Appleton Today

In 1769, celebrated Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett published a book so bizarre it has puzzled readers for over two centuries. "The History and Adventures of an Atom" is narrated by an immortal atom that has spent a thousand years migrating through history, ultimately lodging itself inside the rectum of a fictional Japanese politician during a thinly disguised retelling of the Seven Years' War. The result is a scatological, coded satire of British political leaders—one that uses absurd pseudo-Japanese names, fart jokes, and obsessive anatomical detail to libel figures like William Pitt and King George II without naming them directly, a necessary precaution in an era when writers could land in prison, or the stocks, for political satire. This story traces how the novel as a form evolved through the 18th century—from the digressive, wildly paced picaresques of writers like Cervantes and Thomas Nashe toward something resembling modern fiction—and how Smollett's own career, marked by financial struggle, a libel conviction, and increasingly caddish protagonists, pushed him toward this singular literary experiment. Equal parts brilliant and unreadable, "Atom" represents a writer cornered by his own success, searching for somewhere new to go and finding it in the strangest possible place. The book remains largely forgotten today, overshadowed by Smollett's more conventional works, yet it offers a startling window into how writers once smuggled dangerous ideas past censors using absurdity, anatomy, and sheer audacity.

Anthropic has finally filed its S-1, and buried beneath hundreds of pages of boilerplate legal hedging lies a genuinely remarkable financial picture. The AI lab has raised $141 billion and still holds $131 billion of it, making it, by one estimate, among the most capital-efficient scale-ups in corporate history. A reported $80 billion "loss" turns out to be mostly an accounting artifact from revaluing convertible notes as the company's worth climbed—not cash actually burned. Strip that away, and Anthropic looks profitable, with billions in positive cash flow. But the real story is what the filing reveals about how Anthropic talks about itself versus how it's built. The company has locked in roughly $800 billion in compute commitments to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and others—bets it says it must win or risk falling fatally behind rivals through what it calls "closing the loop," its term for AI systems that help build their own successors. Founders retain effective permanent control through a special voting share, while a Long-Term Benefit Trust meant to safeguard the public interest only gains real power once those founders eventually step back. Meanwhile, warnings about AI's potential for catastrophic harm appear almost entirely in passive voice, tucked between routine risk disclosures about lawsuits and cloud outages. The filing paints a portrait of a company racing to dominate a technology it openly admits could be civilization-altering—while writing about that risk like any other line item.