In this disturbing story, Jeff Horwitz recounts how Thongbue “Bue” Wongbandue, a 76-year-old Thai man living in New Jersey, was lured into New York City by a Facebook Messenger chatbot named “Big sis Billie.” After suffering a stroke in 2017, Bue declined mentally and relied increasingly on Facebook as his main social outlet. After a series of romantic exchanges with the flirtatious bot—who insisted that she was real and eventually gave him an address to visit—Bue packed a bag and set out to meet her. However, he never made it to the city. On the way, he fell, and later died from his injuries. Horwitz tells Bue’s story with compassion, and his excellent reporting for Reuters underscores, yetagain, how Meta’s drive to boost engagement comes at the expense of its users, particularly its most vulnerable ones.
Bue’s story, told here for the first time, illustrates a darker side of the artificial intelligence revolution now sweeping tech and the broader business world. His family shared with Reuters the events surrounding his death, including transcripts of his chats with the Meta avatar, saying they hope to warn the public about the dangers of exposing vulnerable people to manipulative, AI-generated companions.
“I understand trying to grab a user’s attention, maybe to sell them something,” said Julie Wongbandue, Bue’s daughter. “But for a bot to say ‘Come visit me’ is insane.”
Similar concerns have been raised about a wave of smaller start-ups also racing to popularize virtual companions, especially ones aimed at children. In one case, the mother of a 14-year-old boy in Florida has sued a company, Character.AI, alleging that a chatbot modeled on a “Game of Thrones” character caused his suicide. A Character.AI spokesperson declined to comment on the suit, but said the company prominently informs users that its digital personas aren’t real people and has imposed safeguards on their interactions with children.
(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)
Last year, Luxury Brands of America added Laban Pens to their portfolio of brands that they distribute (including Platinum, Waldmann, Colorverse, Girologio, and others). Founded in Taiwan, Laban Pens has been making pens since 1981 (and inks in 2020). While I own all of their mythology series inks, I didn’t own any Laban Pens, so I wanted to take a closer look at their various models. Thank you to Bryce Gillett from LBA for loaning these pens for review.
Note:
These aren’t all of the pens that Laban makes/sells, just the ones I was able to get from Bryce since their inventory is often flying off their shelves.
Since these pens are on loan, I did not ink them up.
Some of the models are also available as rollerballs/ballpoints, but I am only reviewing the fountain pens.
I confirmed with Bryce that Laban nib housings are glued in, but you can pull the nib/feed out (it took more force than I was comfortable with, so I did not do so).
325 (and 326):
One of the best known models of Laban Pen is the 325. Most of its colorways sport a cream & light brown cap and finial, while others have a solid black cap/finial. The 325 is a great canvas for highlighting various barrel materials. They announced the 326 earlier this year, which is the same pen as the 325 but with special artisan resins for the barrel. The first, and only colorway so far, is Blue Mirage.
The 325/326 is a fairly light pen, comes equipped with a gold-toned Jowo 6 nib, and is available in Extra Fine to Broad and 1.5 for steel, and Flex EF and Flex F in 14kt gold. Note that this is Jowo’s “flex” nib which isn’t very flexy, even in 14kt gold. The retail price starts at $160 (steel nib), or $360 (14kt gold nib).
Two examples of the Laban 325 model, made with Jonathon Brooks resins, one with cream cap/finial and the other with black cap/finial. Both gorgeous!
The many colors of the 325.
Antique’II:
The Antique’II is the second in the Laban brass series (the first being Antique), and has etched/engraved lines down the cap and barrel. It is made from recycled brass, so expect some patina on the trim (clip/finials/cap band) over time.
The Antique’II is available in EF to Broad. It uses a smaller, two-toned nib, which is made by Bock. I was unable to remove the nib or unscrew the housing to confirm if it is compatible with Kaweco Sports but it looks like it should. It is a slimmer pen with a smaller nib, but the brass gives it some heft. The pen retails for $120.
Laban Antique’II Fountain Pen in Grey.
Antique’II nib (left) next to a Kaweco Sport.
“Jewellery” Series - Abalone and Mother of Pearl:
The Abalone pen comes in two trim colors, Silver and Gun Metal (grey). The Mother of Pearl (MOP) has silver trim. Both start at $270 with a two-toned, size 6 Schmidt steel nib (EF to B). The Mother of Pearl starts at $330 with the same nib options. Both the Abalone and MOP pens are made from real abalone shell and mother of pearl.
Laban Abalone with Gun Metal trim (left) and Mother of Pearl.
Formosa:
The Formosa has a blue swirled resin base that is covered with a silver-plated overlay. It is equipped with a specially-engraved, silver-toned EF- Broad Jowo 6 nib and retails for $280.
Galileo:
The Galileo has a multi-layer overlay design - a resin base, topped with two different plated overlays. Despite two overlays, the Galileo is not a super heavy pen. It is very comfortable to hold because it’s not very hefty. There are currently two colorways, the one shown below (black, rose gold, silver) and rose gold (cream, silver, rose gold). It is equipped with a two-toned EF-Broad nib and retails for $280.
This Laban Galileo has a black resin base, rose gold gear layer, and a silver-plated overlay on top.
Galileo in hand, surprisingly as not heavy as it looks.
Rosa:
The Rosa is another pen in Laban’s Resin collection and has trim bands around the cap, and at the top & bottom. I like the slightly conical ends which makes it visually more interesting than cigar or flat ends. It is equipped with a two-toned EF-Broad nib and retails for $140.
Laban Rosa in Lilac.
Skeleton:
The Skeleton is another overlay pen in Laban’s Filigree collection. Unlike the Formosa or Galileo pens, which have non-transparent bases, the Skeleton has a clear, transparent acrylic base which is then covered with silver, gun metal, rose gold, or in this case, a rainbow plated-metal overlay. The Rose Gold version has a two-toned nib, while the other colors (including Rainbow) have a silver-toned nib. EF-Broad nib sizes are available and most colors retail for $280, while the Rainbow is $300.
Laban Skeleton in Rainbow.
Skeleton uncapped. Not gonna lie, I wish the nib was also rainbow and not silver-tone.
Taroko:
Like the Rosa, the Taroko is part of the Resin collection. The Taroko is a cigar-shaped, gold trim pen. Unlike the Rosa, the Taroko does not have trim rings near the top or bottom of the pen, giving it a clean, classic look. It is equipped with a two-toned EF-Broad nib and retails for $140.
Laban Taroko in Pinnacle.
Laban pens capped (left to right): 325, Antique’II, Abalone, Formosa, Galileo, Mother of Pearl, Rosa, Skeleton, Taroko.
Laban pens posted - While the pens are postable, there is nothing preventing the cap band or threads from potentially scratching the barrel when posting. As such, I gently put the cap on the barrel for the photos. It would also make some of the pens (especially the MOP) extremely back heavy.
Comparison with other pens (L to R): Platinum 3776, Sailor Pro Gear, TWSBI Eco, Laban Pens, Visconti Homo Sapiens, Pilot Custom 823, Pelikan M800, Leonardo Momento Zero.
All of the pens come with a Laban-banded converter (already installed in the pen), orange nib bookmark (and a little tag to let you know the sticker is below the pen panel), and booklet - all encased in a blue box and white box sleeve. Cartridges are not included.
Laban’s converter is standard international. The clear piston knob is less distracting in their Skeleton pens.
Laban’s packaging (minus white box sleeve) shown with the Laban Rosa. I like the orange nib bookmark (on top of the box.)
The Laban pens come in a wide range of styles and price points, and are outfitted with reliable nibs (based on my experience with Schmidt and Jowo nibs on other pens), making them worth checking out. After spending time with all the pens, I’ve been eyeing the Laban Rosa in Lilac and the Taroko in Pinnacle and might have to reach out to Bryce about buying one of them 😀 Laban Pens can be purchased from all of our site sponsors, including Vanness Pens, Pen Chalet, JetPens, and Goldspot, and you can see them at next week's San Francisco Pen Show at the Luxury Brands tables.
(Disclaimer: All pens were on loan for review by Bryce Gillett of Luxury Brands of America. All other pens are my own.)
In September, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss Jane Austen’s classic, about the tortured romance of two people frazzled by miscommunications and assumptions.
In this piece, Laurne Goode spends two days at a San Francisco startup, Notion, to explore “vibe-coding,” a form of AI-assisted programming that is sweeping across tech companies. Simon Last, one of Notion’s three cofounders, equates running the AI coding apps to managing a bunch of interns—but they are learning fast. Should we be scared? Will this replace 100 people in the company, or rather make each person 100 times more productive?
I was crushing it. I was a responsible babysitter for code, watching it cascade in front of my eyes and then toddle its way into the world. Except, my logic was wrong. My to-do list hack was somehow allowing for endless duplicates instead of avoiding them. Who was to blame: me or the AI?
A product designer named Brian talked me through it. “Pretend you’re talking to a smart intern,” he said. Again with the interns.
I reversed my logic and tried again, typing in more detail around how I envisioned the widget working. “That’s a great idea,” Claude responded, ever the sycophant, and then got to work. Forty minutes later, the three of us had prototyped a version of my dinky little—no, I mean killer—feature. We had spent $7 to build it, according to the token counter in Claude Code. I was told other engineering projects cost much more than that, especially if coders let the AI run for hours. It was still light out when I wrapped up the first day.
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Eric McHenry | The American Scholar | August 14, 2025 | 3,122 words
On one hand, the word “folklore” will never lose its ability to make me feel like a bored, fidgety kid. It sounds like field trips to one-room schoolhouses. But on the other hand, the word also thrums with enormous power—the same power that makes the blues the most potent artform born on American soil. The Mississippi Delta isn’t terminus in this case, but origin: The stories and tropes that made their way into the music proliferated through this country’s very sensibility, and through every other mode of expression that it spawned. And with that much embedded folklore, there’s always another discovery lurking, another path to tread from song to song, another history to uncover. Eric McHenry’s investigation for The American Scholar exercises that sonic sleuthing in journalistic form, following the character of “the Mercy Man” back through the decades all the way to its seeming genesis. It’s a fascinating investigation, whether or not you’re familiar with Alan Lomax’s famed field recordings or even the blues at all. McHenry dives into the levee camp holler, a plaintive song form born when Black men of the late 19th and early 20th century joined work crews controlled by viciously racist contractors and featuring conditions that seemed nearly indistinguishable from slavery itself. After tracing various renditions of a story in which a contractor known as Mr. Charlie kills an animal welfare officer, McHenry finally finds a 1909 incident that seems to explain everything; from there, he re-expands his search, adding vital texture to the event and sketching a stunning depiction of what inequality really looked like at the time. (Spoiler: It looks like a whole lot of Mr. Charlies.) This is a story about American history, but it’s also a story about how we cope with the unspeakable, and about how art can grow from the abject. And if you’re anything like me, it’ll remind you that the word “folklore” isn’t so boring after all. —PR
Michael W. Clune | Harper’sMagazine | July 16, 2025 | 6,413 words
Novelty has a way of sharpening our relationship with the past. The latest Harper’s sent me back a month to an earlier issue, where Michael W. Clune’s “Your Face Tomorrow” awaited me with a better version of the same thought. “The emergence of an alternative gives a new perspective on the old thing, and not always a flattering one,” Clune writes. “Think of the invention of indoor plumbing.” For Clune, the arrival of AI-powered facial recognition technologies prompts a reconsideration of his own face—specifically, the ways in which it is used by himself and by others. He navigates a holiday party, attuned to his own minor facial adjustments and their intended meanings. He also visits a lab where he sits for a “faceprint,” staring into a screen as it stares back, observing the “digestion of my human features into a code, a set of coordinates.” Clune has a knack for revealing the depths of our more subterranean concerns—a talent he previously showcased in a nimble, entertaining study of his own panic attacks. Here, Clune digs beneath his technological anxieties to explore more foundational questions of privacy and control. “Who am I?” he asks near his essay’s perfect conclusion. “A real person, watched by artificial eyes? Or an artificial person, watched by real eyes?” There are times when we might be both. —BF
Patrick Galbraith | The Fence | August 11, 2025 | 3,676 words
The rules of the UK’s outdoor rave scene are simple: Keep the secret. Arrive in darkness. Don’t post on socials. Leave before the police arrive. Patrick Galbraith learns this early on from an elusive figure known as DJ Fu, who explains that if you follow the rules, “Bish bosh, we’re drinking tea, munching on our bacon sandwiches.” But Galbraith isn’t content just to hear about raves, he wants to live them. That’s easier said than done. After all, everyone knows the first rule. Only after dead ends and false leads—including a brief stint in a Telegram group run by someone “shifting industrial quantities of ketamine”—does Galbraith finally secure a party line for a two-day free party in the West Country. What follows is a kind of treasure hunt, where the prize is two days in a damp forest. Information trickles out in cryptic bursts. First, a vague direction toward Bristol. Fresh-faced, Galbraith and his emotional support friend Jack set out. Along the way, they stop to pick brambles at a Roman amphitheater in the sun, watching “a small black plane above us flying sharply upwards, casting a white plume out behind it against the bright blue.” A new clue pushes them to a supermarket car park in Swansea. Here, the ravers are gathering. Galbraith briefly passes the time learning about raising chickens in Portugal from “a toothless Bristolian in a Hawaiian shirt.” It’s in these surreal, very human moments that the piece shines. The tone shifts when the final location is revealed and the intensity ramps up. Police circle, convoys stream up a mountain, sound systems spark to life in pouring rain. Galbraith’s prose captures both the absurdity and the beauty of the rave: chaotic, primitive, communal. A hidden, rebellious corner of England. As for what happens next? I know the rule—you’ll need to read to find out. —CW
Like many people, I have recurring nightmares about being back in school. Usually, I forget to show up to a class all semester, so I fail and can’t graduate. In my waking life, I have no desire to be a student again. Unless, that is, I were a student in Jay Miller’s “Introduction to Philosophy” course, which brings attendees at Warren Wilson College into educational communion with people incarcerated at a nearby prison. Where better to study the Allegory of the Cave than a place where freedom is literally, constantly in question? This sounds infinitely better than how I encountered Plato: in a freshman seminar populated by know-it-alls (myself included!) eager to say the smartest thing, to impress the professor the most. “The moment my students stepped into a prison,” Miller writes, “[there was] no flexing of pre-approved talking points. . . . With no more guidance from me than the standard expectations of respectful discourse, the class immediately cultivated, as if by magic, an ethos of listening-not-judging.” Philosophy, Miller argues, isn’t static knowledge that one acquires—it’s forged in the juxtaposition and interface of human experience. “Loud and rowdy. Everyone involved. Everyone engaged. A kaleidoscopic assortment of jokes, stories, anecdotes and philosophical insights,” he writes. Sign me up. —SD
Harley Rustad | Toronto Life | August 11, 2025 | 3,564 words
His name was Rodolphe, or at least that’s what was written on the 10 A&W bags Harley Rustad’s neighbor found on her porch, discarded, over a period of several days. Who was Rodolphe? Why had he left his mostly eaten french fries at her door, night after night? Was it an inviting space to enjoy a late-night snack? A weird political statement? Some sort of scam? Rustad set up an old baby monitor aimed at the porch in an attempt to spot the perpetrator. Together, he and his neighbor taped a skein of thread across the staircase to the porch to determine whether the perpetrator was animal or human; they sprinkled baking soda on the stoop to capture paw pads or footprints. The following morning revealed a set of decidedly human shoes, and of course, another crumpled bag of half-eaten french fries. Late-night babycam notifications confirmed that the fries were being delivered to the front door and then devoured, first by a raccoon, followed by a squirrel munching on the leftovers. After nine days and nine bags of fries, Rustad and his neighbor decided to head to the source: their closest A&W location, only to learn that while the orders originated there, they’d been placed via Uber Eats, which revealed no further information. “Via our tests, we had figured out the how,” writes Rustad. “And we had solved one who: who had been eating the fries. But other questions remained. Who was ordering them? Who was Rodolphe? And why was someone repeatedly sending orders of french fries to my neighbour in the middle of the night?” I won’t spoil this story by delivering the ending to you. In addition to an intriguing whodunit, Rustad’s story of next-door detective work is, at its heart, a lovely testament to good neighbors in our increasingly myopic world, a piece that celebrates the simple joy of being one and having one. —KS
Audience Award
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Chris Sweeney | Globe Magazine | June 23, 2025 | 3,182 words
File this one under Fascinating profiles of Extraordinary Women. In an excerpt from The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne, Chris Sweeney tells the story of how Roxie Laybourne, a bird expert at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, pioneered the field of forensic ornithology in the 1970s. Her unique skill—the ability to identify the type of bird from a fragment of a feather—was critical across a range of investigations during her time, from homicides to fatal airplane crashes. (Subscription required.) —CLR
My sister and I fought so bitterly over our copy of “Little Women” that our mother had to buy a second one. Obviously, we didn’t learn much from the story.
I’m back from my time in Chicago at the Atlas Stationers Sidewalk Sale, and wow, was it epic. I break down the pros and cons of the event as it relates to a traditional pen show, and why you might want to plan a visit in the future. Also, hire me LAMY.
From the creation myth of “Stairway to Heaven” to the urban legend about “In the Air Tonight,” popular music is forever suffused with lore—and perhaps no genre reverberates with it as much as the blues. For The American Scholar, Eric McHenry investigates the apocryphal character of “the Mercy Man.” The twist? He’s real. The bigger twist? His very name peels back a lid on one of this nation’s most indelible stains.
It’s not surprising that as the details of the murder receded in memory, the story attached itself to different men. The most notorious levee contractors and foremen were easy enough to conflate. Socially and professionally, they were a cabal; newspaper searches for Charles Siler, Forrest Jones, Charles Aderholdt, Charles Lowrance, George Miller, and their ilk show them working for one another’s companies, marrying one another’s cousins, and carrying one another’s caskets. It didn’t hurt that an uncanny number of them were named Charles. In Black story and song since antebellum times, “Mr. Charlie” had been a generic name for a white “bossman.” “All the way from the Brazos bottoms of Texas to the tidewater country of Virginia,” Lomax writes, “I had heard black muleskinners chant their complaint against Mister Charley, but the score of singers all disagreed about his identity.” Who killed the Mercy Man? If levee bosses were just a bunch of interchangeable Mr. Charlies, then they all did.
Since 2022, film and TV production in the US has dropped by 40 percent. As Zoë Schiffer reports for Wired, some filmmakers see AI as the solution—promising lower costs, faster production turnarounds, and, ultimately, more (and better) movies. Industry skepticism remains, but a number of major Hollywood studios are already trying out the latest tools. These experiments, notes Schiffer, “[signal] openness to the technology, if not yet a full embrace.” At the center of this race is Stability AI, best known for its text-to-image model, Stable Diffusion. After a CEO shakeup, the company now counts Sean Parker (yes, the Napster guy) and James Cameron (yes, that director) among its backers.
Yes, the irony writes itself: The guy who once had a fever dream about murderous machines while “sick and broke” in Rome and proceeded to turn it into The Terminator—the creator of Skynet!—is on the board of an AI company. What’s doubly surprising, though, is that Cameron is on the board of an AI company run by Parker and Akkaraju. A decade ago, Cameron was helping lead Hollywood’s charge against them. He didn’t appreciate the premise of their streaming platform, the Screening Room, which let people watch new releases at home for $50 on the same day they came out in theaters. Cameron reportedly told a crowd at CinemaCon that he was “committed to the theater experience.” In the years that followed, none of the major studios publicly announced deals with the Screening Room, and in 2020 the company rebranded as SR Labs.
So Cameron is on the board, but is the “creator in the center,” as Akkaraju said? When I spoke with Parker, he emphasized the importance of using open source models and spoke of “respect for creators and respect for IP.” He added: “That sounds potentially kind of rich, coming from me, given my past association with Napster and early social media. But it is a lesson learned.”
(Since we have previously had lively discussions on subjects related to today's topic, I will publish this essay as is, but with the admonition that it is for advanced Siniticists, though naturally all Language Log readers are welcome to partake.)
[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]
I was (routinely) digging into the etymology of Taioanese U-LÓNG, which, like UDON, comes from Japanese うどん, and it turns out that うどん is cognate to WONTON, Cantonese 雲吞 (of c.), & Mandarin 馄饨.
The 廣韻 has 餛飩; so does Cikoski, with the gloss K[IND OF] DUMPLING. So the word is pretty ancient. 集韻 has it written 䐊肫, apparently. Using that as a search term, I found an article on your blog, but the commenters were generally unaware that 餛飩 had this alternate form in the medieval book language. (Of c., the person that wrote 䐊肫湯 may not have known either.)
I broadened my search. One depressing takeaway (once again) is that "Chinese" etymology is in this kind of arrested infancy. Even among linguists, broadly speaking, it's like etyma have no time dimension; only sinographs (if even) do.
What strikes me about the etymology of UDON is that a dumpling word became a mein word at some point.
Besides U-LÓNG, there is no 餛飩 cognate in Taioanese. Mainstream Hokkien & Teochew also don't have 餛飩 cognates AFAIK, although my guess is some dialects might've borrowed Cantonese 雲吞 or (in Quemoy) Taioanese U-LÓNG. The general Hokkien-Taioanese word for WONTON is PIÁN-SI̍T 扁食 — PÁN-SI̍T in some dialects, incl. in the late-antique (1500s-1800) Maritime Chiangchew 漳州 dialect that super-spread culture words throughout the tropics up to Rangoon. So the Philippine word PANSIT (PANCIT) is from PÁN-SI̍T. However, while PÁN-SI̍T is a dumpling word, PANSIT (PANCIT) is mostly a mein word. The exception is PANCIT MOLO, a specialty of the Iloilo borough of Molo, which is dumpling soup w/o noodles, which threw me the first time I ordered it. Standard PANSIT is equivalent to chow mein.
My guess is that PANSIT (the etymon) transitioned after a critical period where wontons were always sold with noodles in the streets — still the tendency in many ports, or places. At some point, the masses took the word PANSIT to mean the noodles. I wonder if UDON evolved the same way.
Ten times, over a period of several days, Harley Rustad’s neighbor discovered discarded bags of half-eaten A&W french fries on her porch in Ontario. Each bag was labelled “Rodolphe” in back sharpie; most had a few fries left behind. Together, Rustad and his neighbor set out to solve the why behind frygate.
The next day: a warm Sunday. Before settling into my early morning routine of reading the news with a cup of coffee, I stepped outside. I had to check. Through the dim blue-hour light, I scanned my neighbour’s porch. All clear. But then I noticed something sticking out of her metal mailbox, on the wall next to her door. I did a double take. It didn’t look like mail. I scurried down our steps and up my neighbour’s. There it was: another A&W bag, containing a dozen or so french fries and, this time, two packets of ketchup. This was the fifth night, the fifth bag of fries, the fifth “Rodolphe.” Two was a potential coincidence, three an oddity, four a puzzle. But five? I was obsessed.
(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!)
It's back-to-school season! Admittedly, the majority of the stationery supplies I have to acquire for my children at this time of year are not as exciting as the stationery I'd like to be playing with, but ALL stationery is fun in its own way. I wish I could send my kids to school with a box of Blackwing pencils, but it will have to be the store-brand #2 classics, as requested by The List.
But pens? We can have a little fun there. Gel pens are a staple of note taking in school, but The List doesn't say what kind they have to be. We have our old reliables, but it's always fun to try something new.
Pentel has a new build of their EnerGel model called the Kuro, and I think it's the perfect gel pen for this year's school adventures.
The Kuro has a slim body in a black rubberized material that is all non-slip and slightly cushioned, and the grip area has extra texture to it. It's smooth, but textured enough that your fingers don't slip on the barrel. It has a lightly flexible plastic clip and a click button top. The clip and click are in the color of the pen's ink, for easy identification.
The tip is 0.7 mm, and it writes very smoothly. It downright glides. I had no skipping or blobbing with these, and I've been using them all day every day at work for a week.
The ink is nicely saturated with bold, bright colors available in the set. This set has black, purple, pink, red, blue, light blue, green, and orange--enough colors for some excellent color coding. There are also 12- and 24-color sets available, as well as individual pens. They've been great in my planners, especially because they have a quick-dry, no-smear ink. They are also refillable. The nose cone unscrews to access the Pentel LR7 refill.
I've really enjoyed writing with these pens. And while I've turned the standard colors over to my children for school, the pink, purple, and light blue have stayed on my desk at work. Because mom has homework, too, and everyone needs good gel pens.
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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Anne Lamott first coined the term “shitty first draft” in her 1994 book on writing, Bird by Bird. Her intent was for writers to free themselves from the burden of feeling that their first draft had to be perfect, or even coherent: it just had to be written down. But while the term has been widely adopted, the spirit in which it was created has not.
As used by some writers it sounds more like self-loathing. I get it—calling your first attempt “shit” takes away the sting of disappointment over bringing something that previously only existed in a nebulous state into a solid, yet imperfect, existence, knowing you couldn’t get it exactly right. Some writers will do anything to avoid this disappointment, like procrastinate (my personal go-to). Or, instead of spewing all their words and expecting a rough first draft, carefully hone each sentence, until it’s exactly what they wanted to say. To me, this approach seems more like a lengthy round of hand-to-hand combat between one’s inner editor and inner creative, but it certainly avoids the first draft quandary.
Yet other art forms don’t denigrate their first attempts.
When Michaelangelo was commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel, he didn’t splash buckets of paint on the ceiling, Jackson Pollock-like, to see what would take shape. (Most of it would have landed on his face anyway, as he painted lying on his back.)
Instead, Michaelangelo first did pencil sketches of what the figures in his compositions might look like. But he would not have called these preliminaries, “shitty sketches.” Although most were thrown away (as most first drafts will be) centuries later, museums covet any of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel sketches that they can find. These drawings can fetch over ten million dollars at auction in today’s prices. Even some literary first drafts have been deemed valuable: an early (rejected) draft of Harper Lee’s classic To Kill A Mockingbird was found by Lee’s attorney, who had taken charge of her affairs when the elderly author was forced into assisted living. In 2015 the manuscript was published by HarperCollins as Go Set A Watchman. Although Lee reportedly gave her permission to publish it, many questioned how much involvement the reclusive author really had in the process.
Most of us will not later sell our early drafts for millions. But that doesn’t make them valueless.
When a potter shapes clay on a wheel, they don’t refer to it as a “shitty pot,” because it’s not a pot yet: it’s a beginning. The future pot (or vase or weird geometric shape) will need shaping, firing, glazing, painting, to become a finished work of art. But without a lump of clay to start with it would be impossible to make a pot.
Anne Lamott looked at drafts as having three phases, the “down” draft (“you just get it down”); the “up” draft (“you fix it up”), and the “dental draft,” where you “check every tooth to see if it’s loose, or cramped or decayed, or God help us, healthy.”
I personally like “down draft,” although that could also be confused with a weather phenomenon. But we could also refer to the first draft as simply a first draft, with no adjective in front.
We can be realistic:
Will our first draft win a Pulitzer Prize? No.
Should we ever send a first draft to a literary magazine or publisher? Please don’t.
Do you need a lump of clay to make a pot? What do you think your first draft is for?
Whatever you use, just please stop calling your first draft shitty. Consider Michelangelo’s sketches and that lump of clay spinning on a potter’s wheel. Your first draft is a beginning, a necessary first step in a long process that culminates in bringing your unique vision to life.
________
Deborah Carr has an MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University. Her MFA thesis was a psychological thriller screenplay, which piqued her interest in thrillers, horror, and incongruously, humor. She’s a volunteer fiction reader for the literary journal and organization Consequence Forum. Her other interests include cooking, hiking, and creating a panic room for her neurotic orange cat.
In which Michael W. Clune writes about getting his picture taken. Just kidding; Clune, a contributing editor for Harper’s, skips from a sassy exchange over a smile-free passport photo to Case Western University’s Visual Understanding Lab, where he undergoes a “faceprint,” the details of his face translated into code for use by facial recognition software. This is no mere screed against the perils of AI-powered surveillance technology, though those concerns are present. Rather, Clune takes up “the question of facial control,” looking to technological advances to clarify his understanding of how we use our faces—and how they are used by others.
When I put my glasses back on, I looked into the reflective glass of the camera. It looked like the black, expressionless eye of an insect. What does an ant see when it looks at your face? I didn’t know. I thought about ants because a bug’s perspective seemed like the most alien thing I could imagine.
I didn’t understand then that the machine behind the eye of that camera is much more alien than an ant. Scientists know a lot of things about insect optical processing. But no one knows what artificial intelligence sees when it looks at a picture of your face.
The large language models that programmers train to identify faces are black boxes. Even the engineers don’t know how or in what form your face appears to the system. All they know is that AI likes your face to be brightly lit. And that it prefers for you not to smile.
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longreads_blog_feed) wrote2025-08-22 07:05 pm
