Notes

Submariner

Austin Rogers, writing for GQ, has a heartbreaking story I loved about a stuntman and a watch.

Nestled off a short dirt road in the Adirondack Mountains, just beyond the reach of cellular service, lies Trout Lake. Overlooking the water is a cabin owned by 48-year-old Hollywood stuntman Tom Place, something of a local legend, known more in this small Upstate New York community for his weekend recreational activities than his formidable IMDb credits he’s racked up as a Hollywood stuntman. Because for many years now, Place has been routinely diving beneath the lake’s surface in search of something he lost more than three decades ago: his Rolex Submariner.

After all this time, I’m actually kind of surprised he hasn’t found it yet. I hope he does.

Americans are Turning on Trump

David A. Graham, writing in The Atlantic, outlines the shift that has happened since Donald Trump has been in the White House.

The Democratic Party’s problems remain very real, but for the moment, Trump and the GOP have more serious ones. The most glaring one is Trump’s deep personal unpopularity. In the current polarized and dyspeptic political environment, all presidents seem to be unpopular, but Trump is in a different league. A CNN poll released last week measured Trump at 34 percent support, matching the low he reached in that poll following the January 6 insurrection. Still, that was better than his showing in the AP-NORC survey, which found his approval at 33 percent, just one point above a 2017 low. Quinnipiac University found Trump at 32 percent, the lowest ever in that poll.

The vast majority of Americans have come to the realization that Donald Trump is bad. I’ll take it.

There Will Come Soft Rains

Seventy-six years ago, Ray Bradbury wrote a short story titled “There Will Come Soft Rains” for Collier’s Weekly. I first encountered it reading The Martian Chronicles in high school. It’s a quick read and is well worth your time.

What makes the story particularly special today is that it takes place on the actual date of August 4, 2026.

AI is a Swiss Army Knife

Jeroen Sangers –

AI is a Swiss Army knife. It does everything and excels at nothing.

That’s exactly why it wins. The best tool is not the sharpest one, it’s the one already in your pocket.

Habit

Octavia Butler –

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.

Is This What Comes After AI Slop?

Will Oremus, writing in The Atlantic, has a great story about AI-assisted novel writing.

Most self-published authors can only dream of writing something as popular as Daggermouth. Set in a surveillance state ruled by a masked elite, the novel traces the unlikely romance between the president’s son and an assassin hired to kill him. Since H. M. Wolfe uploaded Daggermouth to Amazon as a Kindle ebook, it has been a viral hit. “Did I finish Daggermouth, or did Daggermouth finish me?” a TikTok book influencer gushed. In February, Simon & Schuster paid seven figures to secure the publishing rights to the book and its sequel, which is due out next year.

Daggermouth has spent months on USA Today’s best-seller list and is ranked No. 1 in Amazon’s “science-fiction romance” genre. It also tops a less prestigious list, one compiled by academics studying AI writing. Among thousands of self-published Amazon ebooks that they identified as containing “substantial AI text,” none was more popular than Daggermouth.

Until recently, AI fiction has been easy to dismiss as slop. On Amazon, new-book releases nearly tripled from 2022 to 2025. (That’s probably not because humans suddenly dedicated themselves en masse to the written word.) Many are blatant copycats of existing titles, seemingly intended to trick readers into buying them. Their sales figures are generally meager; the reviews, indignant. A suspicious number of them feature protagonists with the same names. Last year, readers of one fantasy novel noticed a line that seemed to be responding to a prompt asking a chatbot to write in the style of another author. But if a book as beloved as Daggermouth were written with a chatbot, it would raise an awkward question: Could AI fiction be getting … good?

The answer is yes. It is quite good. No, you can’t just give it a prompt and have it spit out a novel and have it be any good. There still needs to be a lot of human writing and editing. However, this is just the beginning.

I’ve done experiments myself with AI fiction writing. It is surprisingly readable, but not initially. It almost always needs to be edited and reworked. I think we are at the precipice of AI writing that is indistinguishable from human writing.

Not yet, but soon.

Can Anyone Finish the Impossible Bike Obstacle Course?

Yesterday, I was flipping through YouTube on my TV and the algorithm showed me this crazy obstacle course on a pond that bike riders were trying to master. I had to find out how it went.

At first, a bunch of BMX pros tried to get past the first obstacle with results that were basically excuses to see a bike and rider jump into the lake. Then they challenged a couple of professional cyclists, Danny MacAskill and Kriss Kyle. While I had never heard of these guys, they tried it over and over again and would incrementally get further along the route.

The question is whether they can finish it. Watch and find out.

Baseball’s Labor History Is Repeating Itself Once Again

Sarah Borus, writing for Defector, takes us on a journey of collective bargaining agreements of the past, while settling quickly on this upcoming one.

The question of “which side are you on?” is complicated somewhat by the fact that this is a dispute between the obscenely rich and the extremely rich; we aren’t dealing with the miner’s son against JH Blair here. But the question of where else this money would go is not complicated. It’s not going to the miner’s son, of course.

It’s going into the pockets of people like David Rubenstein, the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with $475 billion in assets, responsible for buying up property and raising rents in New York City, participating in union busting and exploitative labor practices, and investing in the defense industry; he owns the Orioles. And also to Ray Davis, whose company, Energy Transfer, owns the Dakota Access Pipeline that was the subject of protests in 2016 due to its encroachment on Sioux land and disastrous environmental effects; Davis owns the Rangers. That money would go to Giants' owner, Charles B. Johnson, a billionaire who regularly donates to the political campaigns of right-wing fanatics. You get the point—this money is controlled by 30 cosmetically different versions of JH Blair, all of whom are trying to convince the public that they are on the side of fairness, unlike the greedy players union, which is made up mostly of players who will virtually all never have contracts even close to what Juan Soto is getting, and none of whom to my knowledge own even one oil pipeline. This makes deciding which side you are on a bit easier to answer.

Owners succeed when the public thinks of baseball’s labor struggle as separate from the political struggles happening all around them. It isn’t, and while the history of unionization in professional baseball has ebbed and flowed alongside the progressive political moments in United States history, the movement has been most successful when the players have realized that connection. What kind of moment does it feel like we’re in right now?

I fully expect the strike will kill the next MLB season. There needs to be a salary cap. There will never be a salary cap.

The only way a cap/floor could ever be implemented in a manner that is fair to players is two-fold. First, there needs to be a substantially overhauled revenue-sharing agreement among owners to ensure that teams like the Rays and Marlins can compete payroll-wise with the Dodgers and Yankees of the world. Second, the cap/floor needs to be set based on total MLB team revenue, which means teams would have to open up their books.

In other words, it’s never, ever going to happen.

Writing by Hand is Good for Your Brain

Neil Stephenson is known for handwriting his entire novels using a fountain pen and paper. This seems pretty ridiculous to me, but he’s got twenty novels to his name and a bunch of short fiction and articles, so what do I know?

He recently posted on his Substack advocating that writing by hand is good for the brain. Apparently, there’s some decent research on the subject. As someone who does a lot of writing by hand, Stephenson outlined a few dos and don’ts for people who want to reap the benefits.

A couple of them resonated with me:

Don’t use a pencil (or a cheap ballpoint). Absolutely not. My preferred writing instrument is a Sakura Pigma Micron 05. I have several in a variety of colors. Since I’ve moved on from planning in digital to paper, these pens have been invaluable to me.

Stick to a pen/paper combination that works. For me, the combination that has worked is the above pen in several colors for color coding and a Baron Fig notebook. There are other notebooks that are cheaper and ones significantly more expensive, but the Baron Fig Confidant is the perfect size with a great cloth cover.

Don’t get hung up on legibility. My handwriting is not great. I’m left-handed, which may be a factor, but overall it hasn’t really been a problem for me reading my own handwriting. Since the notebook planner I’m using isn’t for anyone else, I don’t try to make it perfect.

The First Patch

Busey Bank is now the exclusive jersey patch sponsor for nine Illinois sports: football, men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball, baseball, softball, soccer, and both golf programs. Five years. Thirty million dollars. It’s the first time a corporate logo has ever gone on an Illinois jersey. The coaches get it too. Bret Bielema, Brad Underwood and Shauna Green will all wear the patch on the sideline starting this fall.

Here’s the part that matters. Busey isn’t some faceless conglomerate flying in from out of state. The bank opened in Champaign in 1868, a year after the University of Illinois did. They’ve shared a zip code since before either one had much of a name.

Underwood called it an “unbelievable merger.” Bielema admitted he wasn’t sure about it until he saw the patch stitched onto the jersey. Then he was all in.

So here’s my take. Illinois fans should embrace this.

I get the instinct to recoil. A plain jersey feels like it belongs to the fans, not the market. But that stopped being true a while ago. Players get paid now. Rosters get rebuilt every spring through the transfer portal. Programs that can’t find new revenue don’t keep good coaches or good players. Josh Whitman knows it. That’s why he built a whole Pillar Partnership Program instead of chasing one flashy one-off deal.

Ohio State signed with JPMorgan Chase. Michigan State went with its credit union. Illinois went with the bank that’s older than the Big Ten and already felt like family.

Nobody grows up dreaming about a bank logo on their chest. But Katin Houser will run onto the field on September 5th against UAB wearing his No. 4 with a patch on the sleeve now too, and it won’t change what that number means to him. The patch pays for the roster around him. That’s the trade. It’s a fair one.