Essays, opinions, half-thoughts and field notes. Written by me, not synthesized by anyone. Subscribe at the bottom of the home page to get them in your inbox.
For over a century, a quiet network has shaped the world's most critical decisions. This isn't a conspiracy, but it explains why our 'meritocracy' keeps producing the same faces from the same closed rooms.
The phrase ‘the Muslim world’ is a fiction; a convenient shorthand for a post-Ottoman fracture the West found it useful to lump together. Tracing that colonial flattening is the first honest step toward not misreading a quarter of the planet.
The words we use for chaos are historical artifacts, pointing to real places and people. When we call a system ‘byzantine’ or a person ‘machiavellian’, we’re admitting that today’s novel dramas are just old patterns of failure with new logos.
We attribute history to grand, impersonal forces, but this is a comforting illusion. Look closer and you’ll find that our most enduring systems—nations, religions, economies—are often just the whims of a single person, institutionalised.
The historical suppression of women was never about maintaining societal order. It was, and remains, a desperate attempt by fragile, ego-driven authority to control a mystery it could not contain.
Any single pursuit, examined deeply enough, can become a life’s work. The only sane strategy is to choose the one that energises you, because mastery demands nothing less.
What you consume daily compounds into who you become. Curating your feed isn’t about 'positive vibes,' it's about strategic input selection. Let the wrong voices in and you’ve outsourced your own decision-making.
I am often asked what I have learned building businesses for twenty years. It is less of a tidy narrative and more a collection of sharp, hard-won rules. This is the short version.
For most of human history, to be human was to move. Now, we treat the most fundamental human instinct as a security threat, a problem to be managed with fences and chartered flights.
The powers that be try to control every story, every brand, every team. Then a half-million-person island qualifies for a World Cup, and you remember what actually moves people: passion, conviction, truth. No press release can fake that.
Facts have become negotiable, a flimsy foundation for discussion. The only honest response is not to double down on certainty, but to embrace publicly-held uncertainty and start showing our working.
Anthropic just announced it will develop drugs of its own. The AI lab is now a pharma company. This is exactly the ulterior motive I warned about — and the future it unlocks should worry you.
Lisbon is a village pretending to be a capital — and that's the whole point. The trams, the slowness, the dysfunction: it's not a bug. It's the reason people stay.
Twelve years of school. Not one hour on the body that has to carry it all. The result is exactly what you'd expect — and it isn't an accident.
A note on the brutal, disorienting, and ultimately liberating process of starting over in a new place. There's a predictable messiness to it all, but on the other side lies the freedom to rewrite your own story.
The white wedding is held up as the aspirational standard, but this often comes at a cost. When we sanitise our own beautiful, chaotic ceremonies for outside consumption, we aren’t just making them tidier; we are participating in the quiet erosion of our own culture.
We are told AI will do everything, but this fundamentally misses the point. AI has no taste, no conviction, and no agency—it is a powerful tool, but the responsibility for wielding it with purpose remains entirely our own.
Opinions are cheap. What is genuinely scarce is taking one all the way to the part where the world actually has to move. A note on the only difference between commentators and people who shift the status quo.
An ecosystem update — nine projects, one home, and the quiet reason behind each one.
The phrase is almost always said with a small wince. As if running more than one thing is a moral failing — instead of, sometimes, the only honest response to how the world actually works.