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Sam Byers

@sambyers.bsky.social
900 followers 382 following 704 posts

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

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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
What if we wrapped books in meat. Men might pick them up by mistake. Then also read them by mistake later.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Perhaps if we could send out some sort of signal these men would respond.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
What do they want. What do they think about. How can we communicate with them.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
In other news, men: the ongoing conundrum. www.culturedmag.com/article/2026...
culturedmag.com
How Many Men Does It Take to Get a Man to Pick Up a Book?
We asked a publisher, an agent, an author, an editor, and a literary gadfly how they are working to solve the so-called male literacy crisis.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Yes completely agree. I think the long term consequences of effectively outsourcing our uniqueness and humanity in this way haven’t really been considered. And of course, thinking is free! Inevitable that someone would try and make private thought a subscription based service.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I also think a really under-explored aspect of this is confidence. I can only assume that if people feel they need something that composes an email for them or generates ad copy or something, they must not have felt that assured in what they were doing to begin with.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
It’s a long standing confusion that the purveyors of AI are now exploiting in order to sell people tools they don’t need. Similarly, people often ask novelists “where” they “get” their ideas from. Nowhere - they arise in the mind.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Yeah I’ve had these kinds of conversations and I’m struck by what seems to be a total misapprehension of what an “idea” is - as if an idea is a kind of naturally occurring resource that can be mined or harvested, rather than an inward urge that demands to be expressed or explored.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Writing a professional email setting out why you felt a particular book didn’t work means engaging with a very basic set of aesthetic and technical criteria and using language to explain your reasoning. Once you can’t do that without help, you’re in quite significant trouble.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The real danger here isn’t even the obvious point of principle around upholding certain values etc - it’s that people are going to become de-skilled at an alarming rate, leading to both a precipitous decline in quality and the disappearance of anyone able to arrest the decline.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I mean come on.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
This is going to end badly. www.wired.com/story/book-p...
wired.com
Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting
Workers at three major publishing houses tell WIRED that LLMs are being used for publicity, cover art, back cover copy, and emails, as some execs push junior staff to champion the tech.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
My god this is absolutely transcendent. Despite listening to it many times, I’ve never actually watched a performance of Music For Eighteen Musicians. Mesmerising. And what a performance too - rock solid but with that all important shimmering, glistening quality. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWvf...
youtube.com
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians, Quartet and Music for Pieces of Wood | Live from The Glasshouse
YouTube video by The Glasshouse International Centre for Music
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
www.sacbee.com/news/local/a... Yeah - it’s been a very sad few years for him, although he has produced great work amidst it all (the Ukraine piece for Granta was especially good). I will definitely be obtaining the box set! Phase two will be, er, reading it.
sacbee.com
Famed writer William Vollmann is dying. Sacramento’s still a big part of his life
William T. Vollmann has spent roughly half his life in Sacramento. With a new book out Oct. 6, he discussed what the city means to him.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Sadly could be the last chance. More and more I think: his is the major literary project of our lifetimes.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Vollmann.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The episode on camouflage clothing - not a subject I would immediately think would be my kind of thing - is especially revelatory, finding its way to Jan 6th, militarised police forces, and special ops chic. Feels like it gets at something deep in the contemporary American psyche.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
By far the most fascinating and well put together podcast I’ve listened to in ages: an eight part history of American military and outdoor clothing that is really a kind of cultural history of America itself. Brilliantly researched and structured. articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/gear-chapt...
articlesofinterest.substack.com
Gear: Chapter 1
The American Military Uniform
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Confident young man on the train asserting that “berries aren’t fruit.”
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Never get tired of the skies over the fens.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This meanwhile isn’t “lovely” as such - it’s austere and gritty and absolutely unflinching - but it’s astoundingly good.
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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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Reposted by Sam Byers
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 a future where we all sit around in our sweaty plastic clothes eating air with a 1cm ring of dough round it is a bleak one and we must work tirelessly to avoid it.
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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
Yeah I agree. I have a lot of concerns around rights once that privatisation/digitisation happens. I think eg benefits decisions, homelessness applications, civil legal matters etc all being decided by bots will be a disaster, and once we outsource ethical thinking we’ll struggle to get it back.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Based on this the most likely future seems to be pure chaos - omnidirectional violence and disruption.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I’m not sure the single super-evil threat model of political rhetoric holds much water when all around the world people are essentially vibe-coding weapons guidance systems, pathogens, and immense cyber-attacks.
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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
Important to keep abreast of what’s not happening, won’t happen, and wouldn’t matter even if it did happen, I always think.
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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
If you extrapolate this belief out and shape from it a worldview, it becomes pretty easy to see why we are where we are, in so many ways.
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Ruby is absolutely right, I think, that the injunction to “write what you know” is based on the (false) belief that “the only knowable being is oneself.”
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Sam Byers @sambyers.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
It wouldn’t be in the scope of Ruby’s review but there is an even broader analysis to be made, I think, of the prison of individual consciousness, a collapse into solipsism, a fallacy of self knowledge, that explains much of our contemporary art, politics, and deep unhappiness.
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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
Too “cruel” to be in contention for a literary award? Really?
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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
Would you not, in an era of eroding truth and trust, in which once cherished institutions and principles of learning, study, culture etc, are rapidly disintegrating, take the opportunity to make a sturdy case for standards, trust, a bulwark against disinformation etc?
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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
Don’t want to know what it is now anyway. Little bleeder.
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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
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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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