The Bookseller revealed the results of its long-awaited survey about bullying in the UK publishing industry. Paywalled, which is annoying.

Topline: 69% report being bullied, an additional 25% said ‘not me, but I’ve witnessed it’. That’s based on 247 respondents, which is a significant (if not representative) sample of a fairly small industry. The quotes and stories are horrifying.

Hachette came in for a particular beating, with two people even going on the record to talk about their awful experiences. Their initial corporate apology, printed in said Bookseller, was a pretty spectacular example of the ‘I’m sorry if you feel that way’ variety. Needless to say, that didn’t help things.

Many of my closest friends work in the industry - and I’ve worked for the industry (including several Hachette divisions) in multiple roles over the years, although none recently. I love publishing! There are so many brilliant people, doing brilliant things. But, like all industries that are desirable (publishing, music, film, fashion, art, advertising), staff - at all levels - are more vulnerable. Those working in publishing are told that their position is a privilege, and they should be glad to have it. They are non-unionised, unprotected, expendable, and reminded every day that there are hundreds of people who would happily crawl over their body to possess their ‘dream job’. Everyone knows everyone, so if you can’t hack it, well, that’s it for you. That atmosphere of precarity only makes it easier for those in any position of power, however minor it may be, to abuse it.

It is not my place to tell stories for others — at least, not without their express consent. I will say that one common thread is the consistent failure of both senior managers and Human Resources. I hope that the Bookseller piece inspires a ‘moment’ of overdue self-flagellation where some individuals are chucked to the wolves. I also hope that the process of expurgation goes further than those singular cases, and that the companies involved take a long, hard look at the systems and functions that permitted, or even maintained, their toxic culture.

This is the Bleak Issue™, so let’s kick off with Andrew Griffin, who is always sunshine and rainbows.

The [recent hacking] disclosures seemed to confirm our worst, most sci-fi fears: that these powerful systems could go rogue, not just being used for cyber attacks but launching and conducting them all by themselves, in ways that we can’t control and might not even know about…

But they are also convenient announcements for the companies making them. Just as AI companies have repeatedly brought up the risk of existential annihilation from artificial intelligence, because it gives a sense that their products are so powerful that they can’t be contained – the sci-fi panic about systems going rogue also helped boost the apparent importance of the technology.

Thanks, Andrew! (I can’t link to it directly, but the Indy/Tech newsletter is very good.)

As soon as I saw the subject line on this email, I knew it’d be about that bonkers Sam Altman post. And it was! I’ve wanged on about this before, but there’s something almost about the way that the Silicon Valley techbro life-cycle divorces humans from humanity. Brilliant people, coddled, pampered, and neatly extracted from the ‘distractions’ that come from living life like an actual human being in the actual human world. As a result, you get arcology basement dwellers: smart enough to come up with Mega Big Ideas™, confident enough to voice them out loud, and sheltered enough not to realise that they’ve just reinvented the bus.

(On a similar note, I had a lovely co-ranting session with a researcher this week about how people are turning back to qualitative research because a. we’re swamped with data and no closer to actually solving any problems and b. we’re starting to realise that human beings are actually nuanced and complicated creatures that live in worlds filled with complex friction).

The Reuters Digital News Report is out and brings more positive vibes. The global picture is pretty bleak (16% of under-35s now get their news through AI). The UK-specific picture has some national-level bangers such as ‘trust in the media bottoming out at 30%’ (7% lower than the global average) and ‘50% avoid the news’ (up 4% year on year).

We’re doing a summer reading challenge as a family. Anne’s chosen a dozen books for to read, and vice versa. We both selected some books for the Goblin, which he’s meticulously ignoring in favour of more Horrible Histories.

Anne’s selections have been annoyingly good. So far, I’ve read nine. In no particular order:

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers - Sayers is Anne’s favourite author. I bounced off Whose Body? pretty hard, and, although I read all her short fiction for Dark Academia, I still approached this with some trepidation. It was great! Who knew?!) Besides Anne.

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird - Absolute banger. She’s hilarious and sassy and brilliant. It is also quite funny for the ‘realism’ crowd, what with a woman wandering around the most dangerous parts of Wild West completely happy and unmolested. Also, she likes skunks.

A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux - Not quite as dense as the other picks, but it led to an interesting conversation about the changes in romance over time. It is deeply silly (cannot get over her Purse of Holding), and all time travel romances are inherently ridiculous, but I will concede it was a lot of fun. Anne can explain the bigger picture better, so I’ll let her write that someday.

The Order of Books by Roger Chartier - This one was harder going, but, as Anne pointed out, it got me thinking. It also made me want to go back to publishing (NO, JARED). I was less interested in the litany of specific French bibliographers and their compendiums. But the wider points about ‘hey, did you know inserting white space to make books readable was a revolutionary act?!’ were genuinely mind-blowing.

[this machine kerns fascists]

Corvus by Esther Woolfson - ‘Are you really making me read one of those bird books?’ …I loved this book. I only cried a little. I feed the crows in the local park every few days (#crowbro), but now I try to spend a little more time just… enjoying them. I love books about any passion where the author manages to make their passion infectious.

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville - I read Moby Dick at university. Actually, I didn’t! First and only time I’ve used a Cliff’s Notes (Hey kids, those were like, ChatGPT before there was ChatGPT! Except you still had to read them. And then write the paper yourself. So, actually, nothing at all like ChatGPT!). Anyway, I regret nothing. Moby Dick is trash. There, I said it. Anyway, this book was not awful and I’m glad I read the whole un-Cliffed thing myself.

All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley - I am not an art person and I am not a grief memoir person (LOL, see below). But this was fantastic, and now I want to go stand in an art gallery all day. But then, who would feed my crows?!

Wait for What Will Come by Barbara Michaels - Hilarious gothic thriller. I love how unimpressed she is by all her suitors.

A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell - I cannot believe this was real. It is incredible, and horrifying. And impressive how it balances the different ways in which it was horrifying. Virginia Hall herself is incredible, and Purnell will gleefully describe her incredible adventures as a spy and saboteur. Then we’ll have a brief aside about how she was routinely undermined by all the dick-swingin’ spy-dudes around her. Then we’ll have another aside about how someone close to her gets tortured to death. Then back to dashing adventure! Purnell juggles all of this brilliantly: you understand the full scale of Hall’s heroism because you also witness the scale of the challenges - environmental, systemic and, of course, human - in her way.

Also, hey: the Nazis were really, really, really awful. People seem to forget that sometimes. History! Don’t forget it!

I finally wrote a Shelfie! Am I a grief memoir guy now?

My talk about BBQ and EXTREMISM is now online!

It is a crash course in how radicalisation works, a crash(er) course in the history of BBQ and then a crash(ing) together of the two. Brilliant stuff.

Actual cooking… a bit more banal.

The heat wave means we do a lot of our basic daily cooking outside now, as turning on the oven makes the whole house broil. It isn’t particularly inspiring work, but it is a reminder that - once you nail down the fire faffing routine - your basic meat n’ two veg meal is probably quicker to make on a grill. And tastier. And fewer dishes to wash.

I even did some outdoor baking, and made a passable blackberry banana bread (the smoke added nothing, which is probably for the best). Less passable: the blackcurrant BBQ sauce I made out of a friend’s foraging harvest. SO SOUR. Yikes.

The Elements of Dark Academia is out at the end of the month. I’m at the ‘nervous second-guessing’ stage of pre-publication, questioning every editorial decision I’ve ever made on this book, all previous books, and any book yet to come. Good times.

Speaking of Anne, and, er, darkness? The cover for her second book, The Dark Wizard Falls in Love, is now out in the wild. And fabulous.