20 Jul 2026•3 min read
Writing With AI Without Sounding Like Everyone Else
Readers have developed an ear for generated prose. The way through is not avoiding the tools but refusing to let them supply the part that makes writing worth reading.
Tag
Essays
Every essay tagged Essays, newest first. Tags are added by the writer, so this is what our authors themselves considered essays — not an automatic match on the word.
17 Jul 2026•3 min read
Publishing Consistently Beats Publishing Brilliantly
Audience growth is a function of frequency and reliability far more than of individual piece quality, which is uncomfortable and repeatedly demonstrated.
16 Jul 2026•2 min read
Own the Distribution or Rent the Audience
Every writer eventually learns the same lesson about platform dependency, usually the week an algorithm changes. Email remains the least fragile channel available.
13 Jul 2026•2 min read
Titles Are the Only Part Most People Read
A good title is a promise specific enough to be broken. Most titles fail by being accurate, dull, and indistinguishable from the surrounding noise.
12 Jul 2026•2 min read
Write in Public Before You Feel Qualified
The waiting-until-expert strategy has a flaw: expertise makes you forget what was confusing, which is exactly the thing beginners need explained.
9 Jul 2026•3 min read
Attention Is Not the Scarce Resource. Trust Is.
When producing plausible content becomes nearly free, the constraint moves to knowing who to believe. That reshapes what institutions and creators are actually for.
7 Jul 2026•2 min read
The Case for Slow Software
Not every tool should be optimised for engagement and iteration speed. Some categories are better served by software that changes rarely and asks little.
6 Jul 2026•3 min read
Every Tool Encodes an Argument About How You Should Work
Software is never neutral. The defaults, the vocabulary, and what the interface makes easy all carry a theory of the work, and teams adopt the theory with the tool.
4 Jul 2026•2 min read
Craft Survives Automation by Moving Up a Level
Every wave of automation has eliminated a layer of manual skill and created a new one above it. The pattern is consistent enough to plan around.
3 Jul 2026•2 min read
The Group Chat Replaced the Public Square, and That Is Not All Bad
Online conversation has been migrating from open platforms to private rooms for years. The trade is reach for candour, and most people are choosing candour.
2 Jul 2026•2 min read
Optimism Requires Specificity
Vague optimism about technology is indistinguishable from marketing, and vague pessimism is indistinguishable from despair. Both avoid the work of naming what would have to be true.
30 Jun 2026•2 min read
Institutional Memory Is a Feature You Have to Fund
Organisations forget continuously, and the forgetting has costs that never appear as a line item. The teams that resist it do specific, unglamorous things.
29 Jun 2026•2 min read
The Quiet Return of the Personal Website
After a decade of consolidation into a few platforms, people are building their own sites again. The motivations are less nostalgic than they look.