Topic
language
12 essays follow this thread across the codex.
- 01 Literature · June 2026 · 13 min
How a Throat Learned to Mean: The Long Descent of Language
A bone that dropped in the throat, a gene shared with songbirds, a child who points before she can speak. The story of how a primate noise became a system precise enough to carry the universe—and of how, once made, it split into thousands of incompatible ways to cut up the world.
- 02 Literature · June 2026 · 16 min
Invented Tongues and Borrowed Futures: How Imagination Builds Worlds and Where Its Ideas Come From
A philologist invents an elvish word and has to build a world for it to be spoken in; a physicist sketches a satellite that will not exist for two decades. Both are doing the same impossible thing—drawing the not-yet into language so the world can later catch up to it.
- 03 Literature · June 2026 · 9 min
The Hidden Trick That Powers the Modern Novel: Free Indirect Speech
A sentence can think a character’s thought in the narrator’s grammar — and that quiet fusion is the engine of the modern novel.
- 04 Mathematics · June 2026 · 9 min
Gödel’s Incompleteness: The Proof That Math Can’t Prove Everything
How a young logician built a sentence that says “I cannot be proven,” turned the oldest paradox in reasoning into a theorem, and showed that no system rich enough for arithmetic can ever capture all its own truths.
- 05 Philosophy · June 2026 · 15 min
The Six Schools of Indian Philosophy and Their Western Echoes
India’s six orthodox schools mapped the mind, the atom, the ritual word, and the self with a rigor that anticipates Descartes, Democritus, and Hume — yet the resonances mislead as often as they illuminate, and the differences are where the real philosophy lives.
- 06 Music · June 2026 · 9 min
Why Music Crosses Borders That Language Cannot
Translation taxes every other art at the frontier. Music alone walks through unsearched, carrying what no word can declare yet every listener somehow receives — and the carrying needs no key.
- 07 Literature · June 2026 · 9 min
What Survives When a Poem Is Translated — and What That Proves
Move a poem into another tongue and you demolish it to the foundations. Whatever still stands is the surest proof that literature was ever more than its words.
- 08 Philosophy · June 2026 · 6 min
The Category Error: The Logical Mistake That Fools the Cleverest Minds
A short field guide to the category error — the quiet logical sin of answering one kind of question in the grammar of another, and why fluency only makes it worse.
- 09 Philosophy · June 2026 · 9 min
Hume’s Is-Ought Problem: The Hidden Leap in Every “Should”
Hume’s guillotine between is and ought, taken up as a working tool rather than a museum piece — a test you can run on every “should” you hear, including your own.
- 10 Technology · June 2026 · 9 min
From Clay Tablets to Google: What We Lose by Outsourcing Memory
From the clay tablet to the search bar, we have offloaded remembering onto matter and bought reach at the price of retention. An inquiry into what a mind keeps once it no longer has to keep anything.
- 11 Artificial Intelligence · June 2026 · 9 min
Do Machines Understand? The Chinese Room and the Stochastic Parrot
Two thought experiments meant to deflate machine understanding instead expose how little we ever understood the word — and how a convincing fake forces the question we had always dodged.
- 12 Artificial Intelligence · June 2026 · 7 min
Why AI “Hallucination” Is Not a Bug but the Whole Mechanism
A language model does not switch between telling the truth and inventing it. It runs one process, and both outputs are that same act seen from opposite sides.