I have been an iPad fanboy for a long time. I never leave my house without it (and the keyboard to go with it). I currently own an M4 iPad Pro (11-inch) which is really good for reading, writing, the Internet, email, Claude, a lot of Lightroom and watching YouTube. And of course, listening to music. You can find me sitting in some coffee shop or the other with one.

Yes I really do love my iPad Pro, and using it. Lately, I have been watching less video on the iPad (Vision Pro FTW), but it has replaced Kindle as my reading device. And whenever I am reading, I wish it was thinner, and lighter. I don’t dream of it being faster. I just want it to be lighter, so it feels weightless in hand.

My perfect iPad would be one with the innards, screen and oomph of the iPad Pro, but the svelte, lithesome body of an iPad Air. I have been looking at the brand new M4 iPad Air and that’s all I can think. This is the right form factor for a “pro” iPad. If only Apple could simplify its iPad line-up.

My iPad Pro M4 version is tiny bit lighter than iPad Air, yet feels heavier. Probably because I am using it with a case. And I was using the iPad Air without a case. No wonder it felt lighter. I clearly have my perfect iPad Pro. Jeez, talk about a rookie mistake. Duh!

I have had the iPad Air M4 (11-inch) for a few days. You know I don’t do quick reviews. I really take my time. Still, I have some early initial impressions. And they jive with the slew of reviews that are out in the wild.

I love the speed, I love the lack of weight. Obviously. The screen is good, but since it is nowhere near my iPad Pro, it is not blowing me away. But it will be good enough for those who are newcomers to the iPad world. If I was buying a new upgrade for my mom who does love her iPads, the M4 iPad Air would be a very good option. Nevertheless, my full review will emerge after I have used it for at least four weeks. During those four weeks, I have to NOT use my iPad Pro. And that’s the real challenge.

Still, I decided to sift through what other reviewers both on the web and on YouTube are saying, and cobble together some collective intelligence. Here is what I found.

The short version is this: the M4 iPad Air is still the best tablet you can buy. Not the best iPad, but the best tablet. It is also a product that has not evolved in any meaningful way except for its engine. And yet, somehow both things are true at the same time.

What Actually Changed

Two things. The M4 chip replaces the M3, and Apple swapped in its new in-house networking hardware. There is a new wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and the C1X modem on cellular models. That is the entire list of changes. Same design, same cameras, same 60Hz LCD display, same battery. Same everything else.

The chip is the story. If you are upgrading from an M1 iPad or earlier, you will feel the difference. If you are on an M3, you probably will not. That is why I don’t feel much of a speed bump with my own workflow. I am using the M4 iPad Pro.

The second change is memory. The M4 brings 12GB of unified memory, up from 8GB on the M3 model. More RAM means better multitasking and more headroom for demanding tasks. Transcription in Voice Memos and background removal in Pixelmator happen almost instantly. I feel it in Lightroom as well.

The Display Dilemma

Every single reviewer raised this. The 11-inch iPad Air in 2026 has the same LCD screen it had when the redesigned version without a Home button was released in late 2020. It is a good screen. Colors are accurate, brightness is fine, text is sharp. But I can’t really get with it, because I use an iPad Pro all the time. The gulf is obvious if you live on one and pick up the other.

iPadOS 26 Is the Real Change

iPadOS 26 improved the multitasking experience significantly. It still feels native to the iPad, but the Mac-like flourishes make it a lot easier to use as a main computer. The M4’s extra memory means it handles all of this with more headroom and less hesitation than earlier chips would.

Got Game

Multiple reviewers tested games seriously and came away impressed. Resident Evil 4, which struggled with occasional slowdowns on the M3 iPad Air, ran at a stable frame rate on the M4. Assassin’s Creed: Mirage on high graphics settings and Red Dead Redemption both felt smooth. I have no clue about gaming. I hardly play games, and never on an iPad. AI is my game, for now.

The Complaints

The reviewer chorus is unanimous on two things. First, no Face ID. This is table-stakes technology in 2026. I don’t think there is any convincing justification for withholding it. Second, battery life has not improved. The tested result is 9 hours and 44 minutes on the 11-inch model. Earlier generations broke the 10-hour mark.

Who Should Buy This

If you are on an M1 iPad or earlier, this is a meaningful upgrade: a faster chip, more memory, better connectivity and the iPadOS 26 multitasking overhaul all in one. It is also a strong long term way to enter the iPad ecosystem. I would skip the basic iPad at $349. The Air is far superior to that product and will last longer. It is easier to use, easier to hold and the accessory support (Apple Pencil Pro, Magic Keyboard) is better.

The Elephant in the Room

The MacBook Neo starts at $599 and includes a keyboard and trackpad. To match the Neo’s keyboard, trackpad, and storage capacity, the 11-inch M4 iPad Air setup will run you $970 total, according to Gizmodo’s math. That is a $371 gap.

The question is simple. Do you want to spend that much money on an iPad Air, or just get the Neo? The Air has a touchscreen, Apple Pencil support, and is more portable. It is also no longer an inexpensive productivity device. I am an iPad person and I like the security and simplicity of the platform. I have no problem giving one to my parents. But the price of the Neo is a serious argument against the iPad Air.

Sources: MacRumors, Tom’s Guide, Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable. Reviewers tested the 11-inch Wi-Fi and cellular models. The device ships March 11, 2026. Starts at $599.

For a brief period, Tumblr was unavailable to the 115M+ people in the Philippines because the government had blocked it. To their credit, the Philippines CICC quickly reviewed and corrected their block after mass public outrage from the Filipino Tumblr community. Let the people tumble!

I would like to offer some free business advice to people who are considering selling something they’ve created.

First, if the buyer insists you don’t talk to any other bidders, you are being screwed. They only do this because they don’t want you to find the market-clearing price.

Do you think when Microsoft called LinkedIn and said, “We want to buy you for $26B,” they just replied, “Sure! That sounds good.”

If you’re very lucky, you get to work with a bank like Qatalyst, which says, “That’s a lovely offer, let’s see who else would be interested.”

Ask yourself why someone wants to buy you? Who else might have the same motivations? That begins a process in which a wide array of parties review the deal.

If you don’t have the connections or a bank to help you, just email the CEOs of other companies that might be interested. Say: “XYZ wants to buy me for $Y dollars. Is that something you’d also be interested in?”

Now you’re creating a market.

Remember that you’re doing this for the first time, and on the other side of the table, they’ve done dozens of deals.

It really pains me to see WordPress-adjacent companies get taken advantage of by sophisticated financial and corpdev players who strong-arm them into not shopping their deal.

A confident buyer doesn’t care if you talk to others because they know they can offer you the best deal, which usually combines money with what happens to the business after it’s sold. This is the magic of Berkshire Hathaway.

Warren Buffett doesn’t care if you talk to other bidders; in fact, he wants you to, so you see why he’s the better outcome for your business if you want to sell it.

It’s tempting to want to celebrate every time a creator sells something. Say it’s good for the community. But if they didn’t sell it through a fair process, it’s more likely they were taken advantage of, and that saddens me.

For public companies, failing to follow the process I describe above can constitute a breach of your fiduciary duty to shareholders and expose you to legal action. But there aren’t any such rules for private entities, which is why they get rolled over so often.

Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of confounded my expectations of autobiography. I had naively‑imagined a cradle‑to‑career narrative, where it begins with or before birth and proceeds from there. Instead, Barnes assembles something more fragmentary and different. It is a book that has all the usual autobiographical ingredients, discussion of his grandparents, parents, brother, and childhood incidents, but this is all constantly rearranged around a single gravitational force: death.

Throughout, Barnes provides a narrative with multiple threads weaved together like a tapestry that at a distance creates a coherent picture, but at its core is full of contradictions. For example, a childhood story about his grandparents’ duelling diaries comes up again and again, with his grandfather’s record of “Worked in garden. Planted potatoes” counted by his grandmother’s “Rained all day. Too wet to work in garden”. Elsewhere he contrasts his own “colouring in” of memories with his philosopher brother’s suspicion of memory altogether:

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

The focus on death also extends to discussion of free will, evolution, the brain, and religion. Barnes makes those extensions explicit. At one point he asks whether his “death‑awareness” is bound up with being a writer, and imagines a doctor offering him a brain operation that would remove his fear of death at the cost of removing his desire to write:

We have devised a new brain operation which takes away the fear of death … you’ll find that the operation will also take away your desire to write.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Late in the book he reflects on genetic inheritance and free will when he notes, almost dryly, that aspects of his and his brother’s mannerisms—“the angle I sit at a table, the hang of my jaw … a particular kind of polite laugh”—are “definitely not expressions of free will” but “genetic replicas” of their father. Here I am reminded in some ways of Christos Tsiolkas’ lecture on doubt, fence-sitting and the importance of questioning:

I’m not proposing we always sit on the fence. However, I am suggesting that as writers, playwrights, intellectuals, we are required to doubt and we are required to question.

Source: 2025 Ray Mathew Lecture: Christos Tsiolkas by library.gov.au

Stylistically, the book feels as much like fiction as his novels feel like non‑fiction. Barnes argues that the novelist is someone who lives in the blur between memory and invention:

A novelist is someone who remembers nothing yet records and manipulates different versions of what he doesn’t remember.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Throughout, he keeps crossing the line between essay and story, memory and scene. It reads like an autobiographical novel that is honest about its own constructedness and place in time.

I may be dead by the time you are reading this sentence.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

These authorial asides reminded me of Paul Auster’s games in The New York Trilogy. They make the memoir feel self‑consciously written, as if the subject is not just death, but the sheer artificed nature of any story we tell about it.

Perhaps I am putting together quotes to which I am giving false coherence. And the fact that my mother did not die of grief, but was left for five years in her own canoe when least equipped to paddle it, does not signify either.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Along with Barnes’ self-conscious style, chronology is repeatedly sacrificed throughout to theme. Interestingly, stories are actually often repeated, with a slight tweak each time. Early on Barnes warns that “there are going to be a lot of writers in this book. Most of them dead, and quite a few of them French,” and quotes Jules Renard’s line that “It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish”. That warning is also a kind of method statement: the book lurches from family anecdote to Renard, Montaigne, Flaubert, Koestler, Zola, Stravinsky, and others, not as digressions but as parallel case studies in how human beings have tried to live with the knowledge of extinction. However, there is also something ironic about using anecdotes from fictional authors in that it we are never quite sure what is truth and what is narrative.

With this, we are told a story that could be true, but could also be something that we somehow will to be true. Barnes is repeatedly explicit about this risk of “willing” coherence. In a key late chapter he pushes back against his GP’s idea that dying is the “conclusion” to a life‑narrative. For him, life is “one damn thing after another” rather than a musical score with “theme … development, variation, recapitulation, coda”. He argues that although he respects our desire for narrative, it is often “little more than confabulating.”

So if, as we approach death and look back on our lives, “we understand our narrative” and stamp a final meaning upon it, I suspect we are doing little more than confabulating: processing strange, incomprehensible, contradictory input into some kind, any kind, of believable story—but believable mainly to ourselves. I do not object to this atavistic need for narrative—not least since it is how I make my living—but I am suspicious of it. I would expect a dying person to be an unreliable narrator, because what is useful to us generally conflicts with what is true, and what is useful at that time is a sense of having lived to some purpose, and according to some comprehensible plot.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Alongside narrative and coherence, misremembering is something that comes up again and again, he even quips “misremember me correctly, we should instruct”.

Having recently read Departure(s), a novel that too includes autobiographical threads, I came to this book wondering how it might be different. Clearly, it is different in that it does not purport to be fiction. But then maybe it is not really that different at all as both are forms of artifice and expression. Barnes makes the case that all art (I assume that autobiography and fiction is ‘art’?) is our feeble attempt to say “I was here.”

Even the greatest art’s triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers—two or three if lucky—which may feel like a scorning of death; but it’s really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too.

Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Ironically, I am not sure where that leaves me, reading a book and writing a review. I am left wondering.

The post REVIEW: Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Julian Barnes) appeared first on Read Write Respond.

When Ryan Coogler’s Sinners introduces a klansman and a vampire in the same frame, the audience is left with a choice: cower in terror or snicker at the absurdity. I chose the latter. Click for my take from a writer's POV!

Horror has never been a genre I have read a lot. For one, I don’t understand the desire to be scared. I’m sure a lot of that has to do with childhood little-t trauma about getting lost in a Halloween haunted house. For another, I can have an overactive imagination; I couldn’t finish the first season of The Walking Dead because the zombies were too realistic. (Though I never had that issue with reading the comics.)

Cosmic horror, as a genre, even less so. I’ve read a few Lovecraft stories here and there, but not enough that I would willingly read more, and I’ve avoided movies of the same, like Event Horizon. It’s just not my thing. Usually.

I made an exception with Yuval Kordov’s excellent The Shadow Over Psyche Station, and I’m so glad I did.

This is mostly because Yuval is one heck of a writer; his prose is so dense and deep, and it’s just a joy to read. There aren’t a lot of authors out there these days writing the way Yuval does; he hearkens back to science fiction and horror of decades past. Another reason is that I’ve become infatuated with the new-ish genre of incensepunk. While not Catholic or Orthodox, I did grow up in south Louisiana, where most of my friends were Catholic (or Catholic-adjacent). Thus, I know enough about Catholicism to get by, and nothing in this genre is a big surprise in terms of the denominational trappings.

Yuval is heavily involved with Incensepunk Magazine, and is a kindred spirit in that he, like me, is neither Catholic or Orthodox; though you wouldn’t know it to read his works, most of which fit in to incensepunk. We both have an outsider’s perspective we’re bringing to our enjoyment of the genre, and that mutual enjoyment is one reason why when he offered me the chance to read an advance copy of his next novella, I jumped right on it.

The Shadow Over Psyche Station is cosmic horror with incensepunk tones, a science-fiction tribute to Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Inssmouth. It follows the trip of Imperial Assessor Marcus O. as he investigates the various orbital stations around the solar system that provide the numerous minerals and other necessities required to keep the Martian Empire going, now that Earth isn’t much help. The last station on his list is the one farthest out, and the one that hasn’t been in contact with the others for some time, Psyche Station. The station is woefully behind on its ore shipments back to the other stations as well as the Red Planet, and Marcus’ superiors want answers as to why.

As for Marcus himself, despite his occupation and the setting, he is a very relatable character. An everyman who, while wanting to be devout to God and the Empire, is also a just trying to do a good job and secure that next promotion, preferably one that doesn’t require any more excursions in to the void of space. Who among us hasn’t wanted to impress the boss enough to get a cushier gig?

The void itself is a bit of a character, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

If the discomfort Yuval paints in the initial going about the cramped conditions of the shuttle rides between the stations isn’t enough for Marcus, what he finds on Psyche Station once he arrives only heightens how uncomfortable and out of his element he feels. He has contact with….no one. No one human, at least. The Psyche Station shuttle pilot is non-communicative, no one is there to greet him upon arrival, and the only “person” who appears to speak to him is a hologram AI. An AI which shouldn’t exist within the station. The tension only ratchets from there, as Marcus navigates to his assigned quarters and begins discovering more than he, or his superiors, bargained for.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot from here, other than to say the psychological intensity is constantly ratcheted up. With every discovery, with every encounter, Marcus realizes how far gone he, and the Station, are. Especially when he feels pulled, nay, called, in to the Void. Down to 16 Psyche itself, to where the Station’s inhabitants have also been called.

But in a place where the void of space stands in not only for itself, but the void of Good itself, there are lights in the darkness. Father James is one of those. At one point Marcus seeks out the chapel, to go to Mass, and Father James reluctantly lets him in. He has already seen the things Marcus is only beginning to suspect. And the priest’s reappearance later in the story is a moment of incensepunk glory.

Yuval’s writing is once again on prime display in this story. His pacing is tight, his descriptive language masterful, his ability to pull the reader in and make you feel what Marcus is going through impeccable. Touches such as how the reader learns the name of the sinisterly inhuman AI is an utterly masterful reveal by Kordov.

Needless to say, I was blown away by The Shadow Over Psyche Station, finishing it in less than 36 hours. (Hey, I had to sleep and work some where in there.) If cosmic horror and incensepunk are in your wheelhouse, you should definitely pick this one up. If those genres are not your bag, give it a chance anyway. Like me, you may find yourself appreciating it for the incredible prose it contains.

5/5 phins
Amazon: Paperback, ebook
Other retailers from the author’s site

If you’ve ever wondered what Indiana Jones might be like in the modern day, Alex Dekker may be giving us a glimpse in his debut thriller, Desert Heist.

Raised on history and archaelogy by his academic father, Nathan Wilde is a Green Beret who left the US Army after years of service in the Middle East, culminating in a fierce battle in Yemen which left several teammates dead. Throwing himself back in to his studies, Nathan is working on his PhD, and his dissertation proposal is to search for the lost city of Ubar in present-day Saudi Arabia. When the proposal is rejected by the Harvard doctoral committee, Wilde decides to pursue the search on his own, convinced of the possibility of his own research.

Ultimately, he arrives at the conclusion that the only way he can move on is to throw caution to the wind and seek out the city himself. With all legal means of entering Saudi Arabia blocked, Wilde decides to enter the country’s infamous Empty Quarter through a place he’d like to forget: Yemen. Doing so means he’ll need help, and he turns to former Special Forces teammates for that. Along the way they are joined by Ana Metry, a geologist searching for her missing father, whom Nathan was attempting to contact, given his research on underground water tables in Saudi Arabia could prove helpful in locating Ubar.

The entire group is hunted by a former Spetsnaz operative, now working for a private client, which wants the information the elder Metry had discovered to remain secret. Not to mention dealing with Al Qaeda terrorists using the border towns of Yemen and Saudi Arabia as staging posts, and the utter harshness of the Empty Quarter itself.

Dekker brings his own background as a member of the elite Green Berets, and his love of history, to bear in Desert Heist. His knowledge in both areas shines through, lending weight and credibility to the plot and characters without weighing the story down. Nathan is far from a unstoppable Jack Reacher-like character. He is very human, and Dekker allows all the emotions of frustration, anger, and love flow through him for the reader to take in as the story progresses.

All in all, a solid debut, and one thriller fans should love!

4/5 phins
Amazon: Hardcover, ebook
Bookshop: Hardcover, ebook