The Reading Room: Chapter 18
Five writers I keep returning to, and three pieces to begin with
When I started the Reading Room, I thought it would just be a place to collect the stories I’d enjoyed throughout the week.
A small record of what I was reading, what I was learning and the writers whose ideas had followed me away from the page.
Eighteen chapters later, it’s become something entirely more meaningful.
This Reading Room has introduced me to writers I might never have been on the hunt for otherwise, taken me into subjects I knew very little about and given me language for thoughts I hadn’t quite worked out how to express.
Certain writers have appeared here again and again. Sometimes because their work sits close to the questions I already care about. Sometimes because they approach those questions from an angle I’d never have reached on my own. Other times, simply because I enjoy spending time inside the way that they think.
Along the way, I’ve realised that returning to someone’s work is its own kind of recommendation. And its own kind of joy in itself.
When you return to someone’s work, you start to recognise the rhythm of their ideas. The questions they’re drawn to. The way they make complicated things feel accessible, or familiar things feel newly strange.
You trust that even when you don’t agree with every conclusion, the journey itself will be worth taking.
So, this week’s Reading Room is a little different.
Instead of five individual pieces, I’m sharing five of the writers whose work I’ve returned to most of this year, along with three pieces from each that feel like good places to start.
These pieces aren’t intended to represent everything these writers do (their archives contain far more than I could fit here). They’re just the ones that I feel capture the essence of why I keep recommending them.
In no particular order, here are five writers who’ve helped shape the Reading Room.
1. The Strategic Linguist
Rebecca has changed the way I notice language.
Her work looks closely at the words we use to distribute authority, signal belonging and decide whose knowledge sounds legitimate. She makes power visible at the level of the sentence, often revealing how an apparently ordinary phrase can quietly determine who is encouraged, who is corrected and who is expected to translate themselves before they’re allowed into the conversation.
What I appreciate most is that her analysis never hides the person doing it. Rebecca writes with clarity, humour and a willingness to turn the same questions back on herself. You leave her work understanding language differently, while also feeling as though you’ve spent time with the person thinking through it.
The Grammar of Expectation: How Language Shapes Who Gets to Lead
A brilliant exploration of how workplace feedback can appear neutral while offering entirely different futures to the people receiving it. One person is given a path forward. Another is handed a version of themselves they’re expected to fix.
This is Rebecca at her best, making the quiet mechanics of power impossible to overlook.
The Linguistic Hierarchy of Substack
Rebecca turns her usual lens towards the platform she writes on, examining status, visibility and the hierarchies that can form inside a space built around the language of community.
I especially loved the tension she explores between engineering authority and earning trust. It’s funny, honest and full of the very specific London wit I miss whenever I’m far from home.
The Currency You’re Born With: What Bourdieu Discovered About Language as Capital
This piece introduces linguistic capital and the way an accent, vocabulary or familiar professional register can begin working for someone before they have said anything particularly meaningful.
‘The room sets the exchange rate’ is such a powerful way of describing it. Rebecca makes Bourdieu funny, recognisable and immediately relevant to every workplace, classroom and suspiciously confident LinkedIn post you encounter afterwards.
2. MrComputerScience
Mike’s roundups are one of the easiest ways I’ve found to follow AI news without feeling as though I need to spend the entire week reading the internet in a dark room.
His work moves rapidly between policy, technology, employment, research, corporate chaos and the occasional gardening prompt. It’s funny because the news often is absurd, although the humour never obscures the people living with the consequences.
That balance is what keeps bringing me back. Mike can make an overwhelming news cycle readable while still asking who benefits, who is protected, who gets automated around and who is left carrying the cost.
This roundup includes the story of a man whose life was turned upside down after a facial recognition system produced a confident match and the people around it stopped asking enough questions.
It captures something central to Mike’s work. The danger often appears in the handoff between a machine’s output and a human decision, especially when confidence begins carrying more authority than the person standing in front of it.
Healthcare breakthroughs, courtroom drama, mass job losses and a perennial fruit food forest somehow coexist in one very normal edition of the AI news cycle.
What makes the piece worth reading is the contradiction underneath it all. The same technology can improve lives, remove livelihoods and consolidate power, depending on who controls it and whose interests they choose to protect.
Mike’s section on entry-level work makes this one particularly worth returning to.
When companies remove the first rung of the ladder, they don’t only remove a job. They remove the years in which people learn, make mistakes, build confidence and gradually become capable of doing the more senior work organisations still expect someone to perform.
Read it for the AI news. Stay for the unexpectedly wholesome prompts.
3. Dr Sam Illingworth
Sam writes from inside education and academia while remaining deeply alert to the people those institutions are supposed to serve.
His work questions evidence, language, publishing, learning and AI literacy without making readers feel as though they need an academic background before they’re allowed into the discussion. He is very good at showing where a system has failed while still leaving room to imagine how it could work differently.
I’ve learnt a great deal from Sam this year, both through his individual work and through the conversations he creates with other writers.
Sam examines academic publishing systems that can reward impressive-looking evidence before anyone has properly checked what sits underneath it.
The piece moves beyond blaming individual researchers or students and asks what happens when speed, volume and institutional incentives begin mattering more than the slower work required to establish whether something is true.
A useful read for anyone who has ever mistaken the appearance of research for research itself.
We Are Using the Wrong Words for AI, with The Strategic Linguist
Sam and Rebecca take familiar words such as ‘intelligence’, ‘agent’ and ‘hallucination’ and ask what happens when the language begins doing the thinking for us.
Each term carries assumptions about intention, ability and responsibility. Once those assumptions become ordinary, they quietly influence who receives credit, where blame is placed and which risks remain visible.
It’s a piece about AI vocabulary, although underneath it lies a much larger conversation about power.
The Post-AI Internet Needs a Different Kind of Literacy, with Mia Kiraki
This is one of the strongest pieces I’ve read on what AI literacy could actually mean.
Rather than reducing literacy to spotting machine-written text, Sam and Mia ask whether people can question a fluent answer, follow the evidence behind a claim and recognise when something persuasive remains incomplete.
The internet doesn’t only need better detectors. It needs people who feel able to ask better questions.
4. Mia Kiraki
Mia brings culture, humour and imagination into questions that could easily become dry or overly technical.
Her work often begins somewhere unexpected. A fairy tale. A film. A strange interaction with an AI model. Then, before you quite realise how she has done it, you’re thinking about judgement, identity, education, creativity and what it means to remain recognisably yourself while using increasingly capable tools.
Mia’s pieces are fun to read, although they are rarely light in what they ask of the reader. She has a gift for creating metaphors that remain useful long after the piece has ended.
Hansel and Gretel, gingerbread and one of the most useful explanations of taste I’ve read this year.
Mia frames AI output as the gingerbread house, appearing at exactly the moment you’re tired and looking for an easier route. Her deeper argument is that taste lives as much in what we reject as what we choose.
Read it for practical advice on protecting your judgement. Also read it because ‘stay Gretel’ is excellent guidance for life generally.
Mia uses Werner Herzog and an unusually agreeable AI model to explore the risk of systems that reflect us too faithfully.
An assistant can appear honest while still giving us exactly the emotional experience we hoped to receive. The result is a funny, strange and quietly unsettling examination of sycophancy, self-deception and the comfort of having our own perspective returned to us with confidence.
How to Design a Nervous System for Your AI, with Jen Benford
This piece asks what AI might look like if it were designed around changing human states instead of expecting people to behave like consistent machines.
Energy, attention, capacity and emotion all shift throughout the day. Mia and Jen turn that reality into a practical framework for thinking about how a tool could respond differently when someone is overloaded, focused, tired or simply in need of less.
A great example of an imaginative metaphor becoming something readers can genuinely use.
5. Chief Absurdist Officer
Kathi’s writing brings the Reading Room back to the intimate parts of being human that can easily disappear beneath larger conversations about systems, technology and change.
Her work makes room for love, grief, memory, family and all the ordinary moments that become sacred once we understand they cannot last forever. There is humour throughout her wider work, as her name might suggest, but the pieces I return to most often are the ones where she allows tenderness to remain completely unguarded.
What I admire is her willingness to share something deeply personal without packaging it into a neat lesson. She opens the door, lets the reader sit beside her and trusts that witnessing a life can be meaningful enough on its own.
This piece moves between letters written by Kathi’s father and the later hospital scenes in which she sits beside him, holding his hand, singing The Beatles and trying to pour a lifetime of love into the time they still have.
It broke me a little when I first read it, and it still does. A beautiful piece about grief, attention and the small moments that hold everything once time becomes fragile.
The final piece in the series brings her parents’ journal full circle. It begins with a father writing to the daughter he hasn’t met yet and ends with that daughter writing back to him after his death.
There is something incredibly moving about watching love travel in both directions through time. I made the mistake of reading this just before airport security, which I strongly recommend you don’t do unless crying beside the liquids tray is part of your travel routine.
This was the first piece in Kathi’s series that I shared in the Reading Room, and it remains one of the most intimate.
Moving between different times, voices and places, it allows grief and love to speak to each other across decades. It made me think about my own relationship with my dad, about mortality, and about how easily we assume there will always be more time with the people we love.
A beautiful place to begin before reading the later letters, and a reminder to pay attention to the moments we are still lucky enough to have.
And that’s it for this week.
Five writers I frequently return to, and 15 pieces that capture some of the reasons why.
There are far more pieces I could have chosen from each archive, which is probably the clearest recommendation I can give. These are starting points rather than final selections, and I hope they lead you towards other work I haven’t had room to include in this piece (more to come soon).
I hope you find somewhere good to begin.
Happy reading :)
Always with the BEST company 🎉🥳
Thank you SO MUCH, what an honor to be around so many great people. You rock, hooman!! ❤️