Seek the wonders, slay the monsters
This is a blog about exploration. The world is grand and beautiful, and we should make it a duty to seek out its marvels. Of course, along the way, we’ll also encounter problems — monsters, which it behooves us to destroy in order to make the world better.
In practice, this means a lot of thinking about science, history, art, and philosophy, but any topics are fair game. This is a generalist blog. Like a seafarer in a new land, you never know what you’ll find.
Intellectually, I’m somewhere between adjacent to and squarely into rationalism, post-rationalism, and progress studies. My role models are Astral Codex Ten and Wait But Why. I also make a point of picking diverse and beautiful historical art in each post.
In late 2020 I gave myself the challenge to publish on 100 consecutive weeks. I completed the challenge in October 2022, and then just kept going — as of writing this, I’ve done it for more than 175 weeks. I usually aim to publish on Wednesdays, but sometimes almost always do Thursdays instead.
Subscribing is free, but you can subscribe to one of the paid tiers if you want! There aren’t really any benefits for now other than a gated index page, so I don’t expect you to send me money. But the option is there, and I’ll greatly appreciate your support if you do.
If you want to check my past work, here are some of the ones I’m most fond of:
Science, Tech, Progress
AI
Aesthetics and Art
History
Misc
Beyond the Atlas, I work in AI evaluation at Elicit, where we build a tool to analyze the scientific literature. I do occasional writing gigs, for instance at Works in Progress. I used to publish The Classical Futurist, a bimonthly magazine about classical antiquity and the future. I’m also active on Twitter, which happens to be the best way to contact me.
The sea monsters, logo, and other parts of the Atlas’s visual identity come from the Carta marina et descriptio septentrionalium terrarum, a map of Scandinavia from 1539. I’ve remade some of them into pixel art, because pixel art is fun.
