Writing

Shorter pieces on the questions the books take at length: how people love each other badly, what fear does to possibility, and what physics does and does not license us to say about either.

Usually worked out in public, and usually before they are resolved.

ESSAYS

All essays

2 ESSAYS

  1. What the observer effect actually says, and what it does not

    The most quoted result in quantum physics is also the most misread. The observer in the famous experiments is a detector, not a mind, and the real puzzle it points to is stranger than the popular version.

  2. Why reassurance is never enough, and what to do instead

    Asking someone to promise they still love you works for about an hour. The relief is real, which is exactly why the question comes back, and why it slowly changes the relationship it was meant to protect.

This address used to hold essays about search and marketing. Those were removed rather than relocated; the marketing writing continues on fullstackdigitalmarketer.com.

THE FIVE SUBJECTS

Five subjects, one preoccupation

They are separated below because a reader deserves to know which register a piece is written in, particularly where the physics and the metaphor sit close together. They are not really five things.

Relationships
Insecurity, validation, neglect, and the mechanics by which a fear about a person produces the behaviour that confirms it.
Philosophy
Mostly questions about determinism, participation and what it means to be a cause of something rather than a witness to it.
Psychology
What the research actually supports, held at arm’s length from the version of it that circulates as advice.
Physics and time
The literal register. Block universe, spacetime, measurement, and the parts of quantum mechanics that are genuinely strange rather than rhetorically convenient.
Fourth dimension
The metaphysical register, labelled as such. Kept apart from the one above so that neither borrows credibility from the other.

In the meantime

The long-form version of all of this already exists. Two manuscripts, neither published, both holding the same line about where the physics stops.