For most of the industrial era, the professional was the worker technology could not reach. The factory hand could be replaced by a machine, the clerk by a spreadsheet, the switchboard operator by a network of relays. But the radiologist reading a shadow on a scan, the litigator sensing which argument would land with a particular judge, the structured-finance banker who knew instinctively that a deal was wrong before she could say why — these people were protected by something more durable than a job title. They were protected by the illegibility of their own expertise. Their judgement lived in a place no employer could copy and no algorithm could reach: inside their heads, accumulated over decades, most of it never written down because most of it could not be.

That protection is now being dismantled, and the striking thing is who is dismantling it. It is not being taken from the experts by force. It is being bought from them, by the hour, and a growing number of them are selling.

In June 2026, The Hollywood Reporter documented the entertainment-industry version of this trade: writers, editors, and development executives, squeezed out of a contracting film and television market, taking gigs through AI training platforms to correct model outputs and teach the systems to better imitate human creative judgement. That story is real, and it is wrenching, and it has been told. But it is the visible tip of something much larger and, for the professional classes, far more consequential. The same platforms that recruit out-of-work screenwriters are recruiting doctors, lawyers, bankers, and software engineers — the people whose expertise was supposed to be the last thing a machine could learn — and paying them, in some cases north of a hundred pounds an hour, to hand it over. This is not a story about creatives. It is a story about what happens to the entire idea of expertise when the cheapest way to automate a profession turns out to be to hire it.

The moat was always tacit

To understand why this moment is genuinely new, you have to understand why economists spent two decades believing it could not happen.

In 2003, the labour economist David Autor, together with Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, published what became one of the most influential papers on technology and work of its generation. Its argument, distilled, was that computers are good at tasks that can be reduced to explicit rules and bad at everything else. Routine work — the kind you can specify step by step — was exposed to automation. Non-routine work that depended on judgement, pattern recognition, and tacit understanding was safe, because you could not write down the rules for it in a form a machine could follow. The whole edifice of professional employment sat comfortably on the safe side of that line. A doctor's diagnostic intuition, a lawyer's sense of a case, an engineer's feel for a system — these were the paradigm cases of work that resisted codification.

The intellectual root of that idea is older still. In 1966 the philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi coined the phrase that has haunted every attempt to automate skilled work since: “We know more than we can tell.” Polanyi's point was that the most valuable human knowledge is precisely the knowledge we cannot fully articulate — the surgeon's hands, the taster's palate, the reader's ear. You can watch a master at work for years and still not be able to reduce what they do to a manual. Tacit knowledge, by definition, escapes the rulebook.

For two hundred years, this was the professional's moat. Expertise commanded a premium because it was scarce, and it was scarce because it could not be transferred except slowly, expensively, and through human beings — apprenticeships, residencies, pupillages, the long grind of watching someone who already knew. You could not download a career. You had to grow one.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback is, at its core, a machine for defeating Polanyi's paradox — not by finally writing down the rules, but by routing around the need to. The insight underneath RLHF is that you do not have to articulate tacit judgement in order to capture it. You only have to elicit it, over and over, at scale. Show the expert two outputs and ask which is better. Show a proposed diagnosis and ask where it goes wrong. Present a contract clause and ask the lawyer to flag the liability the model missed. The expert cannot tell you the rule, but the expert can tell you, reliably, which answer is correct — and if you gather enough of those judgements, a statistical system can infer the shape of the rule from the pattern of the choices. The tacit is made legible not by description but by demonstration, one graded example at a time.

This is the quiet conceptual violence at the heart of the story. The very quality that made expert judgement safe from automation — its resistance to being written down — turns out not to matter, because the machine never needed the rulebook. It needed the expert's verdicts. And the expert, it turns out, will supply those verdicts for a day rate.

Displacement by participation

Set this against every previous wave of technological displacement and the difference is not one of degree but of kind.

When the power loom displaced the handloom weaver, the machine did not first apprentice itself to the weaver. When the spreadsheet displaced legions of bookkeepers, it did not pay them by the hour to teach it double-entry accounting. The classic pattern of automation is substitution from the outside: a capability is built by engineers, deployed by capital, and it renders a class of workers redundant whether or not those workers participate. Their expertise is not extracted; it is simply made irrelevant. There is something almost clean about it. The weaver owed the loom nothing.

What is happening now inverts that logic. The system cannot be built from the outside, because the capability it needs — expert judgement in medicine, law, finance, screenwriting — does not exist in any codified form for the engineers to programme. It exists only inside the experts. So the only way to build the system is to bring the experts inside the process and pay them to externalise what they know. The displacement does not happen despite the worker's participation. It happens through it. The worker is not a bystander to their own obsolescence; they are, functionally, its supplier.

This is the structural novelty worth naming precisely, because it changes the moral and economic character of the whole arrangement. Call it displacement by participation. The expertise is not eliminated; it is transferred. And the transfer is voluntary in the narrow sense that no one is holding a gun to the physician moonlighting on a medical-reasoning dataset, and coerced in the broader sense that a great many of the people doing this work have arrived at it because the market for their primary expertise has already thinned beneath them, or because they can see it thinning and are hedging.

The screenwriter Ruth Fowler described exactly this hedge in a personal essay for Wired in the spring of 2026, writing about turning to AI training work because entertainment jobs had dried up and she needed cash for rent and groceries. The drying up is measurable: employment in the US motion picture and sound recording industries fell 28 per cent between July 2022 and May 2026, from 450,000 jobs to 326,000, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures compiled by The Guardian. Another veteran writer, quoted in the reporting on the same phenomenon, described the psychological texture of the work as something akin to a crazymaking standardised test — hour after hour of grading a machine's attempts at the thing you used to be paid to do, telling it where it went wrong, watching it get imperceptibly better on your instruction. The creative version of the story is the one that has broken through, because creative pain photographs well. But the same transaction, conducted more quietly and at higher rates, is now running through the professions that the middle class has spent a century treating as safe harbours.

The going rate for a career

The marketplace that has industrialised this transfer is best embodied by a single company. Mercor, founded in 2023 by three entrepreneurs then in their early twenties, began life as an AI-powered hiring platform and pivoted, when it discovered where the money was, into something more consequential: a broker of human expertise for the AI labs. It now connects a roster of specialists to companies including, according to legal filings, OpenAI and Anthropic, who pay for the expert feedback that trains their models. Meta was on that list until March 2026, when a supply-chain attack on the open-source LiteLLM package was used to lift some four terabytes of data from Mercor, exposing the personal details of more than 40,000 contractors along with proprietary source code and the training methodologies of its clients. Meta paused its work with the company indefinitely; OpenAI said it was investigating but kept its projects running. The contractors were not consulted about any of it, which is a fair measure of how much control the people supplying the material retain over anything drawn from them. In October 2025 the company raised $350 million in a Series C round, quintupling its valuation in eight months to roughly $10 billion. By July 2026 it was in talks again, this time at a valuation of about $20 billion — a doubling in nine months — on an annualised revenue run rate that had crossed $2 billion after doubling in four; in August, Nvidia was reported to be weighing participation. As of early September the round had not been confirmed closed.

The composition of Mercor's workforce is the part that should arrest anyone who still believes expertise is a fortress. The company has said it has more than 30,000 experts on its books, paid on average over $85 an hour, with the firm distributing more than $1.5 million to contractors every day. A proposed class action filed in a Texas federal court in May 2026, White v. Mercor.io Corp., describes that workforce with useful specificity: it includes physicians, attorneys, bankers, and software engineers. Reporting on the sector puts the rate bands into focus — physicians commanding somewhere in the region of $130 to $170 an hour on some platforms, lawyers around $110 to $130, with the highest specialist tiers in medicine, law, and finance reportedly reaching several hundred dollars an hour. The Hollywood Reporter, covering the creative end of the same market, noted writers earning up to $44 an hour and music professionals with advanced degrees up to $100.

Read those numbers as an outsider and they look generous — a good hourly wage for skilled remote work. Read them as an economist and they describe something stranger: the spot price of a profession's accumulated judgement, quoted by the hour, with no premium for the decades it took to acquire. A physician's diagnostic intuition, built through medical school, residency, and years of practice, is being purchased at a rate that does not distinguish it from the labour that produced it — because the buyer does not want the career. The buyer wants the verdicts the career produces, in sufficient volume to train them out of the physician.

Why is this the cheapest path to capability? The answer lies in the changing internal economics of building a frontier model. For most of the deep-learning era, the dominant cost was pre-training — pouring the scraped text of the internet through ever-larger networks. But the internet's supply of high-quality text is finite and largely exhausted, and the frontier has shifted to what the labs call post-training: the reinforcement and refinement that turns a fluent but directionless model into one that reasons, follows instructions, and gets specialist questions right. By industry estimates, post-training has grown from a small fraction of a frontier model's compute budget a few years ago to something like a fifth or a quarter of it today, and the human data feeding that stage has become one of the most contested inputs in the industry. Individual frontier labs are reported to be spending on the order of a billion dollars a year on human training data.

Here is the economic crux. A judgement rendered by a domain expert — the correct diagnosis, the right objection, the flawed clause caught — is worth a great deal to a model precisely because it is scarce and hard to synthesise. A single well-designed expert contribution can be worth more to a training run than a hundred cheap, generic labels, because it carries information the model cannot get anywhere else. Against the cost of the alternative — building genuine medical or legal capability by some other means, if such a means even exists — a hundred-odd pounds an hour for the real thing is not expensive. It is a bargain. The displaced expert is cheap not because their expertise is worth little, but because, at the moment of the transaction, they have very little bargaining power and the buyer has a great deal. Their profession is contracting; the platform has thirty thousand alternatives; the contract is short; the rate is take-it-or-leave-it. The expertise is priceless and the expert is disposable, and the gap between those two facts is exactly where the valuation lives — and why the number keeps doubling.

What the expert takes home

Which brings us to the question the day rate is designed to make you stop asking: beyond the money for the hours worked, what does the expert actually receive?

Consider what the transaction transfers, and what it does not return. The expert supplies the most refined product of their working life — judgement that took decades and considerable expense to acquire. That judgement is distilled into a reward model and folded into a system that can be copied infinitely, never tires, never retires, and is being marketed, in many cases, into the very market the expert came from. In exchange, the expert receives payment for the hours they sat at the keyboard, and nothing else. No equity in the model their judgement helped build. No residual when that model is licensed to a hospital network or a law firm. No attribution, because their contribution is deliberately dissolved into a statistical aggregate that bears no one's name. No ongoing claim of any kind. The relationship terminates the moment the invoice is paid, but the value they contributed does not terminate — it compounds, on the balance sheet of someone else.

This is a profoundly different bargain from the ones the more organised corners of skilled labour have fought for. When SAG-AFTRA struck in 2023, one of its central demands concerned digital likeness: the principle that if a studio wanted to scan a performer and reuse their image, the performer was owed consent and continuing compensation, not a one-time buyout. The Writers Guild won terms ensuring that AI could not be credited as a writer or used to erode writers' pay. Those frameworks are imperfect and contested, but they share a premise — that when your enduring professional essence is captured and reused, you retain a stake in it. The RLHF expert retains nothing. The structure is closer to a buyout than a licence, except that in a buyout you at least know you are selling the asset. Here the asset is your judgement, the sale is disguised as an hourly gig, and the thing being bought is your future competitive position, sold at the price of your present hour.

The conditions surrounding the work make the imbalance starker. The White v. Mercor complaint alleges that the company controls its experts' hours and weekly availability, sets their pay rates, trains and supervises them, offboards those who underperform, and monitors their work through a mandatory screen-tracking application — the indicia, the plaintiff argues, of employment rather than the independent contracting under which the workers are classified. Misclassification, if proven, means no benefits, no employer pension contribution, no protections. Layered on top are the non-disclosure agreements that the reporting describes as standard across the sector, which prevent workers from discussing their clients or, in many cases, even acknowledging what they are building. And when disputes arise, arbitration clauses frequently keep them out of open court. The worker contributes the crown jewels of their profession and receives, in return, a wage, a surveillance app, a gag, and a waiver of the right to sue in public. It is difficult to design a transaction that more efficiently separates a person from the value they create.

None of this is to say the experts are foolish for taking it. The individual calculation is often unanswerable: the rate is real, the bills are real, and the model will be trained with or without any particular physician's participation. That is precisely the logic of a collective-action problem. Each expert, acting rationally alone, has every reason to take the gig. All experts, acting together, are underwriting the erosion of the scarcity that gave their expertise its value in the first place. The tragedy is not that any one of them is making a mistake. It is that there is currently no mechanism through which they could make a different choice together.

The reasoning frontier and why expert judgement became the prize

It is worth pausing on why expert feedback specifically has become so valuable so suddenly, because it explains why the professions, and not just the arts, are now in the frame.

The generation of models that dominated the early 2020s were, for all their fluency, generalists trained to sound plausible. The competitive frontier since has moved decisively towards reasoning — models that can work through a multi-step medical differential, construct a legal argument, or debug a complex system, and get the answer verifiably right. Reasoning capability is far harder to bootstrap from scraped internet text, because the internet is full of confident wrong answers and thin on the rigorous, step-by-step expert working that distinguishes a correct chain of reasoning from a persuasive but flawed one. To train a model to reason like a specialist, you need examples of specialists reasoning correctly, graded by other specialists who can tell the difference. That is a resource the open web does not contain in sufficient quantity or quality. It exists only in the heads of practitioners.

This is why the labs have moved from crowdsourced labelling to credentialed expertise, and why the going rate for a board-certified physician's feedback has climbed so far above the rate for generic annotation. The scarcer and more consequential the judgement, the more it is worth as training signal — and the more the profession that monopolised that judgement has to lose by dispensing it. The economics reward exactly the extraction that is most damaging to the expert. A profession's tacit knowledge is simultaneously its collective inheritance and, on these platforms, its most liquid asset, sold off one graded example at a time by whichever of its members most needs the cash this month.

There is a grim elegance to the sequencing. First, a profession's public output is scraped without consent to build the base model. Then, when that model proves fluent but unreliable at the hard specialist judgements, the profession's living members are hired to supply the judgements the scraping could not capture. The first act took the profession's past; the second act rents its present; and the intended product of both is a system that competes for its future. The experts are being asked to close the one gap the machine could not close on its own — and that gap was their moat.

The problem of the last cohort

Every profession renews itself through a formation process that cannot be shortcut. A doctor is made through years of supervised practice on real patients under the eyes of senior clinicians. A lawyer is made through pupillage, clerkship, the slow accretion of cases. An engineer learns which textbook solutions fail in the field by watching them fail, alongside someone who has seen them fail before. Tacit knowledge, being tacit, can only be transmitted through immersion in the doing. This is expensive and slow, and it is the mechanism by which each generation of experts equips the next.

The experts currently selling their judgement to the training platforms were formed under those conditions. Their intuition was cultivated inside functioning professions with abundant entry-level work, mentorship, and the volume of real practice that turns knowledge into instinct. They are, in effect, a reservoir of judgement filled by an institutional apparatus that assumed the demand for that judgement would continue.

Now trace the feedback loop forward. If the models trained on this cohort's judgement succeed in performing the routine specialist work — the first-pass diagnosis, the standard contract review, the initial financial model — they will absorb precisely the entry-level and mid-tier tasks through which the next cohort of experts would have been formed. You do not become a senior radiologist without first reading ten thousand ordinary scans. You do not develop a lawyer's judgement without first grinding through the routine matters that a capable model may soon handle more cheaply. Remove the bottom rungs of the ladder and you do not merely make life harder for juniors; you sever the mechanism by which senior expertise is produced at all.

This is the deeper structural problem the professional version of the story exposes, and it is distinct from any worry about the quality of a given model's output. The judgement being harvested through expert RLHF is, in an important sense, non-renewable under the conditions the harvesting creates. The models are drawing down a stock of tacit professional knowledge that was accumulated under an apprenticeship system their own success threatens to hollow out. A profession can run for a while on its inherited stock of expertise. It cannot run indefinitely on a stock it has stopped replenishing, and the experts feeding the machine today may be the last cohort formed the old way — the last generation whose judgement was grown rather than inferred. What replaces them, if the ladder is pulled up behind them, is a genuinely open question, and none of the platforms brokering the trade have any reason to answer it.

Treating expertise as labour

If the diagnosis is that experts are being paid a day rate to transfer an asset worth vastly more than the day rate, the responses fall into a few families, none sufficient alone, all more plausible together.

The first is legal reclassification, and it has already produced its first answer. In McKinney v. Scale AI, Inc., in the San Francisco Superior Court, Scale AI agreed to pay $12.5 million to settle claims of misclassification and unpaid wages covering everyone who worked as a Contributor for Scale, Smart Ecosystem, or through HireArt while resident in California between 10 December 2020 and 28 February 2026. The settlement has only preliminary approval and, as settlements do, admits no liability, so it binds no future court. What it sets is a price. The White v. Mercor suit and a parallel action against Surge AI now put the same question — contractors, or employees in all but name? — to defendants who have watched a competitor pay eight figures rather than argue it out. If the courts find that a platform which dictates hours, monitors screens, sets rates, and offboards underperformers is running an employment relationship, the economics of the entire expert-data market shift: benefits, protections, and a higher floor follow. Reclassification will not, on its own, give the expert a stake in the model. But it would end the pretence that supplying the training signal for a hundred-billion-dollar industry is a casual side gig deserving of casual treatment.

The second family is the idea, older than the current boom, that data extracted from people is a form of labour and should be compensated and governed as such. In 2018 Jaron Lanier and the economist Glen Weyl set out the framework they called data dignity, or “data as labour,” arguing that people whose data powers digital systems are owed both compensation and collective bargaining power over its use. Their proposed vehicle was the mediator of individual data — an intermediary, something between a union and a data trust, that would negotiate on behalf of many contributors at once, because no lone individual has leverage against a platform but an organised bloc of them might. Applied to expert RLHF, the logic is direct. A physician alone cannot negotiate a residual on a medical model. Ten thousand physicians, bargaining collectively over whether and on what terms their profession's judgement may be used to train their replacements, are a different proposition entirely. The expertise that is worthless-per-hour and priceless-in-aggregate is exactly the kind of asset whose value can only be captured collectively.

That points to the third response, which is collective bargaining reaching into the gap where this work happens. The guilds and unions that won AI protections — the WGA at the studios, SAG-AFTRA on digital likeness — negotiated the relationship between workers and the employers who hire them directly. The RLHF market sits deliberately outside those relationships, in a jurisdictional vacuum where the writer training a model is not, technically, working for any studio, and the physician grading medical outputs is not, technically, practising medicine. Professional bodies — medical associations, bar associations, engineering institutions — have so far treated AI mostly as a question of tools and liability. They have not yet grasped that their members' collective judgement is now a traded commodity, or that they might have standing to govern its trade. A bar association that can discipline how a lawyer practises could, in principle, take a view on the terms under which lawyers sell their judgement to train systems that will compete with lawyers. None yet has.

The fourth response is structural and speculative: models of ownership that give contributors a durable stake rather than a one-off fee. A residual or royalty on the models an expert helped train. Equity, however small, in the value created. Data cooperatives that pool professional judgement and license it collectively on terms the members set, rather than letting a platform arbitrage each member individually. These ideas are easy to sketch and hard to build, and the platforms have every incentive to resist them, because the entire margin of the business depends on paying for the hour and keeping the compounding value. But that resistance is itself the tell. If a stake were worthless, refusing to grant it would cost nothing.

The last and least comfortable response is simply to see the trade clearly and price it accordingly. Right now the expert sells cheap partly because the transaction is disguised — framed as flexible remote work, a lifeline, a way to stay current in a shifting field, rather than as what it structurally is: the sale of a profession's future to build its replacement. An expert who understood the full nature of what they were transferring might still take the gig, because the bills are still real. But they would demand more for it, and the labs' billion-dollar data budgets suggest there is more to be had. The single most valuable thing the professions could do in the near term is refuse the framing that this is marginal work deserving of marginal terms. It is the most strategically important labour in the AI economy, and the people doing it are the only ones who can supply it.

The redundancy at the centre of the word

There is a bleak pun buried in the language here. To be made redundant, in British usage, is to lose your job because your role is no longer needed. But redundancy, in engineering, means something almost opposite: a backup, a duplicate held in reserve so the system keeps running when a part fails. The expert training their replacement occupies both meanings at once. They are being made redundant in the first sense — building the thing that will render their role unnecessary. And they are functioning as redundancy in the second sense — the human backup whose judgement is being copied precisely so that, once copied, the human is no longer required to keep the system running. The whole point of the exercise is to move the expert from the second category to the first: to extract the reserve capacity and then dispense with the reserve.

What makes this distinct from the century of automation that preceded it is that the extraction requires consent, and consent, in principle, can be withheld or conditioned. The loom did not need the weaver's cooperation. The medical model needs the physician's. That dependency is the one point of leverage the professions have, and it is closing — every graded example makes the next expert slightly more dispensable — but it has not closed yet. For this brief window, the people whose judgement the machines most need are the same people who could, if they organised, set the terms on which that judgement is transferred, or decline to transfer it on terms that offer nothing but a day rate. The economics that make expert judgement the prize also make expert refusal, or expert bargaining, unusually powerful — if it could be coordinated before the reservoir is drained.

The temptation is to end on the individual, to ask how the doctor or the writer or the banker should feel about grading a machine towards their own obsolescence. But that framing, again, lands the whole weight of a structural problem on its most precarious participants, and it lets the more comfortable parties — the labs with the billion-dollar data budgets, the platforms whose valuations keep multiplying, the professional bodies that have not noticed what is being sold from under them — off the hook entirely. The individual expert taking the gig is not the author of this arrangement. They are its raw material. The real question is not whether any given professional should sell their judgement to train their replacement. It is whether a society that depends on cultivated human expertise — in its hospitals, its courts, its firms, its studios — is content to let that expertise be quietly transferred into systems owned by a handful of companies, one hourly contract at a time, in exchange for nothing more durable than the hour. That is not a decision any single expert can make at any single laptop. It is a decision about what the professions are for, and who owns what they know. Right now, the answer being written, invoice by invoice, is that they know it only until someone pays them to hand it over.

References

1. Lesley Goldberg and colleagues, “Hollywood Workers Are Training AI Models as Job Prospects Grow Slim,” The Hollywood Reporter, 24 June 2026. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/ai-training-hollywood-writer-jobs-prospects-1236628302/
2. Ruth Fowler, “I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI,” Wired, May 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/i-work-in-hollywood-everyone-who-used-to-make-tv-now-training-ai/
3. “As Hollywood jobs dry up, workers are quietly training AI models to survive,” Digital Trends, June 2026. https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/as-hollywood-jobs-dry-up-workers-are-quietly-turning-to-ai-training-to-survive/
4. Marina Temkin, “Mercor quintuples valuation to $10B with $350M Series C,” TechCrunch, 27 October 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/27/mercor-quintuples-valuation-to-10b-with-350m-series-c/
5. “AI startup Mercor now valued at $10 billion with new $350 million funding round,” CNBC, 27 October 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/ai-hiring-startup-mercor-funding.html
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7. “AI Platform's 'Expert' Workforce Draws Misclassification Suit,” Law.com, 11 May 2026. https://www.law.com/2026/05/11/ai-platforms-expert-workforce-draws-misclassification-suit/
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9. David H. Autor, Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(4), 2003. https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/skill-content-recent-technological-change.pdf
10. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, University of Chicago Press, 1966.
11. Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl, “A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society,” Harvard Business Review, 26 September 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/09/a-blueprint-for-a-better-digital-society
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14. “RLHF Explained: How Human Feedback Trains AI Models in 2026,” Decode the Future. https://decodethefuture.org/en/rlhf-explained/
15. “Data Annotation for AI Labs: Recruiting Guide 2026,” HeroHunt. https://www.herohunt.ai/blog/data-annotation-ai-labs-the-recruiting-guide-2026/
16. “30,000 Professionals Are Training Their Own Replacements,” Metaintro, 2026. https://www.metaintro.com/blog/mercor-ai-training-white-collar-jobs-skills-2026
17. “Mercor: Unlocking Human Potential in the AI Economy” (Series C announcement), Mercor, 27 October 2025. https://www.mercor.com/blog/series-c/
18. ”'Digging the grave of my profession': the Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs,” The Guardian, 22 August 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/22/the-hollywood-creatives-training-ai-to-do-their-jobs
19. Marina Temkin, “Mercor is in talks for a $20B valuation,” TechCrunch, 9 July 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/09/mercor-is-in-talks-for-a-20b-valuation/
20. “Nvidia Weighs Investment in Round Valuing Mercor at $20 Billion,” PYMNTS, 19 August 2026. https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/nvidia-weighs-investment-in-round-valuing-mercor-at-20-billion/
21. “After data breach, $10B-valued startup Mercor is having a month,” TechCrunch, 9 April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/09/after-data-breach-10b-valued-startup-mercor-is-having-a-month
22. “Scale AI Misclassification Settlement: California Class Action” (McKinney v. Scale AI, Inc., S.F. Super. Ct. No. CGC-24-620481, preliminary approval 2026), King & Siegel LLP. https://www.kingsiegel.com/blog/scale-ai-misclassification-settlement-california-class-action/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Once we learned that my father’s cancer, which arrived in an unexpected and devastating way about a year ago, was terminal, my husband and I decided that we would be honest with our four year old daughter about the process that was unfolding. How does one explain cancer to a four year old, though? I’m sure there are trained medical professionals and parents of sick children that have had to deftly explain things to children, but as I am neither one of those things, I was a bit at a loss. I am a mental health therapist, though, and I figured that should be enough to help me navigate grand, existential dilemmas with a preschooler.

The day after telling my daughter about her grandfather’s death, she sincerely asked me, “Is Grandpa still dead?” I answered that he was, and reminded her that death is a permanent condition. Developmentally, it makes sense for her not to understand this seemingly obvious fact. On the other hand, do I really understand the idea of someone being gone forever? I know my dad is dead; I was there when he died. But there is still a part of me that wonders where he went. That part of me might still be looking for him, even though I know better.

My dad was not religious, or spiritual, and had no belief in any sort of afterlife. In line with his understanding of such matters, I cannot really allow myself to take comfort in the idea that he is out there somewhere, waiting for us. It would be nice to be able to, but it seems incongruent, somehow. I like to pretend that I am totally fine with the concept of death, that I simply accept that everything is finite, and I have a zenlike relationship with loss. This is, of course, a convenient lie that I enjoy telling myself. I’m like a preteen trying to convince the older kids that the movie we’re watching is totally fine, not too scary at all. I don’t even really believe myself, but I’ll put on a brave face no matter what.

The day of my father’s funeral, my daughter met a lot of extended family members. Living across the country, we don’t see them very often, and it was her first time meeting many of them. My aunt introduced herself to my daughter, saying “Your grandpa was my brother.” My daughter calmly replied to her, in the absolutely devastatingly nonchalant way of young children, “Well, your brother’s dead now.” If she had been older, or if she had been a more devious person, I would have wanted to shrivel up from embarrassment. But my sweet, kindhearted little girl was not trying to wound the great aunt whom she had met only moments earlier. Instead, it seemed that repeatedly pronouncing the factual state of her grandfather’s absence was how she was making sense of it for herself. Grandpa was here, I used to be able to talk to him, now I can’t because he’s dead.

Last year, our dog died. Ruby had been 13 years old and had also had cancer. I think this introduction to the world of grief and loss was helpful for my daughter, as she was able to begin to wrap her head around the concept of death, of someone being here one moment and not here the next. She never asked where Ruby had gone or any of the logistics of what one does with a dead dog. My daughter was sad, but accepted the information with a placidity beyond her years. However, a few months later, she found Ruby’s unicorn-festooned dog pajamas, a way we kept her warm in her old lady era. With true distress, my daughter cried, “Ruby left her pajamas here!” I explained that Ruby didn’t need the pajamas anymore, but my daughter remained concerned.

Do all dogs go to heaven? Do any dogs go to heaven? Is there a heaven to go to, anyway? While I don’t spend much time pondering the immortal soul of my late, beloved mutt, I do wonder if there is any way that the energy of those we have loved remains intact, somehow. Could I ever someday be reunited with a dog? Or a dad? Even in an abstract way? Are our loved ones gone, absolutely gone, when they die? Thousands of generations of theologians and philosophers and dudes on the internet have pondered the possibilities far longer than I have. The truth is that nobody knows, and the people who say they know are lying. So I’m left with tolerating ambiguity, something I don’t do particularly well.

I do believe that there is a wisdom to the frank acceptance with which my four-year-old approaches the subject of death. There is sadness, sure, but beyond that, loss is simply something to be taken in stride. We are here for now, and later we won’t be. We can talk about the people we’ve lost and the losses themselves without censoring ourselves too much. I can move forward after a loss without extensive, painful existential pondering. That can be good enough.

I have lived my life surrounded by a series of synchronistic experiences nearly always focused on music as a means of conveying the quality of certain relationships, events, and their meanings. I never paid them any mind until this year, having chalked up such experiences to nostalgia, trauma, and other such joys and sorrows one collects as evidence of living.

Recent events have shown me that when anomalous experiences such as mine, which are interconnected in a certain coherent and consistent fashion, reveal their names, relationships, and meanings to me over time and in no uncertain terms, I should pay careful attention. One lesson I have learned throughout is that these sorts of things cannot be judged and valued on initial impressions alone. Regardless of whether it is an unusually remarkable and obscure piece of jewelry, an enigmatic ancient Mesopotamian symbol, or a rather gross-looking entity inhabiting a human host.

It's rather incredible how new the world looks now that I've started paying attention to the things I once ignored. And I can never go back to not noticing.

#Intermundia #Anomalology

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

In Summary: * Much of this Friday has been spent listening to general baseball talk over the MLB Network, watching old episodes of Price is Right with the wife, and listened to Indiana centered football talk on the Football Friday show on an Indianapolis radio station. As I sit here at the computer I'm about half an hour away from the night's college football game; yes, I'll be listening to the radio call of that game.

Yard work, today? I did move the big green bin around to the back yard this morning, but didn't start loading it. That'll happen on another morning, probably Tuesday or Wednesday. I've got early football to follow tomorrow and Sunday, and Monday should be laundry; we'll just have to see how the week develops.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 226.97 lbs. * bp= 167/96 (59)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:20 – egg drop soup * 07:00 – 3 breakfast tacos * 10:40 – Mongolian beef, fried rice * 12:30 – beef lo mein noodle bowl * 16:10 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to musc, nap * 10:30 – watching MLB Central on MLB Network * 12:00 to 14:15 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:30 – listening to Football Friday on 107.5 The Fan, Indianapolis * 17:00 – listening to the 1st hour of The Joe Pags Show * 18:00 – listening to college football, Villanova Wildcats at Louisville Cardinals

Chess: * 08:00 – moved in all pending CC games

Greetings and SNAIL-utations blog friends!

Cute Snail and I hope this post is finding you well. Let us know how you’re doing by leaving a note in the comments, or posting a SNAIL-TASTIC message, finished color up or gifting story on our Padlet winter and holiday themed community gallery wall here.

In the meantime, below is a list of the winter and holiday coloring fun that Cute Snail and I have put together for all to enjoy.

The Cute Snail Fall Adventures Coloring Book ($19) - US Letter size, easy print anytime PDF format. Sustainable. Designed to be keepsake quality if desired. Includes 21 winter and holiday themed colorable pages – 10 with pre-written text and 11 with blank journal lines for sweet handwritten notes, quotes or affirmations. Also includes a list of pages organized by age, skill level and sensory kit friendliness along with printing notes and the personal “You Can Do Anything You Set Your Mind To” story about Juliet and Cute Snail’s creative art Journey. Best suited for classrooms, activity rooms, quiet spaces and those who love snails, smiles and unique, whimsical, offbeat one-of-a-kind original art finds. View or purchase from our Payhip store here.

Fall Themed Loose Coloring Pages – these are US letter size, and are available in an easy print anytime PDF format and can be printed at any scale you like. They are also 100% FREE to download from our Payhip store. New additions may be added to the lists below at any time. so subscribe to stay in the loop if you like. Also – more coloring pages with pre-written text are included in the fall coloring book.

Pages with Pre-Written Text (for those who need or prefer this style)

Cute Snail Fall Sunflower Garden Chat Coloring Page

Cute Snail Disco Ball Skateboard Back To School Coloring Page

Cute Snail Bright Day (Back To School) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)

Cute Snail Rainbow, Stars & Glasses (Back To School) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)

Cute Snail Bright Day (Fall Edition) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)

Cute Snail Rainbow, Stars & Glasses (Fall Edition) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)

Cute Snail You’ve Got Mail Coloring Page (sensory friendly)

Cute Snail Apple-y Sweet Learning Adventures Back To School Coloring Page

Pages With Blank Journal Lines (for including sweet handwritten notes, quotes or affirmations with your color ups).

Cute Snail Fall Sunflower Garden Chat Coloring Page

Cute Snail Disco Ball Skateboard Back To School Coloring Page

Cute Snail Comfort Food Fall Equinox Coloring Page

Cute Snail You’ve Got Mail Coloring Page (sensory friendly)

Cute Snail With Glasses Sitting On A Mushroom Coloring Page (sensory friendly)

Cute Snail Apple-y Sweet Smiles Coloring Page (sensory friendly)

Cute Snail Bat Snail Happy SNAIL-oween Coloring Page (sensory friendly)

Cute Snail Happy Thanksgiving Coloring Page (sensory friendly)

Fall Coloring Postcards – US Letter size, easy print anytime PDF print sheet format. Sustainable. Designed to be keepsake quality if desired. Each print sheet is 100% FREE to download from our Payhip store and contains one colored postcard and one coloring postcard. Can be trimmed down and gifted as one single card or two separate cards depending on your gifting needs. Postcards can also be used for decor ating and junk journal or decoupage type crafting as well. View and download them in our Payhip store here.

I actually don’t enjoy writing about this stuff. You know what I enjoy writing about? Professional wrestling!

And speaking of professional wrestling, I saw a piece today about a wrestler who is having a hard time getting booked because they are a domestic abuser. They haven’t been convicted of anything—their former partner has just detailed the abuse, and people have been like, “this person is a piece of shit. I’m not booking them.” Plenty of pieces of shit continue to get booked in pro wrestling, so I’m not suggesting it’s some sort of piece-of-shit-free utopia. But it did strike me that this person has faced more consequences for their actions than most of the people who were friends with Jeffrey Epstein.

Indeed, while a lot of wrestlers who are pieces of shit are still working, most of them have lost their jobs at the promotions that offer the most money.

Sadly, this is not the case for Epstein’s pals. A LOT of them have faced absolutely no professional consequences for their association with him. (Though if you want a grim laugh, check out this post by former MIT researcher Joscha Boch about how very hard it was for him to have his association with Epstein exposed. The poor guy!)

Indeed, for many of these people, if you don’t search their name with Epstein’s, you won’t find any evidence that they ever knew him.

The press has tiptoed around this stuff—I don’t know their reasons, but they are timid about even saying people were associated with Epstein. Perhaps this is because they’re afraid of being accused of libel because of course just associating with Epstein doesn’t mean you broke any laws.

What it does mean, though, is that you’re a piece of shit. The good news about declaring someone a piece of shit is that there’s no legal standard. There’s no burden of proof. You just look at what you know about someone and go, “yeah, fuck that guy. He’s a piece of shit.” No legal proceedings!

We’ve done this before: even before his association with Epstein came out, we all pretty much agreed that Woody Allen was a piece of shit. Indeed, he’s such a piece of shit that his name was one of the least surprising ones to come up in the Epstein files.

Now, look, I don’t have time to comb through the Epstein files looking for everyone who ever met with him. But I did have time to search for Boston and Cambridge and see whose name came up.

There were a lot of familiar names whose association with Epstein has already been written about in the mainstream media and whose Wikipedia pages mention their association: Larry Summers, Joi Ito, Marvin Minsky, etc.

But Epstein met and corresponded with a WHOLE LOT of people in Boston and Cambridge, and most of them haven’t been written about. So let’s take a look, shall we?

There’s old pal Danny Hillis, my former employer, and professional smart guy currently affiliated with The Long Now Foundation and Applied Invention. I’m still the only person writing about his association with Epstein.

Psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness and still employed by Harvard University.

Geneticist George Church, also still employed at Harvard.

Mathematician and Geneticist Eric Lander, still employed by both MIT and Harvard.

Neuroscientist Ed Boyden, still employed at MIT

Tech Writer Linda Stone

Former MIT Media Lab researcher Caleb Harper, already disgraced for faking research results but not yet disgraced for his association with Epstein.

Tech bro Greg Wyler

Harvard Medical professor Ted Kaptchuk

Statistician Don Rubin, professor emeritus at Harvard.

General tech guy and Wolfram Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram.

I’m not saying these people should necessarily be fired. I’m saying that insofar as they are known for other things, they should also be known for being pieces of shit.

Again, you don’t need any kind of legal proceeding to decide for yourself, as I have, that these people are pieces of shit. Please do!

So shines a good deed in a weary world: seemingly alone out of anyone Epstein reached out to in Boston or Cambridge, Palm and Handspring founder Jeff Hawkins rebuffed Epstein’s efforts to meet up thusly: I will pass. Our research is published. If Jeffrey has read it and wants to discuss it then we can start with an email conversation. Jeff.

You know who else could have cut this wealthy perv off with a cold blooded email just like Jeff Hawkins? Literally every single person on this list.

Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: Crocs but Make it Corporate, Irish fashion and politics, Every Ghanaian is rich, Anemia and chicken livers, Babies born to anaemic mothers have smaller brains, and No more steaks at the Ecuyer

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Crocs but Make it Corporate. So, can Crocs work for the corporate Accra girl? Absolutely—but style is the difference between “fashion-forward office girl” and “why did she wear that to work?” Wear them with confidence, keep your outfit structured, and remember: in 2026, the corporate wardrobe has room for personality. Pair your Crocs with: – Wide-leg tailored trousers + a crisp shirt for that “I have a 9 a.m. meeting, but my feet are still at peace” look. – A structured midi dress + blazer for a playful but polished corporate twist. – A matching co-ord set for effortless fashion-girl energy. – An oversized corporate shirt + pencil skirt when you want to mix classic office wear with a little rebellion. The Accra Reality Check: Between Accra traffic, long working hours, running between meetings, and those spontaneous after-work plans, comfortable footwear is honestly a luxury. Crocs give your feet room to breathe while still allowing you to participate in fashion’s latest “ugly shoe but make it cool” era. And in true Accra girl fashion, if you style it well, it can go from office desk to brunch without changing shoes. Comfort is no longer the opposite of fashion. The Accra corporate girl is wearing both. Irish fashion and politics. Irish designer Sarah Gallagher of the ‘Sarah Lorraine’ label is continuing her meteoric rise after being selected as one of the few people to showcase her range at Ireland’s Fashion Week later this year. She is already exporting her clothes worldwide and has her range stocked in shops all around Ireland. Her biggest endorsement is that Irish president Catherine Connolly has worn her designs on many occasions. Its range includes handmade stunning capes made from 100% Merino Wool from the well-known Molloy & Sons and lined with satin, sold across Europe, the USA and Canada. “I will be part of the ‘Irish Heritage Show’ which highlights sustainability, and this is really what my brand is all about-beautiful Irish tweeds and natural fabrics that speak to our rich and vibrant heritage”. What’s special? No favours, no political parties, the president just buys her stuff because she likes it. Do we have things like that here? The Donegal Blazer by Sarah Lorraine

Every Ghanaian is rich. Sounds wrong? You have a mobile phone, or you could not be reading this. Likely, you have a second mobile as well. Maybe you’re driving a car, or your brother or hubby has one. You have a TV. You paid for all these things, or they were given to you by someone who paid for them. Does that make you rich? Sort of. In the developed countries, things are a bit different. Hardly anyone pays cash for things; they buy on credit. So you choose your phone in a provider’s shop (say MTN, Telecel or AirtelTigo), choose a package of so many minutes a month and so much data, sign a contract, and now every month they deduct a certain amount from your bank account until you finish paying, say, for two years. After that, you need to renew your contract. The phone is now yours, but you still need airtime and so forth. For cars, it’s the same, but say over five years. In Europe, they really push credit sales because the hidden interest you are paying is way higher than if you borrowed from the bank. So they make a profit on the sale and a profit on the credit. So, are we rich? At least what we are holding in our hands or are driving around town is ours. And our Golden Stool? It is ours, and it was not decorated with stolen gold and emeralds like most thrones.

Anemia and chicken livers. If you are anemic you can try to solve the issue by taking blood tonic, but better is to change your diet into more iron containing food like kontommire and other green leaves and meat. Meat is not cheap, but chicken livers are, at 43 GHC a kg at Melcom. And easy to cook, fry 2 minutes on both sides, it has it’s own particular flavour and needs nothing else, not even salt.

Babies born to anaemic mothers have smaller brains. Boom. Still not worried because you feel ok? Read article in next issue.

No more steaks at the Ecuyer. (Ring Road, opposite Fire Service Headquarters, Osu, Accra) now commonly called, the French Restaurant is one of my favourites. it is near where I live, prices are reasonable and quality is quite good. And I enjoy their roofed outside terrace. I like their steak au poivre (black pepper steak) with haricotes verts (the long green beans), a very tender local beef fillet, better than the imported 5 times frozen stuff, and likely with less antibiotics as well, the local cows only get treated by the vet when they are almost dead. And local cow’s food is more varied than the “Agric cows”. That steak gives me my iron and my protein. The other day the answer was “today no steak”. So I ordered something else but later asked what the reason for the no streak was. Had everybody ordered steak and they ran out of stock? No, they couldn't get the quality they wanted. Ayeeko, better none than inferior.

Lydia...

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JOURNAL 11 septembre 2026

Je n'ai pas pu raconter : Tom était là aujourd'hui, il a fait ses exercices. Il s'applique, il est lourd, il est maladroit, il est trop grand, il est touchant. Il ferait mieux d'essayer le kendo, mais non c'est mon enseignement qu'il veut aussi longtemps que ce sera nécessaire il m'a dit. Apparemment il n’a pas de problème de visa. Je pense qu’il a beaucoup de tunes, ici ça aide fortement.

#dojo

Observations from waking on the beach just before dawn.

-Dawn moments-

The quarter moon
Watches from the zenith
 While Sol makes her
 Morning debut—
 Stunning, as always.

Then, like Christ’s
 Ascension, the clouds
 Carry the night star
 Into shrouded mystery.


We know where she went,
 But it is faith that tells us.

The little sandpiper runs through the dry sand; each time a foot lifts, a tiny puff of grains follows it. When it sprints, there’s a cartoony effect of little sand clouds. This moment feels like the perfection of existence—peace and life, hunger and satisfaction, joy and contentment—at the beach.

Another day in paradise.

Glory be! They have forgotten me.

Gooood Morning, Sunshine!!

Wherever and whomever you are this morning’s I pray there is bounce in your step, a song in your breast and they you are awash in hope and dreams!!

8:07 here, where the sidewalk ends. Just in from a brisk morning greeting. The sun is lazy in its hazy rising. The temperature here is UNBELIEVABLE! I thought we'd never see anything below 99º (37º) ever again! And yet here is a proper fall morning wrapping my tired body in a big 3rd-season hug!

My dreams were color and touch and dancing and singing. There was a fern that kept speaking to me in whispers. And it all felt very Goonies.

Post meeting, we came home and planned our ‘goodie night’ next Tuesday. We invited 8 people. We’ll play Pictionary for 45m, the. Talk and snack for an hour and then wish everyone a good night.

😘

One family we invited said 🤕 ‘you know, we've been here for 20 years and no one has ever invited us over for family worship.

💔

I feel a little guilty… but one man can only do so much. At least we can help break the spell.

WOW! Just realized the last goodie night we had was 17 years ago! :-o January 1, 2009.

I made a new friend last night: Nico! Nico is a friend of CB and is visiting from Capital City. A possible implant.

Oh! I pray he moves in. He’s 22x has hopes of attending a school that teaches evangelizing, and has been in the full-time work for 10 years. The last three, he was in the special full-time work volunteering in New York. He's back home and looking for a new challenge.

I very tenderly put my hands on his face and said with earnestness, 'do not move here, it is VERY difficult.' (Yes, I really did this). Then I smiled and said broadly, 'WE WOULD LOVE IF YOU CAME TO OUR TOWN! You know, if you can make it here and in Capital City, you can survive ANYWHERE! Please come let us be your litmus.'

Then we talked for an hour about his experiences, people we knew in common and how much he enjoyed his work as a volunteer. Part of his assignment was working night watch for a year. I must say, if you want to enjoy crazy stories, befriend night watchman.

Everything from raccoons and bears to clandestine intruders and troublemakers.

And once, a small explosion.

The MIL came by so I could do some minor auto repairs. In exchange, I got my dishes washed. Yes, I know—I should have done them before bed. But I was tired. And lazy.

Just found out a life-long friend will be traveling to Brazil to have hip replacement surgery. He is two years my Jr. Freaking out a little. He had some back pain and assumed it was just back pain. Chiropractor helps. Went to doc and they said, 'no old man, you have an arthritic hip joint. REPLACE. 

Freaked him out, went to a second doctor.

Now he's going to go to Brazil for a few months in November.

I suppose there could be worse places to have your bones sawed off.

That was a little tail spin!

Not a big day here. Will do some drawing. Cleaning up the studio and if the incredible weather holds, some yard work.

Lunch with a friend if he is free. Visiting with Nico made me want to cut my hair. Nothing he said, a switch came on mid conversation and I suddenly want a haircut. Should I get a perm?

Haha! I asked chat to show me with a perm...

I am intrigued, but probably not. Really want Hemsworth's doo from Thor... but I don't think my social infrastructure will tolerate.

Mom's comment when I share my ai gen perm portrait.

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10am.

Time for breakfast and a walk! And not stressing out about the accident. The anxiety keeps trying to claw its way in. But fighting it.

Rainbows and puppy dogs. Everything will be fine.

I'm fine, you're fine. We're all going to be okay.

What we really need is God's Kingdom. Or a Time Machine.

My next sketchbook I think is going to be named Verisimilitude. But after that... I lik 88 gigawatts or Flux Capacitor.

Man, I just wanna beach off this morning!

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=——

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#amber #weather #north #echo.

It all started..

Last year, I had the opportunity to travel south to an analog studio belonging to my friend, bkbirge. I didn’t know it at the time, but this awoke in me a desire to mix less and play more. I learned that intention and vision are audible if you visualize it and intend it. I learned that if I get it down sounding how I like it, there’s a lot less mixing to do. This is all good stuff. Not only do I stink at mixing, I don’t really like it that much. It stresses me out. It often makes me feel like I am trying to pay attention to a spoken conversation while reading a text on my phone. I don’t get much of either. While the music is going in the monitors, I might not hear what I need to because I am looking at some kind of readout. Stop the madness.

How do I do this?

Since that trip, I have been thinking about how to switch things up. I find myself with a hybrid mixing set up now. So, mixing isn’t the issue it was. I have been able to record with effects like compression and gate so that the track sounds the way I want, and I don’t have to spend effort repairing files. I’m really into all this at the moment. But it isn’t just with gear or mixing; it’s also a mindset in my songwriting.

What do songwriting and The Big Bang have in common?

I searched for “How to write a rock song” on Google and found a summary of most tips I’ve heard in various forms. Even the time signature of 4/4 is mentioned. The article discusses riffs, building a verse-chorus structure (some people call this arrangement), and making room for a solo. However, it doesn’t really answer my question. Just like The Big Bang, a song bursts forth and evolves over time, each set of ears, a new explosion. But what is the core essence of the original song? What sparked that initial explosion? Isn’t that what you’re aiming for—an explosion? Songs require elements like explosions and fires do. But it’s during the early stages, not the polishing phase, that the magic of song happens.

Relax, if you’re nervous, I know the answer, happy to answer it. It was just dramatic writing.

The message.

The explosion happens when message comes across. The explosion is receiving a message from the music. All it is. If your music doesn’t contain message, that’s probably worth looking into. It’s what folks want from music they like. Even if the message is have fun, or party on, or relax, or vote, if it speaks to them in song, that’s message. That is the ingredient I find lacking in scores of music I do not vibe with, message. You could even say intent. But it doesn’t have to be intentionally.

Think about liking a song for the first time, or the thousandth.

If you are vibing with a song, someone has learned your language and started rattling it off to you. It is a good feeling. And no one is even speaking! If you aren’t looking to provide that sensation for an intended audience, as a musician, you make it difficult for the audience to participate in your conversation. It is no longer about them, it is about you. You aren’t speaking their language, you are in yours. I am not saying that is wrong, but I am saying it’s not my message, personally.

Ideas are a commodity around here.

Before I feel like writing a song these days, I have to have an idea that makes me want to write it. I want the song to say something. For me, saying something means meaning something. If I am going to spend the effort on lyrics, playing all the instruments, getting with collaborators who do stuff better than me, spending money, practicing, working, I want the song to mean something to me. A message. A lot like a tattoo. You can see it, but this tattoo on my arm and Keri’s matching one we got at a vulnerable turning point together. We decided to stick it out with each other, to the end. And it’s been wonderful. Ideally, our songs are like that ink.

Fortunately, ideas are flooding me lately, and I am taking notes. I’ve talked before about creative writing exercises that help me a lot. I might start off with a letter I never intend to send. The person may be dead or gone from my life. I try to include atmospheric elements like stores, smells, and noises. I try to dig in myself for uncomfortable truths circling this person and own up to how silly I could have been, neglectful, hurtful, aloof, etc. After the letter is completed, I mine it for words and phrases. I likely have an idea because I dug. Digging usually digs up ideas. For me. This is just one kind of creative writing exercise I use often. There are loads of them. They pop up in Google.

Don’t skip the message.

I would not skimp on this step if I wanted to make an impact with music. Think of this step as shooting a bullet. Without it, you are throwing one. Give the listener something meaty to grab onto. Even if it is just you, this listener, give that to yourself. You deserve to have written a good song too.

Kelly Kintner, Editor, Producer

The Horses Mouth Magazine

The Kintners

Djembe Funk

College football will provide my Friday game of choice. The Villanova Wildcats are scheduled to play the Louisville Cardinals in a game starting at 6:00 PM CDT, and I plan to be listening to the radio call.

And the adventure continues.

We in the West are living in the midst of a jihad, and most of us don’t even realize it — because it’s a brand of jihad that’s barely a generation old. Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War. It’s called the House of War because it, too, according to the Koran, is destined to be governed by sharia, and it will take war — holy war, jihad — to bring it into the House of Submission.

— Bruce Bawer, Surrender (2009)

Note: While certainly no ally of traditionalists and conservatives, Bawer certainly got this right. But don't take his or my word for it, read it for yourself in Reliance of the Traveler, a classic interpretation of Sharia Law. I'm glad to lend my copy to the curious. Do the work. Read primary sources, not the news.

#history #politics #theology

In writing The Campervan, my intent was to expose the invisible friction that exists between static belonging and dynamic mobility. A tension that is quietly defining modern Irish life. Mary and her unnamed visitor represent two entirely contrasting responses to the same foundational crisis: the sudden, altering reality of loss. Mary chooses the architecture of stasis. Her “exit road” from bereavement is built on preservation, strict domestic routines, and an aggressive defense of her physical boundaries – her view, her sea, her husband’s old preferences. To Mary, the encroaching campervans are not merely an aesthetic nuisance; they are mobile symbols of a fluid, modern world that threatens to overwrite her memories.

Conversely, the traveler’s exit road is one of motion and confrontation. He drives the very object of his grief back to the place of its making, using mobility as a mechanism for closure and eventual release. When these two perspectives collide over a simple kettle of water, the narrative shifts from a dispute about spatial intrusion to a shared recognition of human vulnerability. It is a reminder that the modern forces we often perceive as disruptions to our traditional heritage are frequently piloted by individuals carrying the exact same timeless griefs, histories, and traditions as our own.

If we are to successfully transform Ireland's communities, our policy frameworks must become as flexible and hospitable as Mary's kitchen table – capable of holding space for both those who need to stand fast, and those who need to move through.

The Campervan can be found at https://rvw.ie/the-campervan

Addendum

Temporal Friction and the Lived Experience of Governance

Transforming Ireland is the title I have chosen for a forthcoming series of the opportunities and the impact of the circular economy. And the Campervan is an experiment on how I might use fiction to illustrate those impacts.

In The Campervan, my aim was to look past the technical vocabulary of spatial planning and examine the human impact of what policy analysts call “temporal friction.” This friction occurs when macro-level regional development frameworks move at one speed, while the socio-emotional landscape of an established community moves at another.

Mary’s sudden exasperation – captured in her plea that “The Council should do something about it, it's not fair” – is a classic manifestation of this disconnect. To an administrator looking at a map or an infrastructure portfolio, the influx of mobile domestic tourism along our coastline represents a successful activation of public assets or a metric of regional economic diversification. However, to the resident on the ground, it can feel like a sudden, unmediated disruption of local spatial heritage and personal stasis.

References:

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/press-releases/report-on-national-coastal-change-management-strategy-sets-out-long-term-blueprint-to-deal-with-future-coastal-change/

https://irishgeography.ie/index.php/irishgeography/article/download/1484/1194/6030)

This tension underscores a core finding in recent spatial analyses, such as the OECD Rural Policy Review of Ireland. The report notes that Ireland's highly centralized administrative structures often lack the “spatial differentiation” required to fully account for how local people actually experience change. When national planning goals; whether under the National Planning Framework or coastal management strategies; are handed down to local authorities, the system often defaults to regulating spaces rather than facilitating the community transitions within them.

References:

https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/1f40d206-report-of-the-inter-departmental-group-on-national-coastal-change-management-.pdf

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/publications/overview-of-planning-in-ireland/

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/rural-policy-review-of-ireland-2026_d53ea78f-en/full-report/making-rural-policy-work-from-strategy-to-delivery_388f48d4.html

The story does not seek to arbitrate whether Mary’s desire for preservation or the traveller’s right to mobility is the “correct” use of the strand. Rather, it serves as an observation of a structural dilemma. If our evolving governance systems are to navigate the transformation of rural and coastal Ireland successfully, they must find a way to reconcile the swift, fluid movement of modern policy and tourism with the slower, deeply human timelines of the people who call those places home.

References:

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/rural-policy-review-of-ireland-2026_d53ea78f-en/full-report/making-rural-policy-work-from-strategy-to-delivery_388f48d4.html

Regular readers of this space or Marshall On Policy, know that my work usually wrestles with the structural, economic, and policy frameworks required to navigate a transforming Ireland. Yet, policy documents and data models can only capture the mechanics of change; they rarely capture the human friction of living through it. In this post, I am stepping sideways from the traditional essay and briefing format into short fiction.

The Campervan is an exploration of perspective. When we debate community, local governance, and changing landscapes, we are ultimately debating how people adapt to the erosion of the familiar. This short story is an attempt to look at the invisible, internal boundaries we build when our outer world begins to shift, and how the “exit roads” we choose to navigate personal loss often mirror the ways we handle societal change. I hope you will indulge this departure, and as always, I welcome your reflections...

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The Campervan

Oh George, there's another one o' them campervans outside the window again. I know how you hate 'em. Blocking out the view of the sunrise. Hiding us from the sea. I've a good mind to go out and give 'em a piece of my mind. Great hunkin' lumps of steel. They shouldn't be allowed. Mary finishes opening up the curtains and worries away with a small damp cloth at some debris an insect seems to have left behind. Kettle boiled, cooker on and a short while later she takes out a tray of breakfast and places it on an old cast-iron and terracotta table, midway between front door and garden gate; the centre piece of her seaside patio. She wipes the chairs and arranges the table. A brightly striped seaside linen table cloth and a posy of daisies in a small white vase.

Out again. – Yes cries Mary, makin' the best of it while we can. Summer never seems to last long. And when it does there's always them pesky mosquitoes. While flinging one arm in the direction of the campervan parked just beyond her gate. Mary notices a hold-all and a couple of cardboard cartons. Going away Maureen? – Oh, just to my sister's place for a couple of days. Mum and dad are coming to visit so we thought we'd all get together for the weekend. – Oh how lovely. It's aways nice to get together with family. How's your dad doin' now, any better? – Oh much Mary, they 'ave 'im on a new drug and it seems to be workin' wonders. – Grand. Give 'em all our best wishes. – Will do Mary. See you in a couple of days.

Mary returns to her breakfast, a brief conversation with George, and opens a book. The chapters glide by, the tide visits, the gleeful shouts of kids on holiday subside, and the evening and night pass by.

It's morning of the following weekend, and a small spider, comfortable in an upper corner of the window has clearly spent the early hours weaving and casting a delicate web. It scurries to conceal itself in its corner as the tread of Mary's feet announce her arrival at the window. She opens the curtain. It's still there George. Her shoulders slump. A sharp intake of breath and a long sigh. There's so many of them now, all up and down the strand. The Council should do something about it, it's not fair. This is our home, our sea. I know how you hate it George. She drags forcefully at the curtain and fails to notice the spider or its web.

She opens the front door. Better let the day in. Then I'll get breakfast as usual. – Alexa, give me some music. Modern music spills from a smart speaker on a mantlepiece. No No NO. Alexa stop the music. The music ends abruptly. Mary laughs and shakes her head. Great present George, but you really needed to set it up properly. Alexa play Local FM. – Soothing Sounds from Seaside FM, announces a voice from the speaker. Better. Mary mumbles, and hums and sings. She works seamlessly, as breakfast begins to appear. Tea and toasted tea cakes. I know she says, extravagant, but it's the weekend. And weekend is cleaning. After a lifetime as a working wife, it's a habit she just can't break. Work in the week, housework at the weekend. Afternoon arrives with dusting and vacuuming in the front room. It is rhythmically punctuated by glances through the window and scowls toward the campervan. Damned ugly things. Shouldn't be allowed. And the litany repeated. I'm gonna have to do something, have to do something Mary declared.

The doorbell rings. Followed by a couple of knocks. She looks up and through the window. Who could…. She switches off the vacuum, stows the handle and heads for the door. It's still open. A stranger. A man, tall, but a little casual. Not exactly a holiday maker, but not a door to door salesman either. He has a kettle in his hand. An ordinary hot water kettle. The council workers working on the sea defences used to come and ask for boiling water for their tea-break, but that was decades ago. Besides, he's got creases in his trousers, his brogues are highly polished and that's definitely not a council workman's shirt. He looks anxious, she thinks. Ah well if he's anxious, maybe I don't have to be. – Yes can I help you? – Oh please, he almost coughs it out. Yes, enquires Mary. – I've run out of gas. She repeats him, You've run out of gas. But this, more as a statement than a query. Well this is not a shop, I don't sell it here. His face turns pale, she traces the contours, she recognizes the anguish. He begins to turn away. Well what is it you want. She's surprised by the tone of her own demand. She tries to recover it and offers a smile. It works. He stops his turn and looks towards her. He raises his left arm, kettle in his hand. Water, hot water. – Mary almost laughs, his words sound just like a kettle when it's full of too much boiling water and it just won't pour. Oh, give it here. I'll pop it on the stove. She takes it from him and starts to laugh. But you didn't need to bring your own water, I would have given you some.

She beckons him to follow her into the kitchen and she places the kettle on the stove. Take the weight off your legs. She points at an unpolished beach chair. You should be comfortable in that, my George made it. Would you like a cuppa whilst you wait. – No, I shouldn't trouble... – Well you going to get one, I'm ready for my afternoon cuppa anyway. Mary busies herself tidying away the cleaning tools, arranging the table and making the tea. The man sits quietly in the unpolished beach chair. He seems to be a man practiced at waiting, like something has silenced him without warning, and the shock is slowly settling; so now all he can do is wait. In contrast Mary's cycling back and forth between the small domestic tasks echoes a train building up a head of steam. And I suppose that's your monstrosity out there is it? She points through the open door down the hallway, out through the front door, directly at the campervan. He half raises himself from the chair to lean and peer toward the van. Yes, yes I'm afraid it is. My wife and I bought it just under a couple of years ago. It's our retirement treat.

She looks directly at him. It's a damned monstrosity, is what it is. Huge hunkin piece of metal spoilin' the morning sun and blockin the view of the sea. You shouldn't be allowed. What were you thinkin'. Did you think we wus a factory and the view didn't matter. – Ah You weren't thinkin were you … thoughtless – spoiled our week that has.

Still staring at him, she blinked. He was struggling to speak. Dazed, he couldn't articulate. I, I. He began. Well you should think more. Softly this time, and passes him a mug for his tea, as she interogates herself. What's wrong with him, he's dazed – I wasn't that nasty. -So you bought the campervan when you retired? Where've you been? There's lots of gorgeous spots along this coast. George and I were avid cyclists when we were younger. Avid. Cycled all up and down this area. Sunday picnics and what not, You know the kind of thing. – Yes, yes, we would do the same. We had a tandem and a bit of picnic basket. It was great, sometimes on our own, sometimes with the club. Sundays were great back then. – Yes they were echoed Mary, adding If we weren't cycling we all used to play cricket or rounders on the beach. Great times.

So where's your wife now? Do you want to fetch her, I'll get another cuppa and some biscuits and we can chat. She watched the colour drain from his face and the contours of anguish return. She, she's not travelling with me now. His hands work their way around the mug. Mary watches, caught up in his demeanour; grip intense, knuckles white. He lifts the mug towards his mouth. And rotates the handle away from him, slowly as he gazes into the drink, looking, for something. We only ever came here. This spot was our first holiday in the van, last year. Oh we had a fabulous time. Revisiting all those old cycling haunts, and finding new ones, restaurants, café's, coastline walks. It was really really great.

Mary presses her question. So where is she now then, if you had such a good time? The contours grew deeper, the skin grew paler, the twinkle left his eyes as drops began easing slowly from them. It was. it was just after. Another stall, a splutter, a stutter and then. She died. Silence. A moment passed. Neither moved, neither spoke. So I thought I'd sell the van, but one, one last trip here, just to remember. Mary, without moving, without breathing, watched him grind to a halt. The tears and the shaking in full flow now.

I'm sorry about the view… She put her arms around him in the chair. Hush, hush she whispered, no need to be bothered about such things now. Slowly recovered. I must be going, I have promises to keep. – Are you OK to drive? Do you know where you are going. – Yes, Yes I'll be fine… Thankyou so much for your hospitality and again my sincere apologies. – Forget it, I mean it. She ushered him gently through the door and watched as he packed away and regained his composure until he was sitting ready to drive. Mary waived him away. She stood at the gate as the tide made its visit. Eventually she returned into the house and closed the front door.

Crossing the front room to the mantle piece, her hand extended forwards past the smart speaker which had now fallen silent, and took hold of a leather frame with the photo of a man, Oh George.

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Further reading

A a note from The Essayists Notebook https://esy.ie/the-shared-landscape-of-grief