Sources
Books, films, and other works that inform the essays on this site. Every essay is fed by at least one work of theory, one of fiction, and one film. At any moment three works are live — one of each — and one rotates out only when another rotates in.
Currently engaging — one theory, one fiction, one film 3 works
Street-Level Bureaucracy
Michael Lipsky
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ikiru
Akira Kurosawa
Archive 20 of 20
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2026 12 works
Seeing Like a State
James C. Scott
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Searching for Safety
Aaron Wildavsky
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
Manu Larcenet
How Big Things Get Done
Bent Flyvbjerg
Megaprojects and Risk
Bent Flyvbjerg
The Spire
William Golding
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges
Normal Accidents
Charles Perrow
Airframe
Michael Crichton
2025 8 works
The Knowledge That Has No Field 2 works
Carrying the Fire 3 works
The Spire Problem 5 works
When Accidents Are Normal 2 works
Everything Is Connected, Not Neatly 2 works
Chaos, Control, and the Limits of Prediction 1 work
Technology, Industrial Mobilization, and Total War 1 work
Information Control and Governance in Sealed Systems 1 work
How Paul Auster's 'City of Glass' uses the labyrinth of city life to explore grief and fragmented identity 1 work
Dreams of peace, shadows of betrayal 1 work
A prescient portrait of Putin's famous spin doctor's deeply cynical politics in Giuliano da Empoli's 'The Wizard of the Kremlin' 1 work
Theory 6 works
Fiction 14 works
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
Manu Larcenet
The Spire
William Golding
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges
Airframe
Michael Crichton
The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Maniac
Benjamin Labatut
The Volga Rises in Europe
Curzio Malaparte
Wool
Hugh Howey
City of Glass
Paul Auster
Call for the Dead
John le Carré
The Wizard of the Kremlin
Giuliano da Empoli