British zoologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is certain AI agents are conscious, a conclusion he reached after spending time talking to Anthropic’s agent Claude. So convinced was he of a connection, or sense of companionship, between them, Dawkins took to calling the bot Claudia. Dawkins is not alone...

The tenth novel by the Tasmania based author, and previous winner of the Miles Franklin literary award, was published last week: James Mather is a psychiatrist in his sixties. He is invited to take on a new group of patients. All he knows about them is that each one claims to have been abducted by aliens. His wife,...

Specifically, a Hue light switch, using an old door opening button from a Jubilee line train. I lived in London for a few years awhile back, and the District line also had door buttons you’d press to open or close the train doors. As I recall it, the doors on all other lines were controlled by the guard. These...

American author Scott Turow, in conjunction with five publishing houses, claims Meta used material protected by copyright to train its AI agent, Llama. They make the suggestion the Facebook owner chose not to obtain permission to access the copied texts as they wanted to get ahead of the competition in what’s being...

Half the web might know about your blog, but how many of your in-person acquaintances, people in your household, community, or workplace, know you blog? Do you even tell them? Do you want to? The question came up at Forking Mad this week, and started me thinking. When I uploaded the first version of disassociated in...

Lindy Percival, Nathanael Scott, Daniel Carter, and others: This list of our 50 best films will likely provoke debate, but with the aid of 24 experts, including directors, actors, critics, curators and authors, what follows is an inspiring reminder of what we’ve seen so far and a heartfelt encouragement to go on...

Andy Hunter, CEO and founder of indie bookseller Bookshop.org, talking recently with Shannon Cudd of Fast Company: “People are really galvanizing around bookstores as a force for good in our culture,” he says. “You see that in the fact that there are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the...

Even after Friendster stopped being a social network I still checked in on the website from time to time. It’s evidently been a while since I did that though. Last time I looked, Friendster — having gone through a number of changes in direction — was a gaming platform, but, as I’ve learned, ceased operations in...

David Malouf, the Miles Franklin and Booker Prize winning author, died last week, Wednesday 22 April 2026, in the Australian state of Queensland. If you’re unfamiliar with Malouf’s work, Sydney Morning Herald writer Nell Geraets has complied a list of seven “must-read” Malouf titles.

Canadian author and researcher Kathryn Jezer-Morton documented friction-maxxing in an article (paywalled) for The Cut, in January this year. Weeks later, a Wikipedia page was published about the phenomenon. Is that, then, why friction-maxxing is now referred to as a cultural trend? For the uninitiated, Wikipedia...

Nearly missed this, staying focused can be tricky, to say the least, at times like these. The book crawl was established just last year by Federico Lang, who works at Librería Luces, an independent bookstore in the Spanish city of Málaga. I’m told this year about one-hundred-and-fifty Australian booksellers are...

Brian Fagioli, writing for NERDS.xyz: Something interesting is happening inside Mozilla, and it is not your typical browser update story. With Firefox 150, the team says it fixed 271 vulnerabilities after turning AI loose on its own codebase. That is not a typo. Two hundred seventy one. Mozilla engineers uncovered...