John West

@johnwest.bsky.social

1907 Followers 338 Following

I report the news with code at the Wall Street Journal. In 2023, I wrote a book, LESSONS AND CAROLS. New book, THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU, out this year. Next book, a novella called THE PSALMIST, out in 2027. http://beebe-west.com/john

A review of The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: > Pulitzer-winning journalist West (Lessons and Carols) charts the internet’s “shift from human agency to platform agency” and lays out a path for users to reclaim the former in this philosophical guide to the digital age. He argues that the internet only appears infinite and frictionless. Instead, it is as finite and mortal as the humans who code and use it, as evidenced by cloud outages and broken links. Humans lost sight of this reality, he explains, as they increasingly “entrusted the management of our digital metropolis to others,” namely Big Tech platforms like Google and Meta, and thus ceded their choice over how to engage with the internet. West calls on the reader to take back their agency over what they choose to remember and what they choose to forget—a practice he refers to as a sabbath—by, for example, screenshotting a social media post that makes them laugh out loud or searching for poems to commit to memory. But even he acknowledges that people cannot “sabbath our way out of the web that ensnares us.” His wide-ranging meditations, which touch on everything from Bach to TikTok, will appeal to readers who want to search for meaning rather than scroll for distraction. (Sept.)
“Old Woman Cutting Her Nails” in the style of Rembrandt.
A screenshot of EPITAB, which shows the poem "Skunk Hour" by Robert Lowell.
A screenshot of my blog, THIS REPUBLIC OF LETTERS, displaying the first post: "We should check our emails; they shouldn't check us."
Birds in motion at a feeder.
A triptych of: (1) Mufasa scattering the hyenas—"what's a mob to a king?"; (2) Simba looking up at Mufasa in the sky—"what's a king to a god?"; (3) Timon and Pumbaa—"what's a god to a non-believer, who don't believe in anything?".
A screenshot of two posts, one says "How it works?" The other says "AI ruins posts."
The poem, "Blackberry-Picking," by Seamus Heaney.
A screenshot of an article from Fast Company about Seamus Heaney.
A bird sitting on a feeder, looking directly at the camera.
A screenshot of EPITAB, showing "Bridge Poem," by John Ashbery: > And now I cannot remember how I would have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place. The place, of movement and an order. The place of old order. But the tail end of the movement is new. Driving us to say what we are thinking. It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand and think of going no further. And it is good when you get to no further. It is like a reason that picks you up and places you where you always wanted to be. This far, it is fair to be crossing, to have crossed. Then there is no promise in the other. Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence, small panacea and lucky for us. And then it got very cool.
An announcement in Publishers Marketplace that John West sold a book, THE PSALMIST.
When I attended conservatory, studying baroque performance practice, I would fumble my way through the music library's stacks almost every day, hoping to stumble across a book that could teach me something living about all those dead composers whose music I was learning. Sometimes, it would be a piece of music I'd discover. Other times, a treatise that referenced the recorder. Every once in a while, a connection between the deep reservoirs of meaning in the wider historical world and the music that was soaked in it. I worked out of the second floor of the conservatory library, the airy windows casting cheer on the study carrels, etched, as often as not, with little messages from studiers long ago. When my mind revolted against the demand that I keep reading, I'd stretch my legs and loosen my brain by walking through the rows upon rows of books and scores, looking for serendipity—ser-endipity being so often the parent of insight. Who knew that Bach wrote a vanishingly small number of tremendous sonatas for recorder and harpsichord? I didn't—at least not till I went looking for Buxtehude's sonatas and ended up with Bach's instead. My serendipitous discovery, alas, was made possible only by a reverent institutionalism not bestowed on everyone. "Innovations that cultivate serendipity—such as the Dewey Decimal System, by whose graces a trip into the stacks for one book often leads to a different, more salient discovery—must, almost by definition, be plagued by arbitrariness," Bill Wasik writes in an essay for the New York Times Magazine. But arbitrariness, and thus serendipity, does not drape itself across the topography of human experience evenly. That is, arbitrariness, in this power-mad world, isn't actually arbitrary. Indeed, where it mountains up—like most things—has much to do with the human institutions that shape our lives.
wealth, 70 weapons of mass destruction, 128-29 weather reports, 43-44, 48-49 websites changing definitions of, 32 as ephemera, 13 function of, 109 of Japanese animation, 12-14 lifespan of, 23 neglect of, 13-15 sturdiness of, 87 weights, 157 Weil, Simone, 69, 78 Whitman, Walt, 103
A screenshot of an index reading: globalization, 149 Glück, Louise, 115 God, 89 G/O Media, 31, 45
The cover of a book (my book): THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU.
A website showing the UI for the Fluster tool.
Over on Bluesky, Marcus Merritt, an artist and poet (who I don’t know), proposed a fake Borges story—one he might have written had he seen the Lovecraftian face of the AI-supercharged attention economy rise out of Silicon Valley. It goes like this: A man asks AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything Like so many of the Argentine writer’s actual stories, I couldn’t get this one out of my head. A parable about compression, it plays on Borges’s map—his story about the useless horror of a map with perfect fidelity to reality. It touches on the Borges’s Library or Babel—his story about every book that could ever exist, which drives its librarians mad. It’s also just funny. And like the best Borges conceits, it has the ring of prophecy. The man at the desk is all of us now: scrolling, summarizing, consuming endless “content” whose abundance is only a disguise for its emptiness. AI slop, despite its volume, turns out to be rather thin gruel. I had a question—a bad question given that Merritt was making a pretty good joke. Why not actually make it? Enter HOMER, my piece of digital performance art masquerading as a social media platform, a microblogging platform where every hour, every post is run through AI summarization, until it can’t really be summarized much more, until all we have left to do is repeat a single word again and again, certain we finally understand. If you want access, reach out to me on Bluesky, I'm @johnwest.bsky.social.
A screenshot of the social media app Homer, which shows a recursively summarized text which used to read "A man asks AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything" and now reads "A man asks AI to condense knowledge into one word; repeating it, he thinks he's experiencing everything"
I don’t only read litfic; sometimes, I read for work. My second book, The Internet Will Die, and So WIll You—coming out in the fall of next year—required a vast amount of reading to write. Vauhini Vara’s Searches (from PRH) wasn’t just the best reported book about the internet and its discontents; it was also a deeply literary work, which scratched the same itch I hope my book will: work that mounts an argument with artistic beauty in mind. Peter Trachtenberg’s The Twilight of Bohemia (form a favorite indie, Black Sparrow), similarly cannot be read only as a book of cultural history—tracing the rise and decline of Westbeth, subsidized artists’ housing in NYC’s West Village; it must also be read as a work of literature. Emily Henry’s romance novel Great Big Beautiful Life (another PRH book) reminded me that the friction of pushing a novel against constraints, including those of a genre, can spark a fire. Henry’s assured prose, deft characterizations, and sprawling cast and concerns come together to produce a book at once rooted in the tropes of contemporary romance but also transcendent of those very same tropes. A neat trick. My partner and I are expecting a baby in January, and Aysegül Savas’s The Wilderness, a through-written essay from the indie press Transit, which detailed the wild strangeness, beauty, and terror of postpartum life felt like maybe the wrong book to read in advance of a birth. Still, a real feat.
Litfic was finally overtaken by romance. Each genre now accounts for about a third of my reading list, though romance novels are a little more and literary novels are little less, an inversion from the years before. I have complicated feelings about this. No, there isn’t anything wrong with romance novels. (Some of them, admittedly, are slapdash affairs, but many of them I’d shelve next to any other bildungsroman—minus the pink-tinged, illustrated cover and happily ever after.) That said, my first love was literary fiction, and I’m sad to see it lose its place atop my list. I’m sad, but frustrated, since many of the literary books I read didn’t exactly knock my socks off.
40: The number of books I read published by Penguin Random House. 2025 was the year that Penguin Random House, the borg cube of publishing, finally devoured my reading list. Between 2020 and 2024, PRH published about 25 percent of the books I read. This year, it reached 40 percent. The consolidation didn’t come at the cost of indie publishers, which continued to account for about 37 percent of my reading list. The shares from Macmillan and HarperCollins, on the other hand, were each cut in half.
The top books I read this year: - JAMES by Percival Everett - ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey - GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry - ORDINARY DEVOTION by Kristen Holt-Browning - TWO-STEP DEVIL by Jamie Quatro - THE WILDERNESS by Aysegül Savas - THE TWILIGHT OF BOHEMIA by Peter Trachtenberg - SEARCHES by Vauhini Vara
A (not very good) video of me playing The Christmas Song on the piano
A plot showing the books I read over the last six years.
A quote from Bouie's column: > For some observers, the 2024 election seemed to show a shift of young people and Latinos to the Republican Party. This was said to herald a “vibe shift” in American politics and perhaps a durable turn to the political right. But the truth of the matter is that voters, and especially those who are new and infrequent participants in the political process, are as driven by events and circumstances as anything else. And the key factor last year was voters’ reaction to the inflation that plagued Biden’s term in office.
Over on Bluesky, Marcus Merritt, an artist and poet (who I don’t know), proposed a fake Borges story—one he might have written had he seen the Lovecraftian face of the AI-supercharged attention economy rise out of Silicon Valley. It goes like this: A man asks AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything Like so many of the Argentine writers’ actual stories, I couldn’t get this one out of my head. A parable about compression, it plays on Borges’s map—his story about the useless horror of a map with perfect fidelity to reality. It touches on the Borges’s Library or Babel—his story about every book that could ever exist, which drives its librarians mad. It’s also just funny. And like the best Borges conceits, it has the ring of prophecy. The man at the desk is all of us now: scrolling, summarizing, consuming endless “content” whose abundance is only a disguise for its emptiness. AI slop, despite its volume, turns out to be rather thin gruel. I had a question—a bad question given that Merritt was making a pretty good joke. Why not actually make it? Enter HOMER, my piece of digital performance art masquerading as a social media platform, a microblogging platform where every hour, every post is run through AI summarization, until it can’t really be summarized much more, until all we have left to do is repeat a single word again and again, certain we finally understand. If you want access, reach out to me on Bluesky, I'm @johnwest.bsky.social.
A screenshot of HOMER, the social media app.
Text of the article, reading: > The Journal’s reporting—based on a review of more than one million FAA and National Aeronautics and Space Administration reports, thousands of pages of documents and research papers and more than 100 interviews—shows that aircraft manufacturers and their airline customers have played down health risks, successfully lobbied against safety measures, and made cost-saving changes that increased the risks to crew and passengers. > The fumes—sometimes described as smelling of “wet dog,” “Cheetos” or “nail polish”—have led to emergency landings, sickened passengers and affected pilots’ vision and reaction times midflight, according to official reports. > Most odors in aircraft aren’t toxic, and neither are all vapors. The effects are often fleeting, mild or present no symptoms. > But they can also be longer-lasting and severe, according to doctors, medical records and affected crew members.
An excerpt from the article: Scientists are removing words like “diverse” and “disparities” from hundreds of federal grant renewals to avoid getting flagged in the Trump administration’s focus on eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. At least 600 research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health have been modified in the fiscal year starting in October to remove terms associated with diversity, equity and inclusion, the Journal analysis found. Nearly all of those projects were multiyear grants that had already been approved but were up for routine annual reviews. The modified grants were worth $480 million this cycle. The most frequently deleted term was “diverse,” removed in 300 instances, followed by “underrepresented.” In some cases, scientists are yanking words that aren’t DEI-related at all, but could be flagged as such, including references to “discrimination” of antibodies in transplant patients. Other changes researchers are making are more substantive, shifting the scope of projects. Scientists caution that research on medical issues affecting minority communities is being de-emphasized. Some grants up for routine yearly renewals sat in limbo until scientists submitted the revisions. Funding delays at times led to layoffs and disrupted ongoing research.
Me, playing a Beethoven Sonatina on a piano.
A quote from the essay: > A genre that used to annoy me but that I now find somewhat charming is the why-I-left-New-York essay. As with most annoying essays, this is all Joan Didion’s fault.1 And as usual, Didion nailed it: Yes, New York is tiring — because people get tired. People get old. The habits we don’t change as we change start to burden us, not support us. One day, it’s unbearable to look around and find your youth — the bars you went to, the lights that dazzled you, the food you relished — not only harder to recognize, but worse: unwilling to delight you, console you, or even welcome you. Unwilling to want you. Going on unchangedly in a city that’s changed, trying to live as you once did with a body that’s changed, is to set yourself up for rejection. That city, that past, that youth — none of it can be recaptured, at least not in life, not in the things you do from day to day. Either you contend with that, consciously, or you leave. Most people leave. > Nostalgia isn’t homesickness, in this understanding — not quite. With its overtone of loss, of irrevocability, and of yearning for the impossible, it’s something closer to time sickness: one can feel, one can see, that youth is gone.
A venn diagram: - Fisher - Phisher - Fissure - Fisher / Phisher: They want to catch you. - Fisher / Fissure: They want to go deep. - Phisher / Fissure: The allow backdoor access. - Fisher / Phisher / Fissure: The go before "of men".
A former sheriff pushed Kerr County commissioners nearly a decade ago to adopt a more robust flood-warning system, telling government officials how he “spent hours in those helicopters pulling kids out of trees here (in) our summer camps,” according to meeting records. Then-Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer was a proponent of outdoor sirens, having responded as a deputy to the 1987 floods that killed 10 teenagers at a camp in nearby Kendall County. He made the comments in 2016, after deadly floods ravaged a different part of Texas the year before. “We were trying to think of, what can we do to make sure that never happens here?” Hierholzer, who served as Kerr County sheriff from 2000 to 2020, recalled in an interview Sunday with The Wall Street Journal. “And that’s why we were looking at everything that we could come up with, whether it be sirens, whether it be any other systems that we could.” That suggestion, from him and others, was never adopted.
Since January, more than three dozen employees and associates of Musk and fellow tech titans Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Palmer Luckey have been tapped for roles at federal agencies critical to their businesses, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. The roles put them in departments that oversee, regulate and award business to the four men’s companies, according to personnel appointments, lawsuits, ethics disclosures and contract data, creating a web of potential conflicts that ethics experts call unprecedented. The group includes current and former employees as well as lawyers, investors and financial advisers of the tech executives. They make up most of the identified people working for the Department of Government Efficiency, the powerful cost-cutting task force created to streamline federal bureaucracy, the Journal found. Others have been appointed to key roles across the government. Companies founded, owned or invested in by Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and Luckey have won more than a dozen federal contracts totaling about $6 billion since President Trump’s inauguration, and are pursuing billions more, the Journal found. Their business interests are often intertwined: Musk’s SpaceX was backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen’s a16z; both venture funds also backed Anduril Industries, a defense-tech startup co-founded by Luckey. Some of the new contracts were in the works before Trump’s election, and American corporations have long placed friendly faces in the senior ranks of government. But people affiliated with Musk’s firms have moved into the federal government at a greater scale than any other group in the history of recent administrations, said Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush administration. “Musk has more power than the heads of most government agencies, and we don’t know everything he does,” Painter said.
A four-by-four grid of images that changes every half-second, becoming ever more clearly a mountain and sky.
Text from the lede of the Wall Street Journal article: VATICAN CITY—Cardinal Robert Prevost, seated beneath Michelangelo’s monumental fresco of the Last Judgement, buried his head in his hands as the sound of his name echoed off the walls of the Sistine Chapel. It was Thursday morning, and the prelates running the conclave were reading out the ballots. The papal election was shifting the way of the Chicago-born cardinal. His tally was rising with each round of voting, while support for the early front-runner—Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin—was stagnating. A realization weighed visibly on Prevost, said three cardinals who watched his reaction: He was on track to become the 267th pope of the global Catholic Church, with its 1.4 billion faithful. By late afternoon it was all over. Votes for Prevost reached the winning threshold of 89, or two-thirds of the 133 voting cardinals present in the chapel. Applause rang out from banks of red-clad cardinals. Prevost, sitting with his eyes closed, stood up and mustered a smile as the historic moment sank in.
A screenshot from an essay, reading: Sometimes it seems that the delights of this life are merely the shadows cast by some other tragedy. This interplay between light and dark, good and evil, has vexed minds far wiser than mine. Ancient philosophers, for example, wondered about the need for the virtues in heaven. Why, they asked, would we need courage if there is nothing to confront? When would generosity be called for if there is no scarcity? Karl Marx, perhaps in answer, said that in his utopia we would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, graze cattle in the evening, and philosophize after dinner. Marx locates the miraculous—human liberation—inside the deceptive ordinariness of work, which tracks Genesis at least. Through toil, the Bible tells us, we will eat of the ground all the days of our lives. Maybe that’s true even of heaven. Maybe, even there, the joy and obligation remain conjoined. They certainly seem to be here on earth. There’s an argument here that I can’t bring myself to make: that we need suffering in order to receive grace; that there is no good without evil; no love without hate. I refuse to believe it. Still, I don’t know what a miracle is in the absence of the ordinary. I don’t know how to love my daughter absent her pain. I’m not sure I should.
We will, as a host and listeners, need to steer a careful course through the rest of the Medieval period. I don’t want to be too diffuse. I can’t teach you the literary history of the whole world. But I think I can offer a literary history that’s a bit more encompassing than the one that was taught to me, and that still includes the things that were taught to me. As I said, I will happily produce upcoming shows on the traditional tentpole works of medieval literature that so many of us know. I will also produce upcoming shows on other works of medieval European literature that native English speakers like me don’t study often enough, like the Middle Welsh Mabinogion the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, the eddas and sagas of Iceland, the Old Spanish Poem of the Cid, and more. Search for podcast or even audiobook content on these, and you’re hard pressed to find anything. But even more so, there is a growing body of medieval Arabic and Persian literature that is now available in strong English translations that I am brimming with excitement to teach you about. Abu al-Atahiya Abu Nuwas, Ferdowsi, Omar Khayyam, Nizami Ganjavi, Rumi, Hafez – these titans of world literature should have been sifted alongside authors of the European Middle Ages and early Renaissance a long time ago. They are fun. Even in translation, their talent is awesome to behold. With just a little bit of background – and we’ll have that background when we get to them – medieval Arabic and Persian literature is straightforward, too. At present, if you search on Apple Podcasts or Spotify for something in English on Beowulf, or Dante, or Chaucer, you’ll have oodles of material to listen to. If you search for Hafez, or Ferdowsi, or Abu Nuwas, or the early Arabic Qasidas, or odes, there’s next to nothing, even though the latter authors are household names much of the world over. I’d like to do what I can to help with that. All of the literature I just described is part of the same west Eurasian vortex,…
While DOGE hasn’t offered details about all of the stated savings, it has posted a list of more than 1,100 canceled contracts to its website. As of Friday, it said the savings from these contracts amounted to about $7 billion. The Journal analysis projects the actual savings could be closer to $2.6 billion over the next year if spending levels remained constant—and about 2% of the funds would have gone to contracts related to DEI. Research-focused agencies were among the top targets for cuts, including the Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, where DOGE terminated contracts costing the government more than $900 million last year. DOGE terminated more than 60 Health and Human Services contracts including a clinical evaluation of an Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury drug and a study of smokers with chronic lung disease. DOGE described these as “administrative expenses.”
Three headlines from the NYT homepage: Why Don’t People Dress Up to Go Out Anymore? Man-Child Learns to Dress Like a Man Compliments Are His Punchline
When Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos dined with Donald Trump and his wife Melania at Mar-a-Lago in December, there was a lot at stake for both men: Bezos, a titan of industry whose company is crucial to the U.S. economy, was rebuilding his relationship with a resurgent and powerful soon-to-be president. A lot was at stake for Melania, too: She was looking for a buyer for a documentary about her transition back to first lady. Her agent had pitched the film, which she would executive produce, to a number of studios, including the one owned by Amazon. As the meeting approached, Melania consulted with director Brett Ratner on how to sell her idea to the world’s third-richest man. Melania regaled Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, with the project’s details at dinner. Just over two weeks later, Amazon, a company that prides itself on frugality and sharp negotiating, agreed to pay $40 million to license the film—the most Amazon had ever spent on a documentary and nearly three times the next-closest offer.
A screenshot of LEAVES OF GRASSTOK. This stanza from Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS: "Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing, / An ocean-bell—O a warning bell, rock’d by the waves." There's a picture of a field. Everything is tinted kind of green.
A screenshot of an app, Leaves of Grasstok, which shows a Depression-era FSA photograph of a derelict house and includes the line from Walt Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS, "Months, years, an echoing, garnish’d house--but dead, dead, dead."
A screen-grab of "Leaves of Grasstok," which displays a stanza from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and has a picture of three men with hard-hats on from the FSA's Depression-era images.
A picture of a passage from Anne Carson's book WRONG NORMA.
A screenshot from the piece, which reads: > There’s a phenomenon that happens where I live along the rugged coastline of Northern California, when conditions are right, or more accurately, wrong: a layer of green, foamy scum clings to the surface of the ocean so that when the waves wash your footprints away, they are replaced by a layer of vile, reeking slime dotted by writhing marine organisms. This is, at times, how the internet feels right now. We are being slowly erased, but instead of passing peacefully into the vale with the ebb and flow of soothing waves, we are being actively replaced by garbage.
An excerpt from Anil Dash's blog: But here's the thing: being able to say, "wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.
Joan Mitchell's painting, HEMLOCK.
The cover of Will Mason's album, "HEMLOCKS, PEACOCKS."
A quote from Walter Ong's book, ORALITY AND LITERACY: > Homeric Greeks valued clichés because not only the poets but the entire oral noetic world or thought world relied upon the formulaic constitution of thought. In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration. The last sentence is highlighted.
An excerpt from an essay in Commonweal