scams. Apple requires app makers to exclusively process payments through Apple’s system which takes a 30 percent commission on every purchase. (To place this in context, that’s ten times as high as the fees credit card companies charge merchants, which are already “sky-high.”) (84) Adobe planned to train AI on the work people create on it until creators rebelled en masse and moved to smaller company’s products. “The ability of purveyors of cloud-based products to alter their terms, prices, and features at will enables one of the most beloved Enshittification tactics of tech business leaders: bait and switch.” (100) Use an App; Do as You Please The most common tactic tech companies use to flout regulation is to break the law with an app, and then insist that the law hasn’t been broken at all, because the crime was committed with an app. (111) One of the best examples would be Uber’s argument that it’s not an employer because it directs workers with an app. Companies can also say that they’re not committing wage theft if they do it with an app. Again Uber is an example with their algorithmic wage discrimination. When they offer jobs to all the drivers in the neighborhood, they calculate a different wage for each driver based on the driver’s recent behavior. Uber can raise the cost of a taxi for riders if their phones are about to run out of batteries. That’s called twiddling, the process of changing the price (recommendation weights, search rankings, etc.) through automated or semi-automated means. Like ‘We’ll just twiddle all of these knobs in order to make more money.’ Offline companies can’t do these kinds of things. Doctorow imagines a gas station owner seeing someone leaving a vehicle that’s stranded in the snow and coming toward the station to get some snow chains. He doesn’t have the opportunity to change the prices on all of those before the customer walks through the door. In digital business, they can change everything all the time instantly and do that based on their surveillance data and other information. Amazon takes the app scam to a whole other level. Since it uses delivery service partner (DSP) companies for its vans, it has fired the companies when their drivers unionize. If those workers were employees of Amazon that would be illegal, but Amazon can claim that it exerts control over the drivers through an app. So it’s an intermediary. Amazon surveils delivery drivers with sensors in the vans that record the traffic around a vehicle. Inside the van cameras monitor the drivers down to the motion of their eyeballs and mouth. So if they’re singing along with the radio, Amazon can tell them they’re not paying attention to driving. They tell the drivers what route to drive and set crazy quotas for deliveries. Since they demand the dismissal of drivers who don’t live up to the standards it sets, Amazon drivers end up urinating in bottles. The fix? They get in trouble if they come back to the depot with bottles full of urine, so they throw them out the window and then you have roads leading to Amazon depots that are littered with sealed bottles of human urine. Twisting Intellectual Property Law When big tech companies say it’s impossible to run code of your choosing on their computers, what they’re really saying is it’s illegal to run code of your choosing on that computer. Now, there isn’t a law that would make it illegal for you to install non-company approved software on your computer. That, according to Doctorow would be like saying you had to put Nike approved laces into your air Jordans. Once you buy them, they’re your shoes and then it’s none of Nike‘s business what laces you put in them. Everything you buy that uses digital technology is also your property. So what’s the issue with tech? The issue lies in intellectual property (IP) law. Companies can design their products in such a way that they have a legal right to reach beyond the things themselves to control the conduct of their competitors, their critics and their customers. There’s one section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or the DMCA that receives a lot of discussion in Enshittification: section 1201. It’s an anti-circumvention law, and it regulates bypassing access control for copyrighted work. It prevents you from breaking a digital lock. Think of the HP printer cartridges discussed above. The ink isn’t copyrighted. But you can’t fill the cartridge with your own ink because the printer cartridge has a chip in it that runs a copyrighted program. That program authenticates with a printer to verify that you bought HP ink. If you have the computer know-how to defeat that program on the chip, then you have gotten access to a copyrighted work illegally. Which is a felony. This may be the reason why more devices are becoming ‘smart.’ They can only be used in ways the manufacturer approves. I haven’t had a baby in the house in decades, so I’d never heard of the SNOO smart sleeper, but it is a great example of this ploy. For those like me who are not in the know: the SNOO smart sleeper is a bassinet with a high-tech self-rocking cradle. When the baby cries, the cradle goes into rocking mode (back to sleep, dear little one!) while playing some sounds. It’s wildly expensive, about $1700. And like most expensive baby products, people reuse it—on second and third children, lent out to friends and family who are expecting. The parent company 😊wanted to extract new revenue from owners after the purchase. Bait and switch—suddenly you’re going to lose the advanced features unless you pay $20 a month (not in the original bargain). Value moves away from the end users and back to the shareholders. Well, lots of companies would like to make money off of old things that they’ve already sold. The reason why SNOO can do it is because the product has a continuous internet connection that they simply downgrade if you don’t pay (for the thing you’ve already paid for—feels like mob protection, doesn’t it?) Again, if you try to make an alternative app that restores the features, then you are breaking the IP laws/committing a felony. Are We Now Serfs to Techno Overlords? Doctorow has an in-depth discussion of his belief that we have moved away from capitalism to something he calls technofeudalism. Technofeudalism’s understanding of ‘free markets’ is not that they are free from regulation but that they are free from rents. And now we are serfs in the digital environment, renting our space from the overlord. The argument requires a review of Econ 101. It’s more than I can get into here, but it’s worthwhile reading. As a quite incomplete summary of the idea: In the years after the great financial crisis of 2008, tech was transformed from a primarily profit-seeking enterprise to a primarily rent-seeking enterprise and the things that make the giants powerful is that they control the factors of production that they rent to actual productive businesses. We work in a monopsony, an economic system where markets are dominated by powerful buyers like Apple, Amazon, etc. These platforms (rentiers) have enormous control over software authors and anyone who wants to place their products for sale on these platforms (the actual productive businesses). The law comes down on the side of the rentier over the capitalist via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 1201. In our next discussion of Enshittification, we’ll look at what we can do to change things. (There must be some kind of way out of here…) The Jimi Hendrix Experience - All Along The Watchtower (Official Audio) [https://youtu.be/TLV4_xaYynY?si=dJC10PPmfG2ZLuGn] Writers Publishers Charge Anna’s Archive with Copyright Infringement [https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/99880-publishers-charge-anna-s-archive-with-copyright-infringement.html?oly_enc_id=9896A4349667C3T] from Publishers Weekly A group of publishers including the Big Five is taking legal action to prevent the pirate website Anna’s Archive from illegally copying and selling their copyrighted material. In a filing made March 6 in [https://publishers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Apress-v-Annas-Archive-Complaint.pdf]the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 13 book and journal publishers filed suit seeking a permanent injunction to stop Anna’s Archive from copying and distributing millions of infringing files. The suit highlights the magnitude of the material Anna’s Archive has stolen and the unorthodox methods it uses to monetize the material. … The lawsuit also asserts that Anna’s Archive “publicly claims to have given ‘high-speed access’ to its illegal collection of more than 140 million copyrighted texts to companies in China, Russia, and elsewhere, many of them LLMs. One court in the Northern District of California recently found that Meta Platforms torrented the contents of Anna’s Archive for use in developing its LLM model Llama.” In an e-mail exchange with a researcher inquiring about the cost of the collection for AI training, Anna’s Archive offered premium access for $200,000 and suggested payment be made using cryptocurrency, the complaint states. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com [https://victoriawaddle.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Enshittification by Cory Doctorow

Hello Friends, Tonight, I’m picking the winners for the book giveaway and will be sending the books out ASAP (hopefully tomorrow). Thanks to those who participated. Today, I’m discussing Enshittification by Cory Doctorow and then following up with some links for writers. This is a ‘Part One’ because there are many issues Doctorow illuminates, and then he concludes with some ideas for changing online culture. These deserve a discussion as well. Also—I mentioned this in Friday’s “Library and Banned Books News,” but if you only read Sunday’s book discussions: I will be changing the schedule in a week or two so that there is only one post per week, on Sunday. The Library/Banned Books News will alternate with the book discussions. Two reasons for this: * I feel the world is just so much right now and people are dealing with an onslaught of information. * I want more time to work on a novel that I have finally started! (Yay!) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow I’d like to explore Enshittification in depth because I think the story it tells is important for all of us. There may be three parts to the discussion (not sure). I encourage you to get your hands on the book ASAP and read along. If you want to borrow it from the library, it probably has a hold list, so put your name in now. 😊 “You Are Not Just an Ambulatory Wallet” “It’s not just you. The Internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of s**t, all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck.” (3) Doctorow notes that he is an Internet activist who’s been working for digital human rights for decades. He calls our era the Enshittocene, which has been caused by specific policy decisions at ‘middlemen’ platforms that connect business customers to end users or connect workers with their customers. Some of the bad actors he discusses are eBay, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Google (connects publishers and advertisers to searchers) and Facebook (connects people who want to socialize rather than search). So, what is enshittification? Doctorow names it in four steps: * First, platforms are good to their users. * Then they use their users to make things better for their business customers. * Next, they abuse those business customers to clawback all the value for themselves. * Finally, they have become a giant pile of s**t. Why Do We Stick Around if the Platform is So Bad? There’s a cost for leaving these spaces even though it’s become a hassle to be there. For example, if you leave Facebook, it’s likely the people you hang out with will not be available to you on another platform—it’s hard to get other people to switch. So when Facebook realized that it could make money from advertisers and publishers, they did so by spying on the users and then using an algorithm to target advertising based on what the users were interested in. Eventually, Facebook stopped being good for business customers as well by increasing the price of targeted ads and, at the same time, not showing the ads to the users that the advertisers had selected. Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Is It Truly Evil? All the platforms discussed have engaged in downright evil behavior, but Amazon is among the most egregious in that their policies affect everyone, including people who have never used their platform. Let’s look at their story. Other platforms are variations on the Amazon theme. Amazon also started out as good for users. It had a lot of investors with a lot of money which it used to subsidize goods (sometimes selling them below cost) and shipping. It had a generous ‘no questions asked, postage paid’ return policy. Early on, Amazon couldn’t lock people into using it the way Facebook could. So it came up with the idea of Prime membership, which creates lock-in because customers are paying for shipping a year in advance. Quite the incentive to shop on Amazon. In addition when you buy audiobooks, movies, and most e-books and e-magazines from Amazon, you’re permanently locked into Amazon‘s platform because the projects are sold with digital rights management. There’s a form of encryption that will force you to view or to listen to those products using apps that Amazon controls. If you leave Amazon and delete those apps, you lose all the media you’ve bought from their platform—an incredibly high cost of switching. Amazon was good to its business customers until it wasn’t. Because Amazon tracks so many users and people stop there for almost anything, Amazon has been able to extract higher discounts from the merchants who sell there. This brings in more users, which, again, makes the platform even more indispensable for the merchants. They have to go there—allowing Amazon to keep requiring deeper discounts, and on and on. It finally comes to stage three, the pile of s**t stage: Amazon using tactics to shift value from the business customers to itself. It started tracking merchants’ best-selling items and cloning them and, at the same time, moving the original seller’s items far down on the search results. The original product doesn’t show when a person searches for it specifically. It shows the Amazon clone instead. Amazon also charges merchants a lot of junk fees that are pitched as optional, but in effect, they’re mandatory. Prime is an example. If a merchant doesn’t include prime shipping, then people won’t pick them. They are pushed so far down in the search results that they’re basically nonexistent. Yet another thing merchants must do: Use fulfillment by Amazon, a service where the merchant sends items to Amazon’s warehouse, where they’re packed and then delivered. It’s more expensive than comparable or even superior shipping services from other shipping companies, but if a merchant ships through a third-party company, then it gets dropped down in the search and ceases to exist. Amazon is gouging its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods (which compete directly with those merchants’ goods). All this turns into higher prices for customers. Merchants pay Amazon “through the nose.” Amazon junk fees add up to 45 to 51 percent of what it earns on the platform. So merchants raise prices on their products, not just for Amazon customers, but as a whole. For reasons that are unclear to me (seem like a loophole and a cheat at the same time), this is necessary for Amazon to stay clear of the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against them. So, we’re all paying the ‘Amazon tax’ no matter where we shop. Doctorow makes similar enshittification arguments for Apple, for its iPhone, and for Twitter. (However, many people were able to leave Twitter when Musk came along and turned into the Nazi platform it is.) Enshittification is well worth reading to see how Apple and Google are in cahoots. (Don’t believe Apple when they say they are not tracking you.) But, wait! There’s more! How Did We Get Here Doctorow shows why this Enshittocene spread so far and so fast by looking at the world that companies operate in. Any company would want to charge as much as possible for goods and services while they spend as little as possible, paying the lowest possible wages, giving customers the lowest quality products, and selling them with the highest prices. What stops them is if workers could quit over low pay; if their suppliers would stop shipping products when their invoices are unpaid; and if the customers would turn away because of the high prices. But our enshittifiers are effectively monopolies, so the markets and the competition to stop them don’t exist. Add to this that they’re not regulated by the government. Part Two will discuss how all this happened: how competition, regulation, interoperability of computers, and worker power all slipped away. Meanwhile, repeat reminder: I recommend you get your hands on the book. If you want to borrow it from the library, it probably has a hold list, so put your name in ASAP. A Few Links of Interest for Writers What is AI Voice? Authors and Money (or Lack Thereof) Authors Hoping to be Published This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com [https://victoriawaddle.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]