The article is a brief announcement about Neal Stephenson's book tour for 'D: Heavy Water,' with minimal substantive content beyond the tour schedule and a mention of the book. It lacks thoughtful essay elements about agency, personal development, or insightful analysis, which are prioritized by the preference rule. There are no examples, arguments, or reflections on mechanisms or lived experience. The prose is clear but extremely limited in depth and intellectual substance, offering little beyond a promotional notice, which the preference rule downranks.
How this was scored
- Rule
- María’s reading compass · v2
- Provider / model
- openai / gpt-4.1-mini
- Scored
- 2026-10-17T18:47:24+00:00
- Source text
- Revision 82 · full
- Text selection
- All available text
- Prompt / schema
- reader-1 / reaction-1
- Settings
- {"max_output_tokens":800,"store":false}
- Tokens in / out
- 1098 / 163
- Estimated cost
- $0.000700
- Run
- #6
Exact rule used
This is an editable starter reading profile inferred from my existing subscriptions and a set of articles shared with me. Treat the examples as exploratory positive signals, not as confirmed favorite articles or evidence that I agree with their arguments.
Prioritize thoughtful essays about agency and how people build a life: learning, feedback loops, creative work, finding one's craft, relationships, friendship, conversation, and attention. Look for specific lived experience that develops into an interesting, useful idea. Make room for literary criticism, art, design, history, institutional analysis, and substantial book reviews.
Also consider AI, technology, startups, product strategy, and venture investing, reflecting my subscription mix. Favor explanations of mechanisms, concrete examples, original reporting or analysis, and arguments that acknowledge uncertainty. A piece should offer more than a headline, a trend summary, or a promotional pitch. Do not infer my political views or endorsement from the sources I follow.
Reward clear, distinctive prose and real intellectual substance. Both reflective personal writing and technically detailed analysis can fit. Length is fine when it earns its space. As an initial hypothesis, downrank repetitive advice, vague inspiration, generic hot takes, and hype unsupported by evidence. These style preferences are provisional and can be corrected with my feedback. Evaluate English and Spanish writing on substance without preferring one language.
When explaining a prediction, identify the specific connection to these themes and any mismatch. Do not give a high score solely because an author appears in my subscriptions or examples. Evaluate only the supplied article text; a title or paywall preview is not proof of the full argument.
Reference titles (sample signals; not actual ratings):
- For a long time, nothing. Then, suddenly one has the right eyes.
- Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
- How to walk through walls
- Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
- half the world's writing should remain unpublished
- We think better when our minds are entwined
- The Hacking Will Continue While Market Morale Improves
- the delight of specificity
- Why we ended up homeschooling
- Bangers from Gibbon
- searching for your life's work is a multi-turn endeavor
- Why I Changed My Mind About AI Risk
- The hyperlocal
- The Specter Of Neuralese
- Your Book Review: Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs
- Agentic fragments
- Average moments of a long-term meditator
- a case for sharing your dreams with friends
- the best conversations help you hear yourself
- First we shape our feedback loops; then they shape us
- timing
Exact article input
D
The book tour begins
Neal Stephenson
Oct 10, 2026
58
8
3
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I’m in New York for
a couple of appearances
at Comic Con this afternoon, the second of which will be
signing copies
of
D: Heavy Water
. Technically this comes out on Tuesday, 13 October, but we’re jumping the gun a little bit for Comic Con. The book tour per se begins on Tuesday. I’ll be hitting Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boulder, St. Louis, Austin, New York, Boston, and then Seattle again, with various interviews along the way. Scroll down a bit on
this page
to see tour details.
58
8
3
Share
Input metadata
{"authors":"Neal Stephenson","availability":"full","canonical_url":"https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/d","publication":"Graphomane","publication_id":25,"published_at":"2026-10-10T16:12:08+00:00","subtitle":"The book tour begins","title":"D"}