Surprise meEntangled Vale
Academia as a people's civil service: or, what we've done to knowledge
Perhaps what we know is less important than what we do with it.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
One step forward, twelve back
With each lesson comes a dozen more questions lurking just below the surface.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Becoming Centred
Before we can meet in the middle, we'll need to agree on where that is.
Surprise meEntangled ValeWild Margin
AI, Culture and the Forgetting of the Relational
When culturalisation narrows our relationships, mere cultural correctness isn’t enough.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Oblivious Oligarchs
Who can we trust to build a brighter future for us all?
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Of Comfort and Disquiet
As disturbing as tales of monsters can be, perhaps they protect us from more troubling truths.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Articles of Faith
Untangling what we know from what we take for granted can be a frightening challenge, but deepening our relationship to the truth may be worth the discomfort.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
A little bit of Pollyanna
How deep are we willing to dig to find the good in people?
Surprise meEntangled ValeSoma Isles
Life as a Lab
The best discoveries are often the ones we could never have predicted.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
A da Vinci coda - process versus results
When our curiosity gets in the way of results, we can draw inspiration from one of history's greatest scatterbrains.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Professionalism – for better or worse
Is professionalism always a virtue? Or can it be the mask of complicity?
Surprise meEntangled Vale
History as it was?
The past may be a foreign country – but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to speak its language.
🗞️ The Myth of the Informed Citizen
Nicholas Carr traces a recurring fantasy of modern life: that each new communication technology, from the telegraph to the internet, would produce wiser citizens and healthier democracies — and how each expansion of information instead bred new forms of confusion and overload. At its centr
Read the note ↗🎥 Who Is the Worst Person Louis Theroux Has Met?
Louis Theroux has spent decades sitting with people most of us would keep at a distance and gently asking them to explain themselves. What he keeps finding isn't unbridgeable otherness but something more unsettling: familiar motives, loosely held, rarely examined. Echoing Arendt's 'banalit
Read the note ↗👁️ To Be There but Not to Be Seen
A former New York City pickpocket, Wilfred Rose, returns to the subway where he worked, narrating how he did it and what it cost him — how to read a crowd, choreograph attention, pass without notice. Alongside the craft is the other side: arrests, family, loss, and a habit he describes as
Read the note ↗📖 Iran's Ultimate Banned Book
'Iran has been trapped in a cycle of self-love and self-hate for centuries, and nothing captures that contradiction like The Blind Owl.' Banned both before and after 1979, the novel follows a troubled painter through a surreal, fragmented narrative. Amir Ahmadi Arian traces its strange aft
Read the note ↗🗿 When a Culture No Longer Wants to Live
Paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak pushes past the 'Neanderthals were basically us' rehabilitation to something more unsettling: what if they were genuinely different — different minds, different relationships to territory and meaning? He suggests their disappearance followed a collapse of
Read the note ↗🎙️ A Real Company Staffed by Fake People
A podcast in which a journalist investigates entrepreneurship in the AI age by trying to run a real company staffed by fake (AI) people. Somewhere between investigative journalism and deadpan performance art — no breathless futurism, no moral panic. It quietly shows how much of 'running a
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