The Architect’s Dream: Why the Perfect System Breaks

The Architect’s Dream: Why the Perfect System Breaks

Various, consolidatedThe Architect’s Dream opens the album because it is where the geometry always begins: in the conviction that this time, with sufficient intelligence and sufficient resources and sufficient will, it will be possible to build something...
Banks, Not Armies

Banks, Not Armies

Florence, 1490sThe thing about the Medici that is most relevant to the present moment is not the art patronage, which is what they are remembered for, but the banking. Lorenzo understood something that most political leaders of his era did not fully grasp: that...
The Feast of Ghosts: Present Tense

The Feast of Ghosts: Present Tense

Present Day, May 2026The Victorian comparison I keep returning to is this: the salons where the wealthy consumed the performance of contact with the dead while the living poor were consuming cholera in the streets below. The performance was elaborate and expensive and...
The Double Edge

The Double Edge

Present Day, May 2026Every technology I have watched arrive has been a double edge, and it has taken me some time to arrive at a settled view about what this means and what the appropriate response to it is.The printing press. The steam engine. The telegraph. The...
Alchemy: What Prague Taught Me

Alchemy: What Prague Taught Me

Prague, late 16th centuryRudolf II’s Prague was a city organized around the belief that the world’s hidden laws could be discovered through sustained, systematic investigation of matter. The alchemists were wrong about the chemistry: base metal cannot be...