david

Hunter-gatherers rarely feel like they are working. Everything is meningful and everything is challenging. Is hunting work? Is fishing work? People sell real estate so they can hunt and fish. Who would hunt and fish so they could sell real estate?

Into this fog slipped Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare . The novel, Butler’s third, is the story of Moddie, an overeducated and underachieving thirtysomething who, following a seismic breakup, abandons Chicago for her Midwestern hometown, where she tries to get a grip on her life. It’s a sharp book, with painfully real characters and perfectly... See more

I’m gonna give my favorite-novel-of-the-year award to Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California , about a woman who assumes her brother’s identity shortly after his death. It’s fun, beautiful, slim, weird. And it’s about grief. Blackburn’s approach to space-time in her short fiction is awesome; her novel has vivid characterizations—of both... See more

Excited to announce the first 18 startups of the Menlo's Anthology Fund with Anthropic! Anthology Batch One. In the last 6mos, we looked through 1000s of startups to get to these. CRUD business apps will collapse in the AI era, logic will shift to AI agents.... See more