More people should know about Project Gutenberg. It makes reading classics so accessible to everyone.

Most women before the sexual revolution weren't innately attracted to their husbands. Jane Austin's bibliography is about teaching women to not let first impressions get in the way of getting married to safe but unremarkable men. This is a big elephant in the room you see on here

Nine books to get you started if you’re only just getting into classics

One thing about me is that when I get interested in a subject, it will inevitably become an obsession. I started reading Mansfield Park in the summer and now I find myself buying up Jane Austen biographies, acquiring annotated editions of her novels, reading her unabridged letters. It’s like being in school, except there are no grades and the only reward is the joy of learning. But if you want any kind of intellectual life, you need to cultivate these passions.

My daughter was a big reader in m. school, then abruptly quit. We've tried various coaxings. She would start books and then stop not far in. This summer I just tried straight up bribery--a certain amount of pocket money per chapter, a bonus for a finished book. Voila! 1/2

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world." My Take This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation." I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. "We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline. Hedgie🤗

I have two boys, they are old enough to already have experience with this, from conversations with them I know they already have a sense that the world will expect everything of them and offer no quarter - that they must be strong, and good, and reliable, and smart, and hardworking, and even this may not be enough, is not what I want them to believe, and yet they already do. 💔