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Sam Byers

@sambyers.bsky.social
900 followers 382 following 686 posts

Author of Idiopathy, Perfidious Albion, and Come Join Our Disease

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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 5h
Confident young man on the train asserting that “berries aren’t fruit.”
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 6h
Never get tired of the skies over the fens.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Absolutely lovely, this. nadiareid.bandcamp.com/album/live-a...
nadiareid.bandcamp.com
Live at Old St. Paul's with NZtrio, by Nadia Reid
10 track album
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Jeff Young @wildtwin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
There’s a brilliant piece by David Hayden @seventydys.bsky.social in the new edition of Science & Magic. It’s a chapter called The Dead Mixer from his novel ‘All Our Love’ You can read it here and you should because it’s very good! www.violetterecords.com/science-and-...
violetterecords.com
Science & Magic | 33 — Violette Records
The men are getting smaller these days
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
What is going on here. Good lord.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Stunningly good - beautiful, daring versions, recorded in fabulous sound. Best thing he’s done in a while, in my view. bonnieprincebilly.bandcamp.com/album/ghosts...
bonnieprincebilly.bandcamp.com
Ghosts of American Psychonauts, by Bonnie "Prince" Billy
8 track album
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Google’s AI assistant, proving why it will be absolutely invaluable to the humanities.
Google’s AI search claiming that Paul Auster “rarely used a traditional first person present tense style in his writing, instead famously choosing a second person ‘you’ present tense approach in his autobiographical works”
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Really rolls off the tongue.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I think the two most significant aspects of shrinkflation we must urgently address are (1) the ever-expanding hole in New York Company bagels and (2) “high end” clothing brands selling polyester clothes for hundreds of pounds.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Both the left and the right get a lot of mileage politically at the moment by identifying some key spectre or central threat to culture/civilisation. For a bit of helpful perspective, check out Anthropic’s own security report on how people have tried to use Claude www.anthropic.com/threat-intel...
anthropic.com
Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic
Case studies from threat actors disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven areas of harm, from cyber operations to biological misuse.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Interesting piece on the reversing fortunes of fiction and non-fiction. dearheadofmine.substack.com/p/the-nonfic...
dearheadofmine.substack.com
The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing
This is not one of those periodic “End of Reading” Atlantic click bait essays.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Perhaps sensing more opportunities for content, the Guardian seems to be pivoting its news coverage from things that are happening to things they can be fairly sure are not happening.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Do not ever email me again.
An email from an online retailer asking me if it’s “too early to whisper Crimbo”.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
“Autofiction writers … are memoirists who have had to become their own ghostwriters.” This, by Ryan Ruby, is easily the best thing I’ve yet read on Cusk, autofiction, and a very particular kind of contemporary subjectivity. newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...
newleftreview.org
Ryan Ruby, Unhappy Consciousness — Sidecar
Rachel Cusk’s ‘Life of M’.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
The more I think about it the more I can’t really follow the literary moral positioning of the week. We’ve got a strident defence of untrue memoirs and a scandalous clamour about novels that might be loosely based on fact.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I haven’t yet read the new Cusk, so have no idea if it merits quite the level of criticism it has come in for, but I can’t help noticing the high moral tone everyone suddenly seems to be reaching for.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
After a long era of saying that publishing is a business of life and death importance holding in its hands nothing less than the intellectual and spiritual health of society, we’re now going through a rapid transition to an era in which publishing accepts no responsibility for anything at all.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Shoutout to the bird outside my window that for three straight days has reliably gone silent the moment I open the bird call app.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Louise Glück
The master said You must write what you see.
But what I see does not move me.
The master answered Change what you see.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Can’t wait for this. www.ecmrecordsus.com/products/jac...
ecmrecordsus.com
JACK Quartet, Paul Griffiths: Samuel Beckett: Stirrings Still (with mu - US ECM Official Store
Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett’s last message in prose, completed in 1987, and first published the following year. More monologue than story, it comes from a narrator on the edge between life and ...
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Cannot recommend highly enough this entrancing, deeply moving film following Agnes Martin in the last years of her life. A remarkable person in every way, completely devoted to her own unique vision. vimeo.com/ondemand/wit...
vimeo.com
Watch Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World Online | Vimeo On Demand
A moving documentary on the internationally renowned painter. Shot over a period of four years, from 1998 through 2002, Agnes Martin's ninetieth year. Interviews with Martin are inter-cut with shots a...
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
The Atlantic has done excellent work on the literacy crisis, the decline of attention, the collapse of reading, the rise of AI etc. How can that be squared with a social media post describing a novel as “a long book to read that contains hundreds of pages of interesting material”?
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Directing people experiencing a mental health crisis to an overcrowded A+E that is not necessarily well equipped to care for them has long felt inappropriate and unhelpful all round. This is such a welcome development. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
New walk-in mental health centres to open in banks and libraries across England
Government plans network of nearly 200 specialist services to help those facing mental health crises.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
“Instead of his appointment conjuring the question “what new opportunities for research will this lead to?”, it was “doesn’t this make you feel good?”” This blisteringly good column by Jason Okundaye is the best thing I’ve yet read on the Arday affair. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
The takedown of Jason Arday has overjoyed the right, and must be a wake-up call for the left | Jason Okundaye
The Cambridge academic has rightly now resigned. But that won’t end the targeting of senior black figures or the lazy way institutions promote faux equality, says Guardian columnist Jason Okundaye
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Incredible the life in this downed tree.
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Jeremy Millar @jeremymillar.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Good to see @lukekennard.bsky.social spitting truths in The Guardian
theguardian.com
AI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study finds
Researcher says simpler writing by AI is easier to read and digest, but this does not mean human authors are obsolete
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Honestly very difficult to accurately convey what a political and ethical revolution it is just to have a prime minister even speak about carers with such insight and passion, emphasising not just their dedication but their *skill*, and the way that skill encompasses the physical and the emotional.
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Helen Barrett @helenbarrett.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Plot twist: www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/b8a5ecd...
telegraph.co.uk
Climate change is real – and the Right needs to get serious about it
The evidence is stacking up – we only have to look out of our windows
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Earlier this week I said that ending rough sleeping was near the top of my political wish list. Fixing social care so that people don’t have to struggle without support, and don’t have to make sacrifices to pay for that support, is probably at the very top. If the Times have this right, it’s huge.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
No no you don’t understand: the pollution was *protecting* us.
A headline from The Telegraph stating that recent heatwaves in Britain “are being driven by cleaner skies after pollution was stripped from the atmosphere.”
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Burnham of course has a mammoth task ahead of him and who knows if he will succeed but I do want to say this: ending rough sleeping is very high on my political wish list and to hear it put forward as a day one policy is both moving and heartening.
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International Anthony Burgess Foundation @anthonyburgess.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Though the novel is intended to subvert the reader's sense of stability in a familiar language, so you are absolutely right that it's not the best marker of general literacy and singling out one student that didn't understand as evidence of illiteracy seems cruel.
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International Anthony Burgess Foundation @anthonyburgess.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
In defence of Anthony Burgess, which I guess is our job, he worked hard so that the context of the invented words would be clear to an attentive reader and resisted a glossary. And from our experience of doing outreach in schools and universities, many younger people do understand the novel well.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Obviously this is excellent, detailed, and in many ways pretty terrifying - essential reading for anyone with even a passing concern for literature, thought, learning etc. I would only add that there is an even broader crisis here around attention. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
theatlantic.com
The End of Reading Is Here
Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Bleak www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
theatlantic.com
How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi
A case study in self-sabotage
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Re that last repost: shocking the extent to which writing that, if it’s not AI slop, certainly reads like AI slop, or even *aspires to the aesthetic* of AI slop, is now completely unavoidable even in reputable publications.
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Lyndsey Stonebridge @lyndseystonebri.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
I have been writing literary criticism again after a long pause, and never before have I felt so keenly the generative qualities of creative language - how much we need it to survive, how imperilled the whole project of human imagination currently is, & how much we have to fight for.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
The weird aggressive laughter of the man whose role in any all male friendship group is simply to laugh manically at anything anyone says.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
My co-worker: a small demon who loves to sunbathe.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Always captivated by Beverly-Glenn Copeland’s wondrous voice, but this is even by those high standards something very special. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc3v...
youtube.com
Beverly Glenn-Copeland & Elizabeth Copeland - Harbour | Later... with Jools Holland
YouTube video by BBC Music
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
The yacht couple have called for calm, just FYI.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
“When you're young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn't, it stands still. We're the ones that move.”
Bob Dylan, 85
The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It's freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don't chase the parade anymore. You're an old king from some vanished country. You're harder to program. You're not rushing to become anything and you're not haunted by things that you did. You're haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.Bob Dylan, 85
The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it's not, and also you've run out of illusions. People treat you like either you've solved something or you've lost something, and you haven't. You see lite repeating itself everywhere.
The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you've got an
understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you're young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn't, it stands still. We're the ones that move.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
I would honestly rather your car be stolen than be fitted with a car alarm.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
Perfection.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Immense gratitude to @societyofauthors.bsky.social for awarding me one of their #SoAGrants. These are so valuable for authors - allowing a period of focused work with a little less financial stress. Do apply - the process is very straightforward and they’re a hugely supportive organisation.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Unless one habitually reads an entire book straight through without so much as a comfort break, doesn’t all reading involve “self-serialising”?
Extract from a guardian article about reading the classics which recommends “self-serialising” ie reading a chapter at a time in order to “replicate the experience of reading Victorian classics in the serialised form in which they were originally published.”
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
This is tremendous, harrowing profoundly important reporting. Anyone who has in the past few years had anything to do with adult social care, safeguarding reviews, and the near total erosion of social care standards will feel the chill of recognition. www.the-londoner.co.uk/tracey-turne...
the-londoner.co.uk
The body in the wheelchair: How did a troubled family get lost by the state?
A decayed corpse was found being wheeled through the centre of Walthamstow. Who was she? And who is to blame for her death?
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Hemsby, Norfolk.
The confederate flag flying beside a seaside fairground in Hemsby, Norfolk, UK.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
Having worked in or adjacent to the community care sector for around 25 years (and having only just left) I was very moved by @drrachelclarke.com’s brilliant Harriet Martineau lecture today on the crisis in care. Totally agree that we are, as Dr Clarke put it, “haemorrhaging care.”
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
Will Self is currently writing one of the best regular politics and culture columns you’re likely to read, and for reasons that remain a mystery doing so exclusively on Facebook and X. This week he has weighed in on the AI writing crisis, and his thoughts are typically piercing and brilliant.
The web has become a realm of disavowal. Human beings enter it in order not to become more fully themselves but less so. They use it to evade embodiment, evade continuity, evade consequence. That literary institutions proved so permeable to this environment demonstrates not merely incompetence but philosophical exhaustion. Publishing ceased to believe sufficiently in literature to defend the conditions under which literature remains possible.To write with genuine style requires embodiment plus all the linguistic capacities already approximated statistically by the machine. It requires the encoding of lived temporality into symbolic form capable of being… [tea break]…reanimated by another embodied consciousness at a later historical moment. Once one understands the complexity of this operation, one also understands how fragile literary civilisation truly is.The scale of the crisis is therefore monumental. The Granta affair is not simply an embarrassing editorial oversight. It is the first genuinely literary manifestation of a much larger civilisational fracture: institutions charged with preserving style can no longer reliably recognise it.
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