A notebook of things that may or may not be connected
A notebook of pieces in registers other than policy analysis — meditations, sketches, observations — that may or may not be connected to each other or to the bodies of work on the rest of the site. The connections are for the reader to make. The Longer Look is a publication of longer looks at questions public debate treats too quickly; some of those looks land here.
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Featured pieces
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The Outliers and Their Shoulders
Newton wrote about standing on the shoulders of giants. This piece is about the giants. It argues that the most popular version of civilisational history &mdash…
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Can We Coordinate As Fast As We Invent?
Technology grows exponentially. Coordination does not. What happens when the gap gets large enough matters more than most things people are worried about. An argument using the Montreal Protocol as…
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The People Who Apply Are the Wrong People
Every selective opportunity has a front door, and the front door filters for the skill of walking through front doors before it filters for anything the opportunity is actually about. A structural…
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England 1–2 Argentina: Why England Abandoned a Working Plan
England did not lose because they attacked too much. They lost after removing almost every reason Argentina had to defend. A piece from the notebook about a decision…
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The Filter Is Comfort
A speculative essay on the Great Filter. Every conversation about it becomes a conversation about explosions — bombs, bioweapons…
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There Was No Essay Here
A personal account of trying to write one essay with AI assistance and producing three drafts I could not sign. The tool is so frictionless that it removes most of the signals writers used to use to…
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The Machines and the Old Books
Four monologues, in voice. An old Arab in Amman, an old Jew in Brooklyn, an old monk in the Cévennes, an old Hindu grandfather in Pune &mdash…
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The Seventy-Two Seconds
A reading of the Wow! Signal — the seventy-two-second radio transmission received in Ohio on 15 August 1977 and never received since. Whatever happened in those seventy-two seconds was not the…
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The English Longbow: A Simple History
For about 120 years — roughly 1330 to 1450 — England had the deadliest weapon in Europe. It was a six-foot piece of yew wood. The reason it worked is the reason it eventually…
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The Children in the Woods
A parable. About the difference between moving forward and going somewhere — and what happens, deep in the forest, to the ones who stop.
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Aliens Left Religious Books for Us to Figure Out
A thought experiment. What if the Great Filter is not asteroids or nuclear weapons but the moment a clever species becomes powerful enough for its sacred stories to matter at planetary scale &mdash…
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The Bear, the Bricklayer, and the “AI Slop” Problem
A short exchange on LinkedIn compressed the entire debate about generative AI and creative work into twenty-odd comments. A man asked whether anyone had read his children's books…
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Safe Is a Place, Until It Isn't
A country can run perfectly smoothly and be hollowing out underneath. Both things can be true at once. An essay on what “safe” actually means &mdash…
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The Bear Inherited
A small picture book companion to the IHT section. Eighteen short pages about a bear and a bakery and a father and the cubs at the till. Not analytical. Not advocacy. The bear is in the kitchen…
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The Bear Pitched
A small picture book companion to the venture-capital section. Ten short pages about ten friends, the cubs at the kitchen table…
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The Bear Looked Up
A small picture book companion to the Building Mars section. Seven evenings in a small field on a small hill, plus one Wednesday afternoon in a small library while the rain wouldn't stop…
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The Bear Read the News
A small picture book companion to the UK migration section. Fifteen short pages about a fortnight in which the bear took both the bear's paper and the neighbour's paper…
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The train
A piece from the notebook. About the difference between the people who moan about the destination and the people who keep the engine going. About the driver who does not know where the train is…