About this journal

Tangents is where I put the things I read too much about. It is not a portfolio, and the essays are almost never about me — they are about a question that got stuck.

The pattern is always the same. Something small snags: a footnote about a sound heard three thousand miles away, a claim that no flat map can be honest, a thought experiment I could not argue my way out of. I go looking, keep going past the point where a normal person would stop, and then write until the thing makes sense. The essay is the residue of that.

What you'll find

The subjects wander on purpose — and whatever else earns its way in. There is no schedule and no beat. Pieces appear when they are finished, which is a slower and more honest arrangement than the alternative.

Everything here is written by hand, sources are linked where they matter, and I try hard to say plainly when something is contested, uncertain, or just my reading of it. If I get something wrong, I would genuinely like to know: write to me.

How it is built

Essays are plain markdown files in the repository. Each one is rendered at build time and published as a static page, so the site has no database, no CMS, and nothing to go down. Every essay's cover is generated from a hash of its own title — the pattern family comes from the subject, the particular drawing comes from the words. No two are the same, and no image is ever uploaded.

Set in Bodoni Moda and Newsreader, with Instrument Sans and JetBrains Mono doing the quieter work. Dark by default, because most of it was written at night.