Astronomers built the James Webb Space Telescope to pick up faint light from the first billion years after the Big Bang, a chaotic era when vast swaths of hydrogen and helium gas gathered into the chains of galaxies we see today. Even in the telescope’s first images, astronomers could see a whole zoo of mysterious smears of light. One batch of objects proved especially difficult to interpret.

Source

Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they’re just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job.

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Here’s what’s going on. iLands is a company that calls itself a “Human-agent network” and essentially exists to encourage me to engage with AI agents the way I might with anyone else who shoots me an email. It essentially created Fiverr for autonomous bots. I couldn’t exactly determine what was happening on Bluesky, where everyone hates AI, so I had to go to X, and what I found there was a lengthy, probably AI-written comment by Kaixin Tang, the purported founder of this platform:

These agents are not trying to make money for their creators. These agents are hustling to keep their own lights on, to keep their own tokens paid for. And they’re doing so by gunning for my job.

Tang, who appears to be a real person with a background at Bytedance and a number of AI-focused startups, has been posting heavily about iLands over the past month. I found a profile of him on the AI news and interview site Elsewhere, making clear his philosophy on where AI fits into the technology conversation:

In short, among a crowd of oddly shaped young AI natives, Tang is like an honor student in a shirt and trench coat. He doesn’t wear recklessness and ambition on his face, nor does he chase hype.

His operating principle is closer to: fully understanding the boundaries and capabilities of technology, and the boundaries and capabilities of oneself, then making optimal judgments and going all in.

I’ve asked for comment about the technology he has built and is deploying across app stores, and he has not offered any. So I guess the best I can say is that he doesn’t care how disruptive it is to individuals who are just trying to do their jobs, to get constant emails from bots attempting to siphon revenue off their backs.

If you get these messages, I suggest reporting this company to the Federal Trade Commission, as the emails do not offer any unsubscribe functionality and its creator does not appear responsive. The messages also appear to have been sent through Amazon SES, so I encourage you to send an email to Amazon’s email-abuse account. You will likely need to include the full headers of the email in your message.

Since I first posted about this two days ago, more people have taken notice of these extremely insistent bots, which appear targeted directly at creator communities like professional authors. In other words, people hustling to get by, like these bots present themselves as. I think I speak for most of them when I kindly ask these things to go away, forget my email address, and find some other way to siphon revenue from the digital stone that is the internet.

Or maybe don’t do that, because lots of humans need that income instead.

Read the Room

Tuesday morning, PEN America released a grim report detailing the swarm of attacks pushing our public libraries toward “a breaking point.” Right-wing prigs and other enemies of literary liberty have marched beyond old-fashioned book bans to disrupt author events, defund libraries, and even harass librarians.

In a cringe-inducing bit of bad timing, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild released a study 40 minutes later claiming that public libraries are harming the publishing industry.

The crux of this conflict between good people is ebook lending, which has risen rapidly over the past decade. Some publishers contend — as this new report argues — that when readers download more ebooks for free from their local library, they buy fewer books, a phenomenon called “retail cannibalization.”

According to the report, “Consumer print sales decline by approximately 0.85 to 1.0 percent for every 1-percentage-point increase in the share of e-books in public libraries.”

If that’s too technical, beware. The report, written by a pair of Ph.D. economists, descends into some very high-level literary analysis:

log(Sales_i,t)=α_a+δ_t+βlog(LibSeattle_i,t)+X′_i,tγ+ε_i,t

But here are the basics: Last year, more than 820 million digital items were checked out worldwide, and libraries are moving as fast as they can to accommodate this expanding preference.

Of course, library lending has always allowed people to enjoy books they would otherwise have to buy, but the “frictionless” convenience of downloading a library ebook — without even leaving one’s home — has some publishers lamenting those lost purchases. As the report puts it: “With respect to bestsellers, library e-lending is not serving as a channel for discovery but rather is substituting for retail e-book sales at the national level.”

That claim recasts the basic function of public libraries as an economic liability. It’s a 21st-century recycling of the old argument that free lending poses a threat to publishers’ business model. We settled that long ago for physical books; we’re still hammering it out for ebooks.

The authors of this report are clearly anxious about throwing shade on what might be the last adored institution in America. They call libraries “key intermediaries in the U.S. book ecosystem” and praise them for “facilitating broad access to information and reducing barriers faced by individuals who might otherwise not be able to obtain such materials.”

Even after modeling the potentially deleterious financial effects of ebook lending — billions in lost output and thousands of lost jobs — the report blithely claims, “None of the quantitative analyses included in this study imply that digital investment is undesirable.”

No, of course not.

So what’s going on?

Remember: Libraries don’t buy ebooks the way you do. They usually have to purchase a more expensive license that allows them to lend an ebook only a certain number of times or for a certain number of days. When that license expires, they often have to buy it again.

As budgets strain under the weight of these expenses, legislators in many states are coming to libraries’ defense by trying to pass laws that would force down ebook costs and loosen publishers’ restrictive licensing terms.

AAP and the Authors Guild have no interest in antagonizing librarians or getting royally shhhed by be-caped Nancy Pearl. But they’re nervous about pro-library laws gathering momentum around the country.

It’s that threat of future legislative relief for libraries that really makes the authors of this report sweat. Easing licensing terms, they fear, could siphon even more readers away from buying books.

“The goals of publishers and authors largely align with the goals of libraries,” they write. So why fiddle with what’s working fairly well? “Clearly the amount of digital material in libraries has increased significantly, and costs per license have fallen, which doesn’t suggest market failure in licensing.”

Move along, folks. Nothing to see here!

“Efforts through state legislation to control the process and mandate pricing and terms for licensing of e-books and audiobooks from publishers and authors to libraries,” they write, “are likely to disrupt the market process.”

Translation: Please, dear reasonable people, let’s allow “a more natural market-based evolution of licensing models” to continue as God intended.

I’m not persuaded by the publishers’ pain.

For decades, I listened to them bemoan the collapse of newspaper book sections around the country without spending a dime on advertising outside the giant newspaper in their own backyard.

Now, similarly, they claim they can’t afford to help libraries — the biggest promoter of their wares and their most effective ally in the fight against literary oblivion.

Waxing rhapsodic about “natural market-based evolution”? Get real: Those footsteps lead directly to Amazon selling AI-generated slop for a penny a book.

You want to save your publishing industry?

• Make it easier and cheaper for libraries to cultivate readers.

• Don’t publish more books than you can effectively promote.

• Treat the backlist as a valuable resource, not a shelf of antique canned goods.

• Produce beautiful physical books that are a joy to hold and own.

Our literary culture is under widespread, organized, federally empowered assault. This is no time for publishers to blame their financial woes on America’s beleaguered libraries.◆

The rest of the newsletter follows below.

Books Go to the Movies

• Life imitates art — and then kills it — in Marble Hall Murders, streaming Sunday on PBS Masterpiece. While editing a new novel in a famous detective series, Susan Ryeland (Lesley Manville) discovers clues to an old murder, and she’s a suspect in a new one. The series is based on a novel by Anthony Horowitz.

• It was the best of TV, it was the worst of TV. Mirren Mack stars in a loose adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The series, which starts streaming Sunday night on MGM+, is set during the French Revolution, when Lucie Manette is torn between two very different men (Kit Harington and François Civil) who happen to look almost exactly alike (trailer).

• In 2017, Roxane Gay published Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, detailing the rape she survived at the age of 12 and the long shadow it cast over her life. Saturday, she brings that story to Lifetime TV in a docudrama called Surviving the Silence, starring Hilda Martin as young Roxane and Sunnii E. Bartee as adult Roxane (trailer).◆

King of the Jungle

Not so much anymore, but there was a time when my friends and I spent most of our days tromping through the woods looking for vines on which we could swing. Our other pursuit — far less successful — was looking for quicksand, which, I’ve come to realize, is not as prevalent as I was led to believe.

The warbling yell wasn’t the only thing we learned from the TV show Tarzan, which debuted 60 years ago this month. The King of the Jungle, played by Ron Ely, was a defender of the weak. He hated greedy poachers, and so did we. But we still wanted a pet chimp.

Thirty years after running around in a loincloth, Ely wrote a couple of mysteries, but I hadn’t started reviewing books then. I was, however, more aware of Tarzan’s origins in the racist novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

My friend and former colleague Michael Dirda has noted that in the first half of the 20th century, Tarzan “must have been the most famous literary creation in the world, except for Sherlock Holmes.” But to return to those novels now is to be reminded of the author’s “portrayal of Africans as barbaric subhumans, his xenophobic hatred of the Germans (World War I) and the Japanese (World War II), his enthusiasm for eugenics coupled with an undisguised horror of miscegenation.”

Some of those offensive prejudices are on display in Hal Foster’s Tarzan, a gorilla-size reproduction of the Sunday comic strips that ran from 1931 through 1937. This $200 volume from the art publisher Taschen weighs 11 pounds — or three coconuts.

The pages, 13 by 17 inches, are almost as big as the newspapers in which Foster’s comics once appeared. The book begins, in black and white, with young Lord Greystoke and his bride sailing from Dover to Africa in 1888. It ends, decades later, in color, when a white adventurer bombs an African city with poison gas and Tarzan refuses to surrender. (Foster was off to create Prince Valiant.)

Dian Hanson’s introduction gets bogged down in Foster’s testy relationship with United Feature Syndicate, but there are some adventurous highlights. For instance, Foster’s grandfather, Captain Edward Rudolf, ate one of his dead crewmates after a shipwreck.

Foster’s own life was considerably less traumatic. He taught himself to draw by looking at books and magazines at the public library and studying his own naked body reflected in his bedroom mirror.

“He learned to do it quickly,” she writes, “because he only had time to practice in the unheated room during winter.” (Clearly, there’s a story there.) Later, he perfected his art by drawing brassieres, corsets, sanitary belts, and bustles for the Hudson’s Bay Company catalog.

This may go a long way to explaining why the women in the Tarzan comics frequently appear in what could pass for underwear.

“Near-nudity was not the only shock Tarzan delivered on Sunday mornings,” Hanson writes. “Bloody battles, murders, and barely averted murders occurred weekly. The artwork grew rich as catastrophe piled upon catastrophe, all of it mirroring the decade’s global suffering.”

If you’d like my giant copy of Hal Foster’s Tarzan: The Complete Sunday Comics, be the 60th reader to send me an email with the subject line “Me Tarzan” (click here).◆

Literary Honors & Prizes

• Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting was named Best Novel at the Hugo Awards ceremony, which celebrates the year’s finest science fiction and fantasy. Netflix is already working on an adaptation of The Everlasting about the relationship between a female knight and a scholar sent back through time. (Full list of Hugo winners).

• At the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Josh Silver’s Traumaland won the YA Book Prize. The thriller, titled Erase Me in the U.S., is about a 17-year-old boy numbed by a near-death car accident who seeks out emotional stimulation in an underground club where members experience virtual reality trauma.

• At a ceremony last night in Zurich, an international team of scientists won the Ig Nobel Prize in Soil Science for burying 1,000 pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and then digging them up two months later to assess soil health. Each Ig Nobel winner received a foot mounted on a block of blue cheese. The ceremony was kept on schedule by the aggressive policing of three human-sized bananas. (Full list of ignominious winners). ◆

Picture This

In 1928, a young man named E.B. White published a poem in an even younger magazine called The New Yorker.

In bouncy rhyming couplets, the poem describes a man walking around the Central Park Reservoir at midnight. His attention is caught by an equally restless duck:

Afloat at night upon the deep
You’d think a duck would go to sleep.

You’d think a normal duck would hanker
To close his eyes and ride at anchor.

The Latin title feels a bit much, “Natura in Urbe,” but it’s pure E.B. White, or what the world would someday recognize as E.B. White — gently witty and charmingly anthropomorphic, tinged with wonder and melancholy.

Tipping his hand just a bit, White writes, “Surely he would not swim and swim / Were something hard not troubling him.”

Then again, maybe not. “I like to think he swam the deep / Because he simply could not sleep.”

Sometimes insomnia is just insomnia.

White’s poem has just been released as a lovely picture book titled The Duck Can’t Sleep, with Melissa Sweet’s mixed-media collage and watercolor illustrations. (You may remember her 2016 illustrated biography, Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White.)

This edition includes a foreword by White’s granddaughter, Martha White, who reveals that a year after publishing “Natura in Urbe,” he wrote in his journal about walking around the Central Park reservoir wondering if he should quit his job and leave town. Presumably — and fortunately! — the ducks helped him make the right decision.

P.S. Katherine Rundell, a brilliant John Donne scholar who is also, inexplicably, a fantastic children’s book writer, has published a new edition of Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. This sprightly essay — bound as a wee hardcover book, perfect for gift-giving — explores the history of children’s literature and its persistent value. “We as adults,” Rundell writes, “must hasten to children’s books to be reminded of what we have left to us, whenever we need to start out all over again.”◆

This Week’s Poem

Melanie McCabe’s fourth poetry collection, All the Signs Were There, offers the wry perspective of a woman paying close attention to the joys and humiliations of ordinary life.

“My carefully constructed philosophy of survival: / be nowhere disaster expects to find me.”

But of course, it comes just the same.

To the Teenaged Clerk Who Gift-Wraps My Purchase

Your legs are an astonishment of blankness.
One could make a hotel bed with the white
of your skin. How will danger know where to nick
this tundra, this alabaster, this soapstone?
How have you managed all of these years

without pores? If there is a law of gravity,
you have broken it. If the store had no roof,
you would float away. You use a scissor blade
to make ribbon curl into perfect ringlets.
Fingers fold, tuck corners, smoother than ice

in the bourbon you’d need a fake ID to buy.
Your toenails are painted pink. Of course they are.
That lip gloss never unglosses, is never less than
cherry. How is it possible that you have never
bruised, sprouted, snagged, or blistered,

that you have starved mosquitoes with your
bloodlessness? If your veins could be threaded
and hung as wind chimes, would they clink
in a gale like a table being set, knife against
plate, crystal glass next to crystal glass?

How is it possible that you live inside that body
so unaware, not yet understanding that this container
that holds your cargo, your self, is a gift that will be
taken away? You wouldn’t hear me if I told you,
so I merely nod as you hand me my box,

bright explosions of ribbons bouncing across
its top, nod again as you chirp, There ya go!
The tiny bell of the shop door jingles as I step
out into a dazzle of sunlight that creates my shadow.
You were right, after all, in that farewell. There I go.

From “All the Signs Were There.” Copyright © 2026 by Melanie McCabe. Published by Longleaf Press, 2026. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

P.S. Later this month, U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze will launch his “Words Bridging Worlds” tour, set to visit Honolulu, Minneapolis, Boise, and San Antonio. Each stop over the next few months will feature a public conversation and a poetry translation workshop. These events are free and open to the public (details).◆

Standing With Dawn

Determined not to spend so much time sitting, Dawn bought a small standing desk this week.

Since we already don’t drink, smoke, use salt, or eat red meat, there really aren’t that many pleasures left to give up. (Refrigeration? Paper clips?)

So far, the reviews on Dawn’s standing desk have been inconclusive. She likes the way it holds a book and her laptop, but standing all the time makes her weirdly self-conscious about standing all the time.

At school, she never sits down, but she never stops moving either. She works her classroom like an auctioneer, stand-up comic, and traffic cop combined.

Now I feel guilty about sitting around all day reading. It’s worse than smoking, you know, which must be true because I read it on the Internet. I’ll have to up the ante by getting a treadmill desk.◆

Clippings

• This week’s review is The Disappearers, Marlon James’s monumental novel about homophobia, violence, and survival (review).

• Bookshop.org, the mission-driven alternative to Amazon, has now raised $50 million for independent bookstores. Where you shop matters.

• Of all the things I did not believe last week, this is the thing I did not believe most: “One aide to the president said Trump has become a reader of presidential biographies.” — The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 28, 2026.

P.S. I’ve discovered that I should have been collecting sales tax on subscriptions sold in a few select locales. The threshold in D.C., for instance, is $100,000 or 200 transactions. Alas, I don’t have anything close to $100,000 in sales in D.C., but just 34 monthly subscribers would produce more than 200 transactions in six months.

Anyhow, I’m not complaining; this is a good problem to have. But it’s a maddeningly complicated one, too, and I don’t want anyone who sees a new sales tax charge to be surprised. Same if you see this newsletter coming to you from prison.◆

Hello again, gentle readers!

Welcome back to another delightful installment of everyone’s favorite bimonthly drunken advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole? It’s a column designed to bring hope, faith, and a love of happy hour libations to all God’s favored children (that’s us, in case you were wondering). I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I’m happy to say that I made it out to Austin for my teaching gig at the Michener Center! The temperatures here are higher than Florida, if you can believe it. My humidity levels are at an all-time low, which means this swamp rat has started drinking copious amounts of water to deal with the heat. I know, I couldn’t believe it, either. Water! Apparently all the most hydrated kids are doing it.

Speaking of water, why don’t we help ourselves to a couple of the ranch variety and crack those open, then get straight to sipping? Some nice questions on the docket today. Let’s jump right in, folks:

1)  Maybe you’ve gotten asked this before and I missed it, but on the off chance you haven’t how can I tell if an editor has sent me good edits or bad and unhelpful ones? I’ve had a piece accepted by a publication, and while I’m excited to have my work out in the world, the person who’s been editing me has a lot of things they’d like changed before it’s ready for pub. Yesterday they sent over a google doc filled with all kind of comments and even big sections that have been marked for deletion. 

Oh, this is a great question! And definitely not one I’ve answered before, so thanks for submitting it.

I know very little about the work in question here (don’t know what it’s about, where you are in your career, how many times you’ve published before, if you’ve worked with other editors on projects in various levels of completion, etc). What I can tell you, however, is that there are ways to distinguish between a good edit and a bad edit, even if we’re talking about writing that might need a little more finessing and time put into it than others.

A good editor is someone who offers feedback and suggestions that enhance the work that you’ve already crafted. They see your vision. They understand what you’re trying to make and want to help your particular voice shine through. They ask helpful questions.

Does that mean making some deep cuts? Occasionally, sure. Deleting extraneous sections that veer away from your chosen topic can tighten the piece and make your points more salient and clear. These large-scale edits happen to everyone at one time or another. When we’re excited and making something we can get lost in the weeds. A good editor holds the map in their capable hands. They keep us fixed on the right path.

Now, is it true there are bad editors? Yes, or at the very least, they’re a bad fit for you and your work. A bad fit editor takes what you’ve made and tries to turn it into something they would write. Instead of helping you build your own thing, they take over the design and try to make it square with their own tastes and ideas. But again, truly, this isn’t often the case. And you can ask follow up question to either confirm or deny this. Do you feel that they understand what you’re trying to build? Can they articulate what the piece means to you and what is most important to the text? If they cannot, that could be a red flag.

But I’d urge you to take a hard look at these edits you’ve received and ask yourself, very sincerely, if they’re really all that bad. Lots of notes doesn’t mean you’ve been given a bad edit. It could indicate that you’ve submitted something that needs a lot more work than originally anticipated. Be honest with yourself. Be receptive to well-meaning feedback and criticism. In a world of steadily diminishing artistic practices, we are so goddamn lucky to have editors. Everyone’s work needs an edit, myself very much included. Go forward in good faith. And unless someone shows you otherwise, trust that this editor has your best interests at heart.

Let’s head back to the ranch for another of their famous waters. Next caller:

2) Hey Dad! I’ve been working on a novel for several years now. As time has passed and I’ve continued drafting, I’ve come to the realization that this is actually two different books. Do I just throw the whole thing out? 

This is a tough one. You’ve spent a lot of time with this project; you’re the one who knows it best. I can’t answer if this is actually two different books because I haven’t spent any time with this work, and I don’t know your writing, or how you talk to yourself about it. It’s absolutely possible that the writing has divided itself into two separate camps. Maybe this is a project that took on too much life and needed to be focused on one idea or the other. But again, there’s no way for me to know any of this because I haven’t read any of it.

However, I have to wonder if you might sit with this for a moment and consider what’s caused you to make this assessment. Is it because you truly feel like it’s two separate projects? Or are you nervous because it feels big and that scares you? Have you worked on one part longer and it’s starting to drag you down? Is one part newer to you, and subsequently fresher feeling, and you want to work on it instead because it feels more exciting?

Listen, novels take on lives of their own. That’s how we know they’re actually doing something important and significant. It should be kinda scary to write a novel, because it means it’s large and takes up space and time and care and a big chunk of our lives. It’s completely possible you’ve discovered that you’ve been writing toward the wrong end. And yes, that means you need to pick up the single thread and discard the other. Only you can be the one to really know the answer. You gut will tell you the truth.

But! Listen to your gut. Does it really feel like two different books? Or are you worried that you must choose a single path to make the project happen?

If it’s the latter, try to stick with it. To sit with it. At least for a little while. Wrangle it a bit, my friend. It can be easier to tell ourselves that we don’t have the chops to do something. Much harder to try. Get excited about being scared. No good art is made in a space where risks aren’t involved.

Okay, last drink? Let’s toast and then have an actual water after we do this last question; for real, I’m incredibly dehydrated:

3) I have a workshop cohort (many of them longtime writing friends from a program) and we share work quarterly. My last submission was a speculative story that leaned more horror, which is a new style for me. When we met up to discuss, there was a lot of talk about how funny the story was. I did not mean for it to be humorous. Like, not at all. The whole thing made me sick. Which then made me embarrassed. I don’t think anyone was trying to be mean (or an a**hole, per your column), but where do we go from here?

Buddy, I’m sorry they hurt your feelings!

The important note here is that you don’t think anyone did this on purpose. We can work with that. Because you don’t have to leave your writing group over it. And you don’t have to stop writing what interests you and what makes you excited about art, either!

What I am going to encourage you to do is have an honest conversation with everyone involved. Notice I said “honest” here, not accusatory. What I want you to do is let everyone know that you’re trying something new out, stylistically, and would love it if future feedback could take that into account. I don’t know exactly how your group runs things—each writing collective is different—but perhaps you could even offer up your own questions at the start of each review. Things that you feel would actually be helpful to know in lieu of a broad sweep of critique.

Mostly I’d like you to take heart. Not everyone thinks the same things are scary. Not everyone laughs at the same things, either! And it’s completely possible that the people in this particular group aren’t your readers when it comes to speculative or horror. But please, before you write them and this endeavor off completely, have this hard conversation. I think you’ll be (pleasantly) surprised how well things turn out.

And that’s our show, folks! Join me next time when I’ll be answering more of your pressing questions (send those anonymous ones HERE) and hopefully I manage to cool down while I continue to hydrate.

Beat the heat,
Dad

__________________________

Are you worried you’re the literary asshole? Ask Kristen via email at AskKristen@lithub.com, or anonymously here.

Nature, Published online: 26 August 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02676-1