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 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 15 / 2026: cynicism and credulity As the months pass, the surprise is no longer that hype and outright fiction are made to pass for truth, but rather that everyone seemingly already knows, and has made some sort of peace with it—whether resigned or enthusiastic. But how much longer can cynicism and credulity prevail?
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 8 / 2026: maps and compasses Reading round-up: wind-powered freight (and how I think about weak signals); how audiences have come to understand the working of worlds; what science fiction has to teach strategists.