I’ve been writing this book for the past year, and it’s taken a lot out of me. I spoke to people who went through absolute hell, who lost jobs and found peace, and who were all changed by psychedelics. While I agree that psychedelics are not for everyone, they are definitely something we should all be exploring as we enter whatever dystopian age we’re living in right now, and I hope this book will be helpful.
Meet ParrotPod
My friend Mike Butcher was musing in a chat room about a service that automatically made a news podcast that gave you a digest of interesting stories on a daily basis. I thought about his request and told him I’d build it. Over the course of about two days I was able to cobble together a working MVP that essentially automatically generates an audio podcast every morning at 10am Eastern. It’s called ParrotPod and you can try it right now.
It’s definitely not perfect and there are still things I’d like to fix but I’d love it if you could give it a try and let me know what you think. It’s a fun project and I’m curious to see what people think. If you try it, please send me feedback at john@biggs.cc.
I reread William Gibson every few years and mostly focus on the first two trilogies, the Sprawl and the Bridge. If you’ve never read Gibson, you need to start with Neuromancer, but I love this one, the last in the Bridge trilogy, for its mix of reality and sci-fi. The Bridge trilogy is all about how the digital becomes real, and this particular book focuses on what would happen if we could create digital life through nanobots. It’s way better than I’ve made it sound, and Gibson is a master of his craft.
In this travel memoir, food writer Tom Parker Bowles sets out to understand why some foods are feared in one culture yet prized in another. Prompted by the food anxieties of friends, he spends a year traveling through Asia, Europe, and the United States seeking out meals that many people consider dangerous, strange, or extreme, including venomous animals, toxic fish, insects, organ meats, and hot peppers. It’s a cute, light book in the vein of Truffle Hound from January.
This is a complete history of the “indie rock explosion” that covers the early years of NYC rock like The National and Interpol along with the oddballs like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Postal Service. If you had an iPod and an eMusic account in 2002, chances are you listened to these folks on repeat, and DeVille does a solid job of going down the list and talking about each band in plenty of detail. Well worth a read if you love this music.
There is a meme that asks when, exactly, it all went wrong. People point to Reagan and Bush. Some blame the Clinton years and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Others say it was the destruction of unions. I point to Daniel Pearl.
I do not say this lightly. I am not trying to reopen old wounds for shock value. Pearl’s murder on February 1, 2002 mattered because it was the first major world event that truly lived on the internet first and foremost. Not television. Not newspapers. The internet.
September 11 happened on TV. We watched it together, live, in public places. The wars that followed unfolded on cable news and on front pages. Editors filtered what we saw. Anchors framed it. There were limits, however imperfect.
Pearl’s death crossed a line. He was a journalist investigating extremism in Pakistan. He was murdered on camera. The video was not just documented, it was designed to spread. It moved through forums, email chains, and early websites with no gatekeepers and no shared sense of restraint. This was viral horror before we had a word for it.
That moment showed what the internet was becoming. Always on. Always available. Detached from place, time, and consequence. From that soil grew two competing ways of thinking.
The first believed information should move freely, journalism, art, code, research, all of it. This idea powered early blogging, open source software, and later things like cryptocurrency. It rewarded people who shared work openly, sometimes for money, often not. The faith was simple. If knowledge moved faster, society would improve.
The second way of thinking was darker, what people now call the Dark Pill. It treated the internet as a mask. A place where fear, resentment, and powerlessness could hide behind usernames and avatars. Mostly young men, disconnected and angry, built identities larger than their real lives. They stopped seeing other people as real. Everyone else became background characters.
In that worldview, cruelty was play. Lying was strategy. Nothing was serious because nothing was real. The point was not to build. The point was to provoke, mock, and dominate attention. The earlier belief in shared progress was replaced by a hunger to watch things burn.
Over time, that second mindset proved more aggressive and more contagious. The free software world quietly shaped infrastructure. The dark internet shaped culture. The same impulse that turned Pearl’s execution into online content now drives harassment campaigns, political disinformation, and state violence performed for cameras.
The logic is the same. Flood the space. Shock the audience. Wear people down. From GamerGate to modern Republican politics, from online mobs to ICE raids filmed for intimidation, the tactic never changes. Create fear. Normalize it. Make outrage feel routine.
I think we are near the end of this phase. I do not think it ends gently. Movements like MAGA do not fade out. They exhaust themselves through escalation. The next few years will likely be worse, not better, before the collapse comes.
This is a moment of crisis. A moment when cruelty pretends to be strength. The only real response is refusal. Refusal to accept this as normal. Refusal to treat suffering as content.
Since writing about mushrooms this year, I’ve become fascinated by everything from oysters to Hen of the Woods. This book about truffles was surprisingly readable and enjoyable, a little story about a guy who falls in love with a huge white truffle and wants to find out everything about these endearing little shroomies. He travels to Italy and Croatia and learns everything there is to know about these amazing little morels.
This book was written with a cleaver. Rosson is a great storyteller, and his style leans on literary fiction, while the story he tells — a man trying to avenge his wife’s death at the hands of a vampire — is a bloody romp. It’s a surprising horror book in that it doesn’t feel like a monster story until the monster appears.
I’ve been reading a few of these lately, and this one basically goes through the ranks of fundamentalists and fascists who are turning our country into a police state. Fugelsang is an interesting and open writer, and this is a readable romp through the rogues’ gallery we’re facing now.
I don’t know a lot of writers. I know a lot journalists — in passing, mostly — but honest to god novel writers are difficult for me to find. That’s why I cherish my buddy John Sundman, a guy I called a national treasure on YouTube.
Sundman is the author of, among others, Acts of the Apostles and Biodigital, two books that defined sci-fi for the post cyberpunk era. He’s an amazing, precise writer with an uncanny ability to predict the future.
He is now struggling to pay his mortgage.
I have two asks: first, buy him a coffee i.e. donate a little to him if you can, just to help out in the short term. He needs the lift to make it through the next few months.
Also, please consider paying for a subscription to his amazing newsletter, Sundman figures it out. I read every issue and I think you’d like it.
It’s tough out there, and it’s only going to get worse. The herd of true artists is thin and getting thinner, and we can only expect AI to make guys like John obsolete. I don’t want that to happen, and I doubt you do, either.
Please help if you can. It would mean the world to him.
The best thing about holidays in the Ohio Valley was the cookie table.
The tradition has changed over the years and now the cookie table usually appears at weddings. But there was a certain time when there was a yearly cookie table that appeared, like magic, every December.
My grandparents built their house themselves in 1959. The story goes that my grandfather and a few relatives poured the foundation, put up the cinderblocks for the basement, then hired a crew to finish the rest. This was Martins Ferry, Ohio, not long after the war, back when a young man could get a steady job at Wheeling Steel and afford a car, a house, and even an aboveground pool.
They dug the basement into a small hill in front of the house and carved out a root cellar, a room that stayed cool and dark no matter the season. The house itself was small, each room sized for the family that lived there, my grandmother Sadie, her husband Herman, a World War II veteran, and my father, who was still growing into himself.
Herman didn’t like animals. He would collect stones to throw at cats. There was never a dog in that house when my Dad was young.
When we visited, we arrived like a small traveling show. My sister and I came with toys and video games, a Nintendo, and the “tapes” I kept in a plastic box. My dad showed up with a 24 pack of beer. We brought our Kerry Blue Terrier, Vixen, to round out the crew. My grandfather sat quietly in his rocker and watched the news while we blew through the rooms like bad weather. Dogs barking, games blaring, someone crying over a Barbie. Our noise filled that quiet house, and it left my grandparents both thrilled and, I assume, more than a little ready for us to go.
The best part of Christmas, though, lived downstairs.
You went down the narrow basement stairs, past the boiler, toward the front of the house, and there it was, the table.
Most of the year it was just a junk table. Twine. Old toys. Random parts of household life that did not have a better home. It was a staging area for things that needed to get hauled upstairs eventually, paper towels, toilet tissue, whatever someone bought in bulk and forgot about. In the summer it became my workbench. I built bike alarms down there. I tinkered with little projects and mixed smoke bombs out of chemistry set materials.
But at Christmas it turned into something else. It became the cookie table.
When I was around ten, I didn’t like going down there alone. The table sat too close to the root cellar. The door was always there in the corner of my eye, and the root cellar always felt like a place that could swallow you if you stared at it too long. It smelled like Coca Cola, which never made sense to me. The shelves held strange, durable things. Canned tomatoes. Beans. Applesauce. Food that looked like it could outlast a person. There were bottles of Coke, beers, a jug of Gallo wine, and whatever else Midwesterners kept on hand because that is what you do, you stock up, you stay ready.
Still, if you slipped past that door and kept moving, you reached the table. And on that table were the cookies.
Chocolate chip cookies, thin but still soft, with Toll House chips. Peanut butter cookies with the fork marks pressed into the top like a signature. Thumbprints with a small crater of jam. Kiss cookies crowned with a whole Hershey’s Kiss. Pizzelles, thin and patterned, smelling of anisette, the kind of scent that announces itself before you even lift the foil.
The lineup didn’t change much. That was part of the comfort. The same classics came back every year, as steady as the ticking boiler. But sometimes there were extras. A tray of chocolates. Cookies from neighbors, never as good as Grandma Sadie’s, but politely accepted and quietly finished anyway. Things we brought from home, an offering, proof that we had tried, too. Once in a while there was a tin of butter cookies, store bought, the kind that taste like sweet air and leave you chasing crumbs. Sometimes a pretzel mix. Sometimes salted nuts.
Mostly, though, it was the real stuff. Cookies stacked on plates, covered in aluminum foil. When you lifted it, the foil crinkled and flashed in the dim basement light. That sound felt like an announcement. You had made it to the best part of Christmas.
We watched TV all morning and took a cookie every few hours. The trip downstairs was always the same. Slow steps, one hand on the railing. Past the boiler, which always seemed louder in winter, and the garage door, and that root cellar. Then the last few steps toward the table, the small burst of courage that turned into a sprint.
You came back up with three cookies in your hand and one already in your mouth. I would go down barefoot, cold floor under my feet, pajamas thin against the basement air, already thinking about the sugar hit that would warm me up from the inside.
Upstairs, I’d eat my prize under my grandmother’s tiny fake tree. On top of the television sat her ceramic Christmas house. A little Santa peeked out of the chimney. A bulb inside lit it from within, shining through colored plastic “windows” that looked like tiny ornaments. That little house felt like our house, not the real one with cinderblocks and a root cellar, but the version we wanted to live in. Cozy. Warm. Full of good things.
From the kitchen, I could hear my mother and grandmother cooking. I could hear the steady sound of my grandfather’s TV. Down the hall, in the big room, my father was reading. I was on the floor in my pajamas, playing Super Mario Brothers or Kid Icarus. Sometimes my friend George came over and we’d sneak back downstairs for more cookies, acting like it was a caper, even though nobody ever stopped us.
George, Center, giving a thumbs up.
The day would creep toward noon, then slide downhill. It got dark early, around five, the kind of winter dark that makes the windows look black. Outside was crisp and cold, the season for snow boots, for kids brave enough, or foolish enough, to leave the house and do something with the daylight that was left.
I wasn’t one of those kids.
Christmas vacation ran like that. The murmur of family. The TV on in the background. The promise of sweetness downstairs. I have tried to recreate that feeling for decades. Not by copying the basement or the root cellar or even the exact cookies, but by building a small rhythm around food. Opening a box of chocolate stars. Making a good meal. Putting something on the table that says, without saying it, you are safe here.
Food mattered to my grandmother. She was a child of the Depression, then a single mother who sometimes barely fed herself. Later, when life finally loosened its grip and she had enough, she did what a lot of people from that world did. She showed love by feeding you. Not with speeches. Not with advice. With baked goods, stacked on plates, under foil, waiting downstairs like a quiet promise.
I’d like to go back there. I’d like to go down those rickety stairs into the dark, fumble for the pull chain, and light the place up. I’d like to take those few steps past the fear, the doubt, and the loneliness, and find the one thing that made it simple, that I was loved.
I’m close. We’re all close. I think with one more push we could get there.
Until then, happy holidays, and I hope you have a lovely New Year.
I found this book too dense and repetitive, but the story is fascinating. It follows former Nazis who strutted around while the Americans scrambled to figure out how to bring them into the United States to work on the U.S. space program. Many of them come off as preening fools who claimed they were only following orders. The main reason the U.S. wanted them was their V2 rocket program, along with other weapons, mechanical and even biological, developed during their brutal and pointless war. It’s worth a read on a cold, snowy weekend.
Dan McClellan is a TikTok creator whose tagline, “OK, let’s see it,” challenges religious “scholars” to a battle of wits. He has a deep background in biblical history and ancient languages, and he brings clarity to what is often a jumble of stories collected by humans since the Iron Age. He’s not a great writer, but his research is deep and fascinating.
Tender at the Bone is Ruth Reichl’s 1998 food memoir about growing up with a mother known as the Queen of Mold, and about learning to care about organic food and great cooking in 1970s California. Reichl is a lovely writer and extremely readable, and this book is one of my favorites.
It’s been a few months since I was able to sit down and write one of these. I found myself unable to read recently, probably because of, well, everything going on in the world. But I took a moment and I’d love to share some of what I’m looking at.
First:
Work Update: I Was Laid Off! Hurray!
I’ve been busy these past few months trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I haven’t figured anything out but I did get laid off from my content gig at a crypto company so if you’re looking for a content team in a box including social media, video, and podcasting, please drop me a line! I have a new offering called Onfluence that involves a monthly hour-long video that I can turn into actionable and valuable LinkedIn and Instagram content for creators. If you’d like to chat about anything at all, drop me a line at john@biggs.cc.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I don’t like Christmas, and the rest of the holidays, including New Year’s, don’t do much for me. But Thanksgiving has always been my happy place.
I remember visiting my grandmother in Ohio. She would make the traditional stuff — turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes. She’d also fill the basement with dessert, an endless row of Buckeyes, peanut butter cookies with the fork markings on top, and chocolate chip cookies that were just moist enough not to crumble. I’d sneak into her basement, a large, open room with concrete floors, and head to the front of the room, next to her root cellar, where she’d keep the cookies in metal tins.
From Bottoms Up, a compendium of booze recipes I’m going to use this year.
After college, I loved holding Thanksgiving for friends. My tradition was to buy a turducken and smoke it for hours on the grill, turning a chimera of meats into something special. I’d make two kinds of stuffing — some folks didn’t like celery — and lots of sides. Every year, I’d order too much wine and make too many drinks and have way too much fun.
This year I’m making the aforementioned turducken and some crawfish and some Soul Food and whatever I find in the latest issue of Bon Appétit. For me, Thanksgiving is a time of experimentation, and I like to inject a few fun dishes into the mix. I usually start cooking at 6 a.m. It’s lovely.
It’s the calm camaraderie that I like about Thanksgiving, the satiety. In an age of endless hunger, it’s nice to know I can feed people something tasty and talk about the year. We’d raid the cookies and leftovers in the garage, creating meal after meal all weekend. We’d play board games, do a puzzle, watch movies. It was the gateway into the holiday season, a bulwark against the cold to come.
This year has been stressful for all of us, I’m sure. I hope you get a chance to cook something nice for someone and just eat, quietly reveling in the marvel that is every day.
I didn’t realize Dan Brown was still at it, and I missed his last book, Origin, which I just picked up. I hate-read Dan Brown because he pushes esoterica into the mainstream and turns some of us into conspiracy theorists for sport. In this sixth Robert Langdon novel, he plays with the Oversoul and golems, and sets the story in Prague. I read the whole thing and enjoyed it. It’s ice cream for the mind. If you want something weird and fun, read it.
Like most of Norman Davies’s histories, this one is an enjoyable slog. It surveys Europe from Rome onward, moving north and east to dwell on places he favors, including Poland and Ukraine. Still, because it’s a Davies book, the history is thorough, anecdotal, and readable. If you want a long read for the winter months, pick it up.
So this particular books is hard to find although you might be able to find it if you click this link. It’s a fascinating travelogue by New York Times Moscow correspondent Hendrick Smith. The book is a bit naive but it tells the story of life behind the Iron Curtain in the 1970s, a time when few had been to Russia let alone knew anything about it. It’s fascinating time capsule of a place that was waking up into industrialization while slowly casting off the many shackles of Soviet-style Communism. Smith is a lovely writer and I’m glad I picked this thing up again.
