I have been meaning to read James Ellroy’s American Tabloid for a few years now, so I picked it up at the airport bookshop this morning.

I’m about 200 pages into it, and it does not disappoint.

I met Ellroy many years ago, back when I was a manager at the Borders in Beachwood, OH. He did a signing at the store; I think he was on tour for My Dark Places.

🔗 [Are We in an AI Bubble? - The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/09/ai-bubble-us- economy/684128/):

Even if AI tools don’t increase productivity, the hype surrounding them could push businesses to keep expanding their use anyway. “I hear the same story over and over again from companies,” Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, told me. “Mid-to-high-level managers are being told by their bosses that they need to use AI for X percent of their job to satisfy the board.” These companies might even lay off workers or slow their hiring because they are convinced—like the software developers from the METR study—that AI has made them more productive, even when it hasn’t. The result would be an increase in unemployment that isn’t offset by actual gains in productivity.

🔗 The world is something that we make | Terminal:

A number of people have fairly gleefully (?) told me that not shopping at Amazon doesn’t change anything because AWS powers 35% of the Internet, like I don’t already fucking know what a dismal situation that is. A few have told me things like “they’re all doing bad stuff”, and the worst of all of this shit is “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism”. Like, so what? Even if that is true, so what? You get to write yourself permission to default to the lowest common denominator shit possible and that that’s not behaviour that shapes collective incentive? It’s the same school of thought of ‘well, if I don’t do Bad Thing X, someone else just will anyway’. The correct response to that is ’let it be them’. It’s a manoeuvre and it’s a transparent line of shit and even I knew that for all the years I was ignoring it myself.

🔗 [The Olive Bar And The End Of Little Things](https://thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-olive-bar-and-the-end-of- little):

It feels like those sorts of experiences—where you’re slightly free to do your own funny thing—are diminished. Everything in that genre of service/activity feels shut down and squeezed out. Maybe it’s harder for me to discern these kinds of tiny delights as I get older; maybe an adult is harder to please.

It always occurs to me that there must be things right now that I don’t even think about, which one day will be gone and which I’ll miss. You always wish you could have appreciated a thing when you had it, but that is one the most difficult things to do. We’re wired to always feel like every little pleasure is being taken from us, and not to feel gratitude for what we have in abundance right now.

🔗 It’s Giving Enron - by Dave Karpf:

What we can say for certain right now is that these massive deals are based on increasingly complex financial shell games. OpenAI — a company that constantly needs fresh injections of investor cash, because its costs are bigger than its revenues — keeps announcing deals to spend billions of dollars to acquire stakes in chip manufacturing companies. Unless they invent digital god and completely transform the entire global economy, like, really pretty soon, they’re inevitably going to run into some hard accounting realities.