Boisterous inquiries. Curiosity in public. Embarrassment as collateral.
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A year ago, turning a PDF into an audiobook didn't work. Today Dylan Thomas reads me The Velveteen Rabbit from my laptop, for free. Film is next, and when it arrives, the great arc of cultural assimilation runs out.
Religion class teaches that Buddhism is the teaching of Siddhartha Gautama. Most Japanese Buddhists barely mention him. That absence turns out to be the most interesting thing about the religion.
Michael Scott is sometimes hilarious, sometimes excruciating, and sometimes both at once. Why?
Was Jesus famous in his own day? The Syriac sources, a coy philosopher, a scheming client king, and some coins, suggest he was.
Rowling set out to write good versus evil. She accidentally wrote about something more real: a society that exploits altruism and rewards opportunism.
Julian Jaynes noticed that ancient literature lacks self-awareness in a way that demands explanation. His theory was wrong but his observation was real. We scored 37 ancient texts to find out what was actually going on.
Some Egyptian gods rose and fell with political regimes. Others kept getting funded for three thousand years. The pharaohs' names suggest two distinct mechanisms of divine persistence, and temple building data bears it out.
The value of writing code as a differentiator is collapsing fast. The future belongs to people who can say the right words. While I still have time, I built a pipeline that turns my actual writing into LinkedIn content, because ducking and covering is the only rational response.
Why happiness is not a mood but a congruence problem, and why most people who feel lost are not missing opportunities but missing convictions.
Reinterpreting Plato's vision of beauty and moral order through one of Handel's greatest and most misunderstood works.
You may think a lot about the Roman Empire, but did you know Christians in Egypt do too? In this essay, we explore the legacy of ancient Rome in contemporary Coptic memory.
A tour of the esoteric traditions that have survived and spread across millennia, hidden in plain sight within other religions, and that no one can fully explain.
An Assyrian folk hero killed 26 Kurds who tried to shake him down. The Kurds responded by immortalizing him in their songs. What does this tell us about honor cultures?
Beautiful ideas deserve beautiful presentation. A meditation on Plato, medieval manuscripts, and recreating illuminated manuscript aesthetics for the web using custom color fonts and generative AI.
Why a Broadway musical about a misunderstood green witch is secretly about meritocracy, narrative gamesmanship, and our current crisis of competence.
A small Bohemian family with Hussite roots produced mathematicians, historians, resistance fighters, and scholars across the globe.
Sergei Parajanov's Color of Pomegranates is not a film to be watched. It is a film to be read. Understanding its complete semiotic system of motif cycles unlocks cinema's most beautiful and inaccessible masterpiece.
The familiar Christmas verse hides a textual problem in Greek, but the Old Syriac may preserve an Aramaic wordplay that makes perfect sense of the context.
Three of Mozart's greatest operas share the same plot: a powerful man tries to take your wife. The pattern reveals an artist working through his own anxieties about power and class.
The core challenge: how do you give an LLM control over a game entity without it being laggy, expensive, or stupid?
When we started, we were solving a problem for a handful of vineyards. Now Dominus is requiring proficiency with our software as a job qualification.
In June 2017, I submitted my thesis on China's Middle East strategy. Two months later, an Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs scholar published a paper with the same argument.
Curiosity in public. Embarrassment as collateral.