Author: Bobbie Johnson

Susana M. Morris: “Octavia Butler worked really hard at putting the pieces together”

August 25, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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interviews

For July’s Curious Reading Club interview, I spoke with Susana M. Morris—the author of the fascinating Octavia Butler biography Positive Obsession. Her research and understanding of Butler is both excellent and inviting; not taking the usual academic tone but really engaging with this incredible writer’s work on a human level. She explained what made Butler so interesting and so forward thinking; what her super powers as an author really were. But maybe the moment I […]

How AI really works

August 17, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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Uncategorized
A woodcut from the Compendium Maleficarum, showing a wing-ed devil handing over a book to a sheepish looking fellow.

Three things I read this past week or so that I wanted to share. There’s a theme in here, I suppose. But that’s where we’re at right now. PS these are all by people I know, but they’re very worth your while. Legacy Media Wants to Hire You (No, Not You) In Scratch, Rahawa Haile absolutely nails the situation for that many writers and editors are facing. Want to get paid? Leave your morals behind… […]

Gluttony and the guillotine

August 5, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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books

If you live in the continental United States and get bitten by a bat, or a raccoon, or a fox, your doctor will probably advise you to go and get rabies shots. Rabies isn’t common, but it’s common enough that about 100,000 people go through the preventative protocol every year. This process is no joke. First you do a PCR test, then you get injected with immunoglobin at every site where the skin is punctured, […]

Stay classy

March 23, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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Link
Aylsham Police Station amid a report of an arrest in Aylsham. REUTERS/Phil Noble

I will read pretty much anything Andrew O’Hagan writes in the London Review of Books (which is a subset of “I’ll read pretty much anything in the London Review of Books” also a true statement) but I particularly enjoyed his demolition of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew of The Epstein Files, the Duke of Pizza Express, or the more prosaic Detainee A. The piece—headlined “Stay Classy”—is a good look at the entire illbegotten […]

Craig Mod: “We’re probably doing a lot of things the wrong way”

March 6, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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interviews
Author Craig Mod on a zoom call, wearing a dark grey baseball cap and light grey long sleeve shirt, his fingers to his head in a gesture of mind explodeyness.

A few weeks back I had a really stimulating conversation with Craig Mod, the bookmaker, writer, photographer and author of Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir, which was February’s book of the month at Curious Reading Club. One thing I mentioned in our chat was that Craig actually has had a profound impact on my career, in a way he probably doesn’t remember and certainly didn’t expect. Maybe 15 years ago I bumped into […]

The tyranny of advertising

February 25, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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Musings
Screen grab of 1980s Yellow Pages ad featuring JR Hartley

Not quite 18 months ago, Sam Altman said that OpenAI putting ads in ChatGPT was definitely certainly probably not a good idea. “Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” he said at a Harvard event in October 2024. “I kind of think of ads as, like, a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody on the […]

Jennie Erin Smith: “I didn’t want researchers to spoon-feed me the story”

February 7, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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books
Author Jennie Erin Smith on a Zoom call

What fun to talk with Jennie Erin Smith, the author of Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families And The Search For A Cure, which was Curious Reading Club’s book of the month for January. It’s a really fascinating book about a major research trial in Colombia which focused on a huge group of people who carry a particular gene linked to early-onset Alzheimer’s. We chatted about all manner of things, including the complexity (or not!) of […]

Preserving the past

January 17, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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Work

For Dweb Digest I wrote a short profile of the archivist Rick Prelinger, and his work to create decentralized copies of vast tranches of archival data alongside his friends and partners at the Internet Archive. It was a lot of fun driving over to their East Bay warehouse and sitting down to talk to him and his team about how they find, clean, capture and share vast amounts of video taken from almost anywhere you […]

David Baron: The Martians used to be the good guys

December 30, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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books

December’s Curious Reading Club book is The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America by former NPR science editor David Baron—a rollicking read about the gilded age’s obsession with aliens, and the space-obsessed Boston brahmin Percival Lowell who made it happen. David’s book looks at how the craze took hold, what it meant, and how it fell apart… and why we’re still obsessed anyway. I was particularly taken by the […]

Tania Branigan: “Everybody thinks they would have been in the Resistance in wartime.”

November 24, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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interviews

This month’s Curious Reading Club pick is Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution (WW Norton, 2023). It’s an absolutely fascinating look at people’s memories of this turbulent, horrific period of recent Chinese history, and how people wrestle with what they have done and what they didn’t do. Tania is an old colleague of mine from the Guardian: I once visited her in Beijing while I was on assignment for this Wired […]