choir
Play a melody. A four-part choir harmonizes every note as you press it.
apophenia
the personal website of Dash Wieland
Stool gold weight
Akan peoples, Côte d’Ivoire, 18th–19th centuryBrass, 1.6 cm high
“The Hausa trader swore his dust was heavier, so I set my father’s little brass stool in the other pan, and the beam sank as predictably as it did for him. The trader tied his pouch and did not look at me again.”
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On New York City
Karl Scheffler wrote that Berlin was condemned forever to become and never to be. New York suffers the same fate, which is why you always arrive too late. When you do arrive there will be people who tell you that the city has lost its old charm, and of course it has. And ten… →
tend
An instrument that plays itself while you steer it. Six dials, six pads, no wrong position.
Incantations in English
The Sator Square — the cool S of antiquity — fascinated me the instant I saw it. I still repeat the motions of our first meeting whenever I see one: left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, turning, reversing, and then, finally, the diagonals, where it breaks.… →
The way I used to rage at God!
The way I used to rage at God! As a teenager raised in the faith I raged at the immensity of the barbarity, the cruelty, and the avarice of my god. For their active participation in war and genocide, and in their bizarre racialized preferences and in their destruction of… →
World Cup 2026: the saddest neighborhood in New York
Every time a team went out of the 2026 World Cup, grief blew in over the New York neighborhood where its people live. A weather radar of the tournament, built from the Census.
Tectonic Drift
Wherever you are standing has been somewhere else. Drop a pin and follow that patch of crust back through 540 million years.
Spurious Alpha
A toy that lets you bet on a market superstition — the moon, Mondays, prime-numbered dates — watch it beat the market, then watch it lose to doing nothing. Real S&P 500 data, and a lesson in why a rising tide makes any rule look like genius.
Choral Hurdy-Gurdy
A music box: four-part chorales composed and verified live in your browser
What's left when you leave a belief system
When you leave a system that had power over you, the natural thing to do is go after its contents. The theology itself. The specific rules and regulations that were used to evaluate you. The mythology about who's chosen and who isn't. The political line. We list out the contents… →
MCV
A programming language from the impossible library.
Losing races to skyscrapers
What it would take to compare the complexity of a skyscraper and a software product, and why the comparison ends somewhere uncomfortable.
Deaths of Despair Are Two Different Crises
A spatial analysis of US mortality data finds near-zero geographic correlation between suicide and drug overdose. The unified thesis obscures two distinct phenomena with different geographies, different drivers, and different policy levers.
Shame Arbitrage
Finding unfinished destigmatization in popular memes
Symphonia: Gothic Groovebox
Designing a digital groovebox that feels different
This is knowable
When I was a child, the Internet was born and phones crawled across the surface of the planet and the whole of human knowledge became accessible with a moment's effort. Querying the well of human knowledge was novel, then routine, then a fundamental part of our humanity as we… →
A pound of Norse flesh? Tracking down a rare motif.
A Norse trickster god and a Venetian merchant walk into a courtroom. Both are facing death and both escape their sentence on the same, hyperspecific technicality. Surely these cases are related? While reading the Merchant of Venice recently, I noticed a similarity to a Norse… →
Protesting too much: the debate about AI art vindicates it as art
The outrage over AI art is the repetition of an old cycle.
Why this website exists
On notebooks, 52-hertz whales, and thinking publicly.