If stories help you think, these might too.
Every diagnostic on this site started as a question: can you act on the structure, or only on how you meet it? Turns out that's also the question behind a certain kind of film and book — the ones where an ordinary person collides with an institution, and nothing gets resolved cleanly.
I didn't build these lists to sell you anything. I built them for myself, over years of watching and reading, and only noticed the connection afterward.
Field Notes is my collection of essays
Autumnal Despatches
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A periodic letter, sent when there is something worth sending. Not a digest of recent posts — thinking that has had time to settle, connections that only became clear in retrospect. Closer to correspondence than content → Autumnal Despatches
AI-Assisted Research is my collection of AI-chats, raw, unedited.
The Commons
No charge, you just need to set up an account
A forum in the old sense. People thinking about the same territory, meeting to compare notes and push back on each other's conclusions. Membership is free; it requires an account, which means you are no longer anonymous. The first step of walking with someone rather than reading their field notes from a distance → The Commons
Lenses on the World is a collection of non-Western news sources. Same news, different perspectives. I have them as RSS feeds for a morning check-in.
Institutional Reckoning are a collection of those media in three different lists: by country, whether you have a hand on the levers of power, or if you don't.
True or true-adjacent stories where an ordinary or reluctant person collides with state, military, corporate, or institutional power. Told soberly — no score-driven spectacle, no clean catharsis. The antagonist is a system, not a villain. Endings tend toward loss, compromise, or quiet moral weight rather than triumph.
Recommended Reading is just that: a collection of books and articles that I have either written myself or recommend. Downloadable, no email required.