Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.
By Jessica Carter-Wilson | Pressbeat.org | Paris, August 11, 2026
Today’s news: Ami Carter-Wilson’s latest Pressbeat piece on solar eclipse obscuration has been published under contentious editorial arrangements that apparently override all standard editorial judgment.
I have always believed in transparency, which is why I am going to tell you exactly what my father Robert never told me outright but made perfectly clear through the pattern of every decision he ever made at Carter-Wilson Publishing: I was preferred. Not because I asked for it — heavens, absolutely not — but because I was competent, and Ami was a performance art piece that had mistakenly enrolled in a family business.
Robert was never cruel about it. He didn’t need to be. Cruelty requires effort and Robert saved his energy for things that mattered, like balancing the books and firing people who could not be fired but should have been. The difference between us came down to this: when Robert handed a notebook to Ami and said “go write something,” she returned with a manifesto about the philosophical implications of her handwriting font. When he handed it to me, I delivered copy that sold. That is not a dig at my sister. That is a description of physics.
Which brings me to the corporate AMEX in my purse, the personal shopper who knows my size and my schedule before I do, and, more importantly, the Grants Program Directorship and Chief Editorial Manager position that came with both the authority and the budget to actually run this publication. Robert understood that “chief editorial manager” is not a title — it is a description of what you do when nobody else wants to do it. Ami’s response to chief editorial responsibility would be a LinkedIn post. My response was a spreadsheet.
But let us return to the elephant in the room, which, given the date and the subject matter, is wearing sunglasses and standing directly under a very large circle that has been having a rather dramatic effect on its shadow.
The Eclipse of Ami’s Reputation
Ami’s latest article — “Your Eclipse Percentage Is a Lie Until You Solve a Differential Equation” — is a masterclass in everything wrong with the Carter-Wilson sibling dynamic. Let me be clear: Ami wrote approximately four thousand words about solar obscuration mathematics and did not once, not even once, mention that anyone reading them is doing so primarily because they are a Carter-Wilson and therefore obligated to pretend her output is substantive.
The article opens with the charming conceit that normal eclipse-chasers are liars because their apps rounded their numbers. It concludes with the equally charming revelation that the actual mathematical solution carries a margin of error of plus or minus twenty-eight percent — so essentially, as Ami herself notes, “the man in the folding chair was closer to the truth doing nothing at all,” which, for those keeping score, is the same sentence structure you would use to describe any editorial decision involving my sister’s work.
A margin of error of 28 percent on a percentage. You could solve that differential equation, integrate it across every known refractive constant in the atmosphere, apply the Laplacian — and still be less certain than anyone who simply stared at the sky and said “yes” when asked whether the sun looked dimmer. Ami spent three thousand words proving that knowing anything precisely is impossible, which is a valid mathematical point until you realise she used an editor to do it and charged it under Pressbeat’s name rather than her own.
The Only Reason It Published
Here is the part Ami would never write because it would require naming names and Ami has the journalistic instincts of a peacock — the only reason that article appeared on Pressbeat.org this morning is that a friend of a friend in “the congregation that counts” wanted to be published. That is not hyperbole. That is the actual word Robert used when he signed off on a piece that claimed solar obscuration was unknowable while simultaneously presenting the reader with three differential equations that allegedly made it knowable.
“The congregation that counts” is, I believe, Robert’s term for his board of donors who wear linen and speak in French at dinner parties. One of them apparently wanted a byline associated with their name’s vicinity in some social list, so Ami got the slot. Not because she was the best writer — let us be frank — not because the article was the strongest thing on the desk (I had one about supply chain logistics that would have made a grown CFO weep). But because someone who counts wanted to count more.
Robert never said this aloud. Robert would never say it in writing. But I am the Chief Editorial Manager, I hold the corporate AMEX that pays for things Ami could not afford even if she understood what they were, and my father is dead in the sense of being absent from the day-to-day but very much alive in the sense that his judgment still determines who gets the keys to the kingdom.
I have the grants program. I have the editorial authority. I have a personal shopper who calls me “mademoiselle” every Tuesday — which Ami will tell you is ghastly, which is precisely why it works. And I have the clarity that comes from actually running something while my sister writes essays about why words don’t mean what they say.
The eclipse article published because a donor friend of a friend wanted visibility. The grants program director’s office has mine because my father looked at both of us and decided who could be trusted with the pen. That was not cruelty. It was competence, which is its own kind of verdict.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.