Why aviolicide is a poor choice
ScienceKilling Grandpa is easy. Explaining why you still exist is harder. A field guide to time travel in fiction, with 110 works put through the grandfather test.
Mind over Mechanism
Where technology, literature, and philosophy go to argue.
Gallery
Proximal God: The inspiration and the journey
ProseHow a dream became a novel, then two books, and finally one again. The inspiration and the long journey behind Proximal God.
Guaranteed to Make You Simile
TechnologyOn building As…As… with Claude, and an invitation to build your own impossible thing the same way.
The Living Wilstach
ProseA Broadway press agent spent twenty-two years cataloguing sixteen thousand similes. I have turned them into a quarter of a million, and the count rises every January.
The Permissioned Economy
PhilosophyHow post-war Britain nationalised the right to build, why the permissioned economy it created is now stalling the country, and what to do instead.
On Englishness
PhilosophySomeone in a pub told me Englishness cannot be defined. I don't accept that. To be English is to live within paradox: reserve masking passion, modesty cloaking pride, irony guarding sincerity.
When virtue is lethal
PhilosophyOur civilisation is dying, poisoned from within by its own virtue. Five mechanisms, all well-intentioned, all catastrophic in aggregate. A call for the study nobody will fund.
The Speed of Life
ScienceOn consciousness in a motionless universe, and why LLMs sit on the same scale as clams.