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.
interpretation
week 29 / 2026: protocols and performances
In this episode: Scott Smith on “protocol communities”; the face as the site of surgical interventions into reality itself; and another look at “body futurism” as dark enantiodromia.
week 27 / 2026: progress and myopia
This week, a debunking of bio-factory protein production, which leads us to a broader look at solutionism, and the frustrating impossibility of simply swapping one metanarrative for another. Plus, the short fiction of Iain M Banks...
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 20 / 2026: regimes and revolutions
If “AI” is a revolution, as its ideologues would have us believe, then they might want to consider how unpopular revolutions tend to end. Are they sincere in their beliefs? I argue that it doesn’t really matter, but that we should nonetheless treat them as if they are.
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.