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.
infrastructure
week 30 / 2026: here and elsewhere
In this episode: contemplating the end of the Western cosmopolitan urge; hanging with the New York neoLuddites; and Silicon Valley’s highly selective readings of science fiction. Plus, G K Chesterton!
week 17 / 2026: city and country
It’s not that there isn’t a problem with migration in Europe; it’s that the migration doing the damage is domestic rather than international. Plus: reframing the fear of death as a vital ecological dynamic, and refusing software the franchise of personhood.
week 16 / 2026: language and longing
It’s language all the way up and down, if you ask Alan Moore—which throws an interesting light on the rolling “post-literacy” debate, and on the tech elite’s increasingly open grasp for magic as something more (and less) than mere metaphor. Plus Bruce Sterling speculates on cybernetics...
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?”
week 11 / 2026: pipelines and pylons
Reading round-up: the unfolding geopolitical sh*tshow has many dimensions, none of them nice, but in this edition of weeknotes I’m focussing on the infrastructural and sustainability futures—the consequences and, if we look further, the opportunities—of the conflict in the Gulf.
week 9 / 2026: intentions and inversions
Reading round-up: what the Citrini scenario tells us about the tremendous power (and danger) of fictional futures; why the best novel of the Culture might actually be the most overlooked of the set.