Musings · Interactive research
Interactive Research
Maps, matrices, timelines, simulators, and podcast companions. Each one keeps the palette and interaction logic of its subject instead of borrowing a generic house style.
Topic-specific systems
The research index
Shared structure only where it clarifies the work. Color, rhythm, and controls belong to the topic.
Strategic map
The 7 Powers strategy explorer
Thirty Acquired-covered companies and seven sources of durable advantage, wired into a source-backed matrix you can inspect by company, power, and strategy.
Acquired research
Market pressure
Money Talks: Treasury pressure
Yield curves, debt pressure, inflation expectations, and Fed policy rendered as the episode's actual economic mechanism rather than a static recap.
Economist podcasts
Work simulator
AI exposure explorer
Occupation tasks, exposure assumptions, and work DNA in one adjustable surface for seeing where AI changes the work instead of the job title.
Technology and intelligence
Triptych
Tryptheque
Othello, film history, and score listening collected as one reading room for line-level theater, screen grammar, and musical anatomy.
Stage, screen, score
Recovered archive
The Debate Years
A high-school Public Forum archive turned into a provenance timeline, topic map, card counts, and saved-case evidence.
Personal research archive
Body mechanics
The Solidcore Formula
Slow tempo, constant tension, muscle interaction, failure, recovery, and off-reformer equivalents rendered as a movement system.
Human systems
Color systems
Topic first, system second
1
Acquired mint
2
Markets, labor, pressure
2
Archive red and brass
1
Body-system warmth
Full library
All interactive musings
Culture, Civilization & Design
Where the Gods Live
Greek myth makes more sense as a map than a cast list. Three of them, read in order: ancient Greece as a moral atlas (Crete v Athens is really Apollo v Dionysus), the Odyssey as ten years of not getting home, and Percy Jackson moving the whole pantheon to America, because the gods travel with the heart of the West, and Vegas already is the land of the Lotus-Eaters.
June 2026
Human Systems
The Solidcore Formula
I loved Solidcore enough to read the coach training manual cover to cover. The formula — slow movement, constant tension, muscles worked to failure — and the recovery in between that does the real work. The exercises, how the muscles interact, and why a studio built on recovery, then priced to push you in every single day, ends up at war with its own philosophy. The inauthenticity is what I left over.
June 2026
Quandaries
How You Got Here
The questions I actually like to ask when I'm getting to know someone. Silly up top — hot or interesting, loved loud or known quiet — a few unhinged (Donner party rules), then the real ones about how they got to be who they are. A deck you draw from; the good part is what you ask after they answer.
June 2026
Knowledge & Research
The Debate Years
Nine monthly resolutions, argued from both sides between 2014 and 2016: a whole high-school Public Forum career, recovered from the original Google Drive files and turned into data. Every card counted by side, every save-date kept as proof it's from then.
June 2026
Media, Narratives & Investigations
Othello, Annotated
I walked into Othello twenty minutes late, with a friend up on that stage, and walked out with a notebook of questions. Why did Emilia's speech feel modern. Does Iago actually have a reason. Is Cassio played queer or not, and can you run the numbers on it. What is the race story. And was the man who wrote this a man at all. A close reading that answers each one with the exact lines, plus an interactive map of the whole canon around it.
June 2026
Media, Narratives & Investigations
Stage to Screen
A diptych on acting, and an ode to the movies. How acting climbed off the stage and into the camera (the Kuleshov edit does the feeling, so the actor does less), what the clown did along the way (Chaplin's sad Tramp to Pennywise's nightmare), and how film learned to see (German Expressionism's canted angle traveling to Kurosawa to Nolan's bent time). Told partly through the film critiques I wrote as a teenager in the Garland High IB Film program, pulled back out of the drawer.
June 2026
Technology & Intelligence
O*NET AI Exposure Explorer
An interactive sandbox for evaluating AI exposure at the task level. Pick a PE-relevant occupation, see its O*NET tasks with importance and frequency scores, adjust AI exposure per task, and watch the weighted score recalculate live. 25 occupations across 8 sectors.
March 2026
Technology & Intelligence
GPTs are GPTs: What the Foundational AI Exposure Paper Actually Shows
Eloundou et al.’s Science paper claimed 80% of US workers face LLM-exposed tasks. The rubric is rigorous. The chain from exposure to dollar impact is not. A dissection — and what company-specific analysis changes.
March 2026
Knowledge & Research
DC’s Opportunity Map: Where You Grow Up Is Where You End Up
DC is not a high-mobility city with poor neighborhoods. It is a low-mobility city whose statistics are inflated by the federal workforce and suburban commuters. For children born into the bottom quintile in DC proper, the probability of reaching the top is 4.7% — less than a third of neighboring Montgomery County’s 16%. The disparity is 7 miles wide, racialized, and reproduced at the tract level.
March 2026
Power, Identity, Resistance
Burgernomics: The Big Mac Index and Global Currency Distortion
The Economist’s Big Mac Index — 54 countries, 25 years of data — reveals currency misalignment, the Balassa-Samuelson effect, and serves as an early warning system for crises in Turkey, Argentina, and Russia.
March 2026
Knowledge & Research
Warmth Is Read First, Competence Second
A field note from a Booth leadership lecture on the Stereotype Content Model: warmth is perceived first, competence amplifies it, and stated preferences (“competent jerks”) diverge sharply from revealed preferences (“lovable fools”). With a 2×2 quadrant visual.
May 2026
Knowledge & Research
Agglomeration: Why Cities Exist and Why They Cost So Much
The economics of clustering — why firms and people pay enormous costs to be near each other, and what happens when agglomeration benefits are captured by landowners instead of workers. From Rossi-Hansberg’s Urban Economics at Chicago Booth.
March 2026
Culture, Civilization & Design
Housing Development, Aesthetic Uniformity, and the Political Economy of Race and Capital
Why all new buildings look the same — and what it reveals about financialized capital, regulatory conformity, racialized reinvestment, and the erasure of place. Design homogeneity is not a taste failure. It’s a market equilibrium.
2025
Human Systems
The Price of Heat: Global Mortality and the Social Cost of Carbon
Carleton et al. assembled 399 million deaths across 41 countries to estimate what climate change actually costs in human lives. By 2100, heat kills like infectious disease — 73 per 100,000. The poor pay 4x more than the rich. The paper rewrote the social cost of carbon.
March 2026
Culture, Civilization & Design
Process Idioms
Some traditions don't state the lesson; they build it into a practice you do. Paint one eye of the daruma and wait. Mend the broken bowl in gold. A collection of process idioms, from Japan outward.
June 2026