Long-form writing. Updated irregularly. For shorter thoughts see Notes.
We flinch from darkness as though it were mere absence — the failure of light to arrive. But darkness has its own texture, its own information. The surgeon who operates in full light can see everything except the thing she is about to cut. The cave explorer who turns off her torch discovers the darkness is not uniform. This essay is an argument that we are systematically wrong about what darkness is for.
Read essay →Why institutions demand that complex things be made simple, and what is destroyed in translation.
Navigation without landmarks; on making decisions from incomplete information.
In the serpentine streets of Tunis, a bridge between the world of being and non-being appears in the form of a lost manuscript.
A meditation on note-taking, personal knowledge systems, and why most of it is self-deception.
Beneath the eastward shadows of the sabils, heresiarchs gather to discuss the loops of cosmic recurrence and the myth of 'The Closed Rose'.
How Borges uses infinity not as a prop but as an epistemological challenge.
Among the Nuba people of Africa’s shadowed hinterlands, traditional theologians tussle over mystical cults that bloomed in the crevices of colonial decay.
In the serpentine streets of Tunis, a bridge between the world of being and non-being appears in the form of a lost manuscript.
Beneath the eastward shadows of the sabils, heresiarchs gather to discuss the loops of cosmic recurrence and the myth of 'The Closed Rose'.
A meditation on note-taking, personal knowledge systems, and why most of it is self-deception.
Navigation without landmarks; on making decisions from incomplete information.
Why institutions demand that complex things be made simple, and what is destroyed in translation.
Essays on travels coming soon.