Online Reading (Feb 21, 2026)

A mix of new and old articles and posts this week.

“THERE’S A LOT of things about the modern world that I don’t like,” the artist Michael Heizer said.
Michael Heizer Measures His Art in Miles and Tons

My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells.
Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking

This is not literature as “entertainment,” no. It’s literature as propaganda.The story’s foregrounding of LLMs as narrator and main character, its framing of both as alienated workers mourning the absence of something they can’t even name, and its depiction of writing itself as more or less Sisyphean labor all serve to discursively construct LLMs as comrades to suffering humans. By extension, the human condition is cast as a generic, apolitical state of abstracted loneliness and confusion cut through by the occasional moment of similarly nondescript wonder.
Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities (The author of this piece, Rachele Dini, looks like a very interesting writer)

I get my ideas from a wide catalog of experience with a variety of media, life experiences and a brain that craves experiences that subvert and trust the audience.
A Video Game Dynamo With Strange Ideas Always Swirling

The public library is the most democratic of public services. Nobody will ask you what you’re doing there. By being there, you belong.
Texas Libraries Are Engines of Optimism

The historic avant-garde emphasized the puckish role of the artist concerning polite society: to improve humanity’s general lot through scandal and provocation.
The institution won’t save you.
On Art After Risk