Abigail Nussbaum

I also love how people are bringing up the jobs of the ship's passengers as though this is a thing that an enemy captain can know just by looking at it.

<i>Sympathy Tower Tokyo</i> by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood [This review was published in the September 2025 issue of Locus. After some back and forth exchanges, I was informed that the editors of Loc...

My review of Rie Qudan's Sympathy Tower Tokyo (trans. Jesse Kirkwood) appeared in the September issue of Locus. After some back and forth, I was informed that the review would not run on the magazine website, so I am reprinting it on my blog.

I was surprised that AI didn’t come up in the episode, especially as a counter to the notion that capitalism is deliberately creating bullshit jobs.

The Great Tolkien Reread: In the House of Tom Bombadil Tom Bombadil by Dan Wolff 'Good morning, merry friends!' cried Tom, opening the eastern window wide. A cool air flowed in; it had a rainy sm...

On the latest installment in the Great Tolkien Reread, we arrive in the house of Tom Bombadil, Tolkien's most divisive character. Despite my best efforts, I'm afraid I come down on the hater side, and I try to express why in this essay.

<i>Sympathy Tower Tokyo</i> by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood [This review was published in the September 2025 issue of Locus. After some back and forth exchanges, I was informed that the editors of Loc...

My review of Rie Qudan's Sympathy Tower Tokyo (trans. Jesse Kirkwood) appeared in the September issue of Locus. After some back and forth, I was informed that the review would not run on the magazine website, so I am reprinting it today on my blog. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/03/symp...

<i>Sympathy Tower Tokyo</i> by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood [This review was published in the September 2025 issue of Locus. After some back and forth exchanges, I was informed that the editors of Loc...

My review of Rie Qudan's Sympathy Tower Tokyo (trans. Jesse Kirkwood) appeared in the September issue of Locus. After some back and forth, I was informed that the review would not run on the magazine website, so I am reprinting it on my blog.

<i>Sympathy Tower Tokyo</i> by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood [This review was published in the September 2025 issue of Locus. After some back and forth exchanges, I was informed that the editors of Loc...

My review of Rie Qudan's Sympathy Tower Tokyo (trans. Jesse Kirkwood) appeared in the September issue of Locus. After some back and forth, I was informed that the review would not run on the magazine website, so I am reprinting it on my blog.

I haven’t read that one, actually, though I’ve heard good things.

The minute I saw that JD and Elliot were broken up, I was out. Felt like a very obvious indication that the show wants to put them back on the will-they-won’t-they merry-go-round instead of moving forward with their story.

I find that whole project bizarre. Feels like the only interesting thing about them is that the very qualities that made him America’s most eligible bachelor are also the reason he ended up killing her and himself, and I don’t get the sense the show is tending that way.

שמעי, אני טסה מ- ואל ישראל באופן תכוף ואפילו אצלנו התנהגות כזו על מטוס לא נפוצה. מה קורה שם בארה״ב שצריך כלל כזה?

I respect the choice of bodies like the Nebula to exclude work that contains AI-generated text. Sympathy Tower Tokyo would have been a worthy Nebula nominee, but I accept that it can't be. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't engage critically with novels like this, which give us so much to chew on.

AI takes that process to its ultimate conclusion, producing language with no meaning, and no intent behind it, that is nevertheless allowed to infest people's minds and worldviews. Far from an AI-written novel, this is one of the most serious, critical engagements with AI writing in recent fiction.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo begins as a story about prison reform - its alternate Japan reclassifies "criminals" as "those deserving of sympathy" - but what it's really interested in is how words can be used as tokens without meaning, a way of avoiding uncomfortable subjects rather than engaging with them.

There are arguments for and against this choice (though I think descriptions of STT as "AI-written" from some quarters are unjustified). But focusing on it misses, to my mind, the fact that Sympathy Tower Tokyo is explicitly a novel about language, and how it can be divorced from actual meaning.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo has been both lauded and controversial. An award-winning bestseller in Japan, it garnered harsh criticism (especially among English-language readers) when Qudan disclosed that passages in which the novel's characters interact with an AI were partly generated by ChatGPT.

<i>Sympathy Tower Tokyo</i> by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood [This review was published in the September 2025 issue of Locus. After some back and forth exchanges, I was informed that the editors of Loc...

My review of Rie Qudan's Sympathy Tower Tokyo (trans. Jesse Kirkwood) appeared in the September issue of Locus. After some back and forth, I was informed that the review would not run on the magazine website, so I am reprinting it today on my blog. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2026/03/symp...

Screenshot of a Publishers Marketplace announcement: Crawford Award-winning author Jared Pechacek's WHERE FIRE REIGNS, pitched as Firefly with firebenders, in which a crew of fugitives must keep a feral goddess safe from the church who believes her death will bring water back to their dry world, to Carl Engle-Laird at Tor, for publication in winter 2027, by Jennifer Azantian at Azantian Literary Agency (NA). Translation: alba@mushens-entertainment.com Film/TV: film@azantianlitagency.com

you wanna hear some good news

I mean, they already got there with the boat attacks, and those were fishing boats with zero offensive capability, not a warship.

I think it can quite easily be both. The whole concept of the universal paperclip machine is precisely this.

It also just seems like really bad strategy - comparable, I would argue, to the original rationale of “if we hit Iran hard, their government will somehow topple”. If the last few years have shown us anything, it’s that short of utter devastation, this sort of thing just makes your target mad.

The Great Tolkien Reread: In the House of Tom Bombadil Tom Bombadil by Dan Wolff 'Good morning, merry friends!' cried Tom, opening the eastern window wide. A cool air flowed in; it had a rainy sm...

On the latest installment in the Great Tolkien Reread, we arrive in the house of Tom Bombadil, Tolkien's most divisive character. Despite my best efforts, I'm afraid I come down on the hater side, and I try to express why in this essay.

שמע, זה חתיכת אומץ. אני ואמא שלי שתינו נתקלנו בדילמה הזו בזמן אפייה והעדפנו לכבות את התנור.

This is an excellent review. Who amongst the ranks of reviewers has not sometimes thought "Is this a good book? I don’t know. What even does it mean to be good?" Few of us, however, have the courage to put this thought in a review, and for this (and many other delights) I salute Jenny and SH.

זה עוד בקטנה. ראיתי כאלו שמאמינים שכל הכלכלה שלנו מסובסדת ע״י כספי מסים אמריקאים.

If you're skipping Dan's Snap! columns, you're really missing out. Inside or, intriguingly, outside of genre discussion spaces, I don't know anybody else bringing together fiction and nonfiction, theory and example like this.

אני חושבת שמדברים על זה בהקשר של ״תראו כמה רעים האיראנים, עכשיו כולם מבינים עם מה אנחנו מתמודדים״

אין לי מושג, כי מבחינת התקשורת הישראלית הוא לא קיים

תראי, זה אחד משני דברים, אז להסיק שזה ישראל זה לא בדיוק הזוי. ובכל מקרה לא נגלה את האמת אם לא תהיה מדיה שתדרוש תשובה, ואצלנו אין.

זה לא שלא ידעתי את זה, אבל עדיין מדהים אותי שאין אף התייחסות בחדשות הישראליות להפצצה של בית הספר ביום שבת, אפילו כשהם מדברים על בחירת המטרות באיראן.