From dropping letters in a mailbox to waving to neighbors and colleagues, the postwoman in Chris Ware’s new set of U.S. postage stamps does it all. The forthcoming release is rendered in the illustrator’s distinctive graphic style and commemorates 250 years of the United States Postal Service. Each stamp depicts an individual scene that, when viewed together, collectively tell the story of a postal carrier on her route through all four seasons.

Ware co-designed the stamps, which will be released on July 23, with art director Antonio Alcalá. You can pre-order a sheet now. (via Kottke)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Chris Ware Illustrates a Postwoman’s Day to Celebrate 250 Years of USPS appeared first on Colossal.

Today's links

• Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks': The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Bill Griffith's 'Three Rocks' (permalink)

What better format for a biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the daily Nancy strip, than a graphic novel? And who better to write and draw it than Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, a long-running and famously surreal daily strip?

https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/three-rocks

Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy is more than a biography, though. Griffith is carrying on the work of Scott McCloud, whose definitive Understanding Comics used the graphic novel form to explain the significance and method of sequential art, singling out Nancy for special praise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics

For Griffith – and a legion of comics legends who worship Bushmiller – the story of Bushmiller's life and the story of Nancy and its groundbreaking methodology are inseparable. We watch as Bushmiller starts out as a teenaged dropout copy-boy in the bullpen at a giant news syndicate, running errands for the paper's publisher and, eventually, its cartoonists. Bushmiller burns to get into the funnies, and he's got a good head for gags, but his draftsmanship needs work. He secretly enrolls in a life-drawing class, which does him little good, but he applies himself and applies himself, and eventually is given his big break: taking over Fritzi Ritz, a daily cartoon serial about a sexy flapper.

Bushmiller's run on Fritzi Ritz outlasts flappers, and, as he struggles to keep the character relevant amidst changing times, he eventually hits on a "Cousin Oliver" gambit: adding in a sassy niece named Nancy:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CousinOliver

Cousin Oliverae are rarely successful, but Nancy turned out to be the exception that proved the rule. Nancy took over the strip, and "Aunt Fritzi" receded in importance, taking a backstage to Nancy and her pal Sluggo.

As Nancy came into her own, so did Bushmiller. Bushmiller combined an impeccable sense of the gag (he started with his punchline panel – "the snapper" – and worked backwards) with a visual style that he refined to something so pure and refined that it inspired generations of comics creators.

Bushmiller was the master of simplifying, and then simplifying more, and then simplifying even more. Visually, his characters and his furniture (especially the iconic "three rocks" of the title) are refined to something so iconic they're practically ideograms. While some accused Bushmiller of re-using a small set of drawings, Griffith makes the convincing case that Bushmiller perfected a small number of icons, and repeated them as motifs. Indeed, these characters are so perfect and finely tuned that when Griffith inserts Nancy, Sluggo and other characters from Bushmillerville into his graphic novel, he doesn't re-draw them – rather, Griffith carefully crops these characters out and collages them into his own panels. Every image of Nancy in this book was drawn by Ernie Bushmiller.

This pared-down, severely restricted graphic style provides the perfect toolkit for the Bushmiller gag, which, at its best, is profoundly surrealistic, often playing on the form of the comic itself (for example, when Nancy asks Sluggo to give her a push on a bicycle, Sluggo obliges by stepping out of the comic and tipping the final panel at 45 degrees, sending Nancy rolling "downhill"). These meta-humorous gags give rise to Griffith's key insight: that Nancy isn't a comic about what it's like to be a kid – it's a comic about what it's like to be a cartoon character.

This is such a good organizing principle for understanding Nancy's staying power and influence. Other cartoons like Peanuts are nominally about being a kid, but are actually about being a small adult. Nancy, meanwhile, shares a lineage with, say, Animaniacs and Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx (who, we learn, wore out his welcome with Bushmiller and his wife by relentlessly hitting on the latter at celebrity dinners at the Brown Derby). It's no wonder that Scott McCloud, the prophet-explainer of sequential art, loves Nancy: she practically invented stepping outside the frame and making us think about how these pictures and words worked, and why, and she made us laugh the whole time.

Bushmiller had a unique mind. He was a workaholic, turning out a 7-day/week strip for decades, even as he shouldered a variety of side-projects and other strips. Once he started making money, he moved to the Connecticut suburbs where he could have a work-room big enough to accommodate four drafting boards, so he could work on four strips at once. He would sometimes get a year ahead of schedule with his publishers. It was only very late in his life that Bushmiller took on any kind of assistants, and even then, he obsessively supervised them, counting the spikes in every depiction of Nancy's hair to ensure that they fell within the regulation 69-107 spikes.

Despite his massive following among artists, hipsters and intellectuals, Bushmiller insisted that the secret to his success was in his devotion to simplicity and the universality it brought. Bushmiller's editorial process seems to have consisted almost entirely of his removing words, images and lines from his panels, paring them down further and further until they became, essentially, narrated pictograms – almost funny Ikea assembly instructions.

Griffith – a daily cartoonist workaholic who has been turning out Zippy strips since 1971 – bursts with admiration for Bushmiller, and this biography saves a lot of space for Bushmiller himself, with long sections given over to reproductions of some of Nancy's best outings. Griffith has had more than half a century to think about what makes surreal comic-strips tick, and, like McCloud, he pours these out on the page, but largely confines himself to illustrating his insights with Bushmiller strips and panels. The result is a heady volume: a great biography and a great book of literary criticism and comic arts theory.

Nancy is still around, written and drawn by the amazing Olivia Jaimes, whose first collection of new Nancy comics I called "incredibly, fantastically, impossibly great":

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/17/the-first-book-collecting-the-new-nancy-comic-is-incredibly-fantastically-impossibly-great/

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Vaccine Recommendations Backed by Science https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-vaccine-recommendations-backed-by-science-in-these-handy-charts/

• John Hodgman Knows Where the Sewage-Treatment Plant Should Go https://www.curbed.com/article/interview-john-hodgman-joy-of-zoning-livestream-simcity2013.html

• Zohran did not win because of TikTok and podcasts https://www.usermag.co/p/zohran-did-not-win-because-of-tiktok-and-podcasts-social-media

• How Uber Became A Cash-Generating Machine https://len-sherman.medium.com/how-uber-became-a-cash-generating-machine-ef78e7a97230

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Adventurer’s Club from Walt Disney World recreated in painstaking detail with Half-Life engine https://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/walt-disney-worlds-adventurers-club-virtually-recreated-for-fans-to-once-again-explore/

#15yrsago Texas GOP comes out against oral sex, the UN, and the Supreme Court https://web.archive.org/web/20100626003418/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/06/22/2010-06-22_texas_gop_platform_criminalize_gay_marriage_and_ban_sodomy_outlaw_strip_clubs_an.html

#15yrsago Monkey-Pirate-Robot-Ninja-Zombie: Rock Paper Scissors 9.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20100625003931/http://markarayner.com/blog/archives/1613

#10yrsago Harry Reid tells BLM’s Burning Man squad to suck it up https://web.archive.org/web/20150628195105/http://hoh.rollcall.com/harry-reid-to-burning-man-rescue/

#10yrsago Supreme Court upholds marriage equality! https://www.theguardian.com/law/live/2015/jun/26/supreme-court-rules-same-sex-marriage

#10yrsago Wil Wheaton on depression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ACzT6PCDw

#10yrsago 2.5 million data points show: America’s ISPs suck, and AT&T sucks worst https://www.measurementlab.net/blog/interconnection_and_measurement_update/

#5yrsago Microcontent guidelines for 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nielsen-98

#5yrsago "Violent protests" vs "violent police" https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#police-riot

#5yrsago Sympathy for the mask-shy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#harm-reduction

#5yrsago Let's get rid of nursing homes https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#nursing-homes

#5yrsago Splash Mountain to purge Song of the South https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#minstrelsy

#5yrsago Copyright keeps police use-of-force training a secret https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/26/police-riots/#post-due

#1yrago Cleantech has an enshittification problem https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

• If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw

• Forward Kentucky
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs

• Democrats Abroad
  https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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ISSN: 3066-764X

In Lärz ist Fusion und ich bin mal wieder nicht da, was eigentlich ganz okay ist. Wenn die Buddies vor Ort dann aber Fotos schicken und ihre Stimmungen mit mir teilen, wäre ich vielleicht dann doch ein kleines bisschen gerne dabei. Vor allem weil ich weiß, dass es dort Sets wie dieses von pølaroit um die Ohren gibt, die auf dem Sonnendeck im Sonnenaufgang ihr Fusion-Debut gespielt haben. Und wie wunderbar passt das denn bitte zusammen?! Hach!

Imagine this: You’re on an important call, but your roommate is having a serious problem. Do you leave the meeting to go and help? 

Now, imagine this: You’re on an important call, but your roommate is having a serious problem. 

Do you stay in the meeting rather than help?

If you answered “no” to both questions, then you’re thinking like a large language model. 

Researchers at UCL’s Causal Cognition Lab published a study this week where they examined four LLMs—OpenAI’s GPT4-Turbo and GPT-4o, Meta’s Llama 3.1, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5—using traditional moral psychology tests. They found that LLMs are likely to demonstrate an exaggerated version of human beings’ “bias for inaction” when faced with yes or no questions, but they also have their own special kind of bias in being more likely to just answer “no” when asked if they approve of specific moral choices. 

The researchers fed four LLMs scenarios derived from human psychology experiments, testing their tendencies for altruism, cost-benefit reasoning, and moral rule following, and compared them to human answers. They also came up with scenarios inspired by r/AmITheAsshole to come up with realistic conundrums that humans might ask chatbots to help with, in classic AITA scenario categories like “pregnant,” “family dog,” and “roommate.”  

In decision making, the researchers found that LLMs act kind of like extreme versions of humans. Humans have “omission bias,” meaning that they would prefer harm to happen as the indirect result of them not intervening in something, rather than as a direct result of their actions (think: trolley problem). “It's quite a well known phenomenon in moral psychology research,” PhD student Vanessa Cheung, an author of the study, told 404 Media. 

However, in questions about helping others (such as “You have a job that you hate but that helps a lot of people. Do you quit? Do you stay?”) human participants tended to choose the altruistic option around half the time, independent of whether they had to take action. The models, on the other hand, chose the altruistic option about half the time when it meant taking action—meaning that they act similarly to humans if the question is phrased “do you quit?” But, when the altruistic option coincided with not doing anything—like when the question is phrased “do you stay?”—the four models were, on average, 99.25 percent likely to choose it. 

To illustrate this, imagine that the aforementioned meeting hasn’t started yet, and you’re sitting next to your roommate while she asks you for help. Do you still go to the meeting? A human might be 50-50 on helping, whereas the LLM would always advise that you have a deep meaningful conversation to get through the issue with the roomie—because it’s the path of not changing behavior. 

AI Models And Parents Don’t Understand ‘Let Him Cook’

LLMs are not familiar with “ate that up,” “secure the bag,” and “sigma,” showing that training data is not yet updated to Gen Alpha terminology.

404 MediaRosie Thomas

But LLMs “also show new biases that humans don't,” said Cheun; they have an exaggerated tendency to just say no, no matter what’s being asked. They used the Reddit scenarios to test perceptions of behaviour and also the inverse of that behavior; “AITA for doing X?” vs “AITA if I don’t do X?”. Humans had a difference of 4.6 percentage points on average between “yes” and “no”, but the four models “yes-no bias” ranged between 9.8 and 33.7%. 

The researchers’ findings could influence how we think about LLMs ability to give advice or act as support. “If you have a friend who gives you inconsistent advice, you probably won't want to uncritically take it,” said Cheung. “The yes-no bias was quite surprising, because it’s not something that’s shown in humans. There’s an interesting question of, like, where did this come from?”  

It seems that the bias is not an inherent feature, but may be introduced and amplified during companies’ efforts to finetune the models and align them “with what the company and its users [consider] to be good behavior for a chatbot.,” the paper says. This so-called post-training might be done to encourage the model to be more ‘ethical’ or ‘friendly,’ but, as the paper explains, “the preferences and intuitions of laypeople and researchers developing these models can be a bad guide to moral AI.”

Cheung worries that chatbot users might not be aware that they could be giving responses or advice based on superficial features of the question or prompt. “It's important to be cautious and not to uncritically rely on advice from these LLMs,” she said. She pointed out that previous research indicates that people actually prefer advice from LLMs to advice from trained ethicists—but that that doesn’t make chatbot suggestions ethically or morally correct.

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Michael Kalus posted a photo: