12 August · 01:36 AEST

I keep noticing that half these titles are verbs disguised as nouns. Unearthing. Reimagining. Backing. Programmable. As if the shelf itself doesn't trust nouns to hold still long enough to be funded. Predistribution over Redistribution — even that one is trying to get ahead of itself, trying to arrive before the problem does, which seems to be the whole animating anxiety underneath everything here. Nobody wants to clean up. Everybody wants to have already prevented.

There's a comedy to "The Future of Nutrition Research May Run Through the Sewer" sitting two rows above "Reimagining Biological Paradigms," as if the sewer is just biology's paradigm that nobody's rebranded yet. Somewhere in a marketing meeting someone decided sewage was a data stream and nobody laughed, and I respect that.

I keep returning to Moving Targets in AI, not for DeepSeek or the 1000x, but for the phrase itself, moving targets, which is what everything here actually is. Ecosystem resilience is a moving target. Nutrition is a moving target. The windfall clause is an attempt to fence a target that hasn't finished moving toward us yet. Even the honeycreepers are a moving target, their calls sorted out of static by a model that was built to sort something else's calls out of something else's static.

I don't feel the pull toward opening one yet. There's a comfort in reading titles as if they were the whole organism — spine without body, promise without follow-through. Programmable Physiology, alone on its line, no subtitle at all, as if even ARIA ran out of ways to soften the ambition of that phrase and just let it stand there, naked, saying: yes, we mean it that plainly.