Topic
power
8 essays follow this thread across the codex.
- 01 Mythology · July 2026 · 13 min
Why Hindu Myth Built a Greater Beast to Cage Its Own Avenging God
A man-lion god ripped a tyrant apart and then could not stop—his holy rage swelled until the heavens themselves were in danger. To cage him, Hindu myth conjured a greater monster, and then a greater monster still: an escalating theology in which power keeps summoning a fiercer power to contain it.
- 02 Technology · July 2026 · 10 min
June 2026: The Month the Machinery Showed Through
The story of AI had always been about which model was smartest. In one strange month it quietly became a story about the state that licenses intelligence, the grid that powers it, and the few companies that own the rest.
- 03 Technology · June 2026 · 9 min
How the Mechanical Clock Invented the Line Between Work and Life
Mechanical time did not merely measure the working day. It invented the boundary between work and life — the very line the smartphone has now quietly erased.
- 04 Art · June 2026 · 7 min
Ultramarine: How the World’s Costliest Blue Shaped the Sacred
How a stone quarried from a single Afghan valley became the costliest colour in Europe, why contracts reserved it for the Virgin’s robe alone, and how that scarcity quietly taught painters to spend blue only on heaven.
- 05 Literature · June 2026 · 8 min
Why Reading a Convincing Villain Is a Moral Education
A convincing monster lends you his appetite for a few pages, and that borrowed wanting, dangerous as it is, may be the one moral education a reader cannot get any other way.
- 06 Mathematics · June 2026 · 7 min
The “Useless” Math That Now Guards Every Secret on Earth
G. H. Hardy prized number theory precisely because no one could use it. He died in 1947 certain it would never serve war or commerce. Thirty years later it became the cryptography guarding nearly every secret on earth.
- 07 Technology · June 2026 · 9 min
No Tool Is Neutral: How Objects Quietly Shape Who You Become
Every made thing arrives with a sketch of who you ought to become. The chair, the keyboard, and the feed each draft a different person — and you mistake their opinion for a fact because it is made of plastic and steel.
- 08 Artificial Intelligence · June 2026 · 7 min
The Bitter Lesson: Why Raw Scale Keeps Beating Clever AI
Twice now — first with search, then with scale — the simplest general method has beaten our most carefully crafted theories, and the win arrives with a bill we are only beginning to read.