The Feast of Ghosts: Victorian London

The Feast of Ghosts: Victorian London

London, 1870s and 1880sThe spiritualist salons of Victorian London were one of the more concentrated expressions of a pattern I have watched in various forms across five centuries: the wealthy consuming illusions at the cost of ignoring realities that were not...
The Tower of Information

The Tower of Information

Present Day, March 2026The specific thing I want to say about the present moment and its relationship to knowledge is this: more information is not the same as more understanding, and the substitution of one for the other is its own kind of architecture of collapse.I...
What the Himalayas Knew

What the Himalayas Knew

Himalayas, circa 1507The monks in the high passes had been watching empires longer than I had been alive at the point when I reached them. This is not metaphor: the monastery I am thinking of had records going back centuries before my birth, records of dynasties that...
Constantinople and the Weight of What Was Lost

Constantinople and the Weight of What Was Lost

Constantinople, 1490sI arrived in Constantinople several decades after the fall. The city had been Ottoman for long enough that it had begun to absorb its new identity while still carrying the wounds of the transition, the way a body carries a scar: healed but not...
Blueprints of Eternity

Blueprints of Eternity

Various, consolidatedI have a specific memory that I return to when I want to understand what architectural certainty looks like from the inside. It is not from Florence. It is from Vienna, in the 1850s, watching the planners of the Ringstrasse explain to each other...
What Leonardo Taught Me About Light

What Leonardo Taught Me About Light

Milan, circa 1495I was in Verrocchio’s workshop before Leonardo was well known and I was in Milan when he was painting the Last Supper and I want to record something specific about what it was like to be in proximity to a mind like his, because it is relevant to...