week 32 / 2026: nature and culture
In this episode: we wander into the forests of medieval Europe, return with the underlying imagery of Enlightenment and Romanticist thought, and then feel for their bones beneath the skin of the present.
history
week 23 / 2026: now and then
In this edition of weeknotes: Adam Curtis on the trap of self-hood, USians on their preference for the present over “The Future”, Sherryl Vint on the merging of the two meanings of speculation, and Chris Butler on the necessary friction of the uncertain present...
week 22 / 2026: fathers and sons
After the hourglass has been overturned, there is a period during which the sand must resettle itself before the flow of time can become regularised once again. We are living through just such a period.
week 19 / 2026: centres and edges
The openings of stories, and the titles we give them, have a huge effect on how they land with the audiences—but as always with stories, it’s an art rather than a science. Plus: in praise of living and working at the edges.
week 14 / 2026: states and status
Science fiction isn’t about predicting things, but I’m not going to miss an opportunity to point out that one of my stories predicted a thing. After that, we can settle down to a long hard look at liberalism’s nemesis, the “teleological regime”.
week 13 / 2026: markets and casinos
Reading round-up: ecomodernism chooses a weird moment to frame climate mitigation as a casino, as prediction markets expose the moral hazard of literally gambling on disaster. Plus: the accusation of technophobia reveals as much about the accuser as about the accused, if not more so.
week 12 / 2026: agents and agency
This week’s reading notes take a blog post by Matt Jones as their springboard, and as an invitation to ask the unacknowledged political-economic question lurking beneath even this fairly sane and sober look at the so-called “agentic” revolution. That question is: “do we really need or want this?”