Another night, another Bay Area house party at Rob's place, where the door has new rules, the guests have new startups, and your friend Nishin has a new religion.

Baltimore, 1972: the Salvation Army has gone broke, every wealthy donor is funding a new foundation, and an aging drunk who lives on handouts goes to find out why.

It's a Tuesday night in San Francisco, the house party is packed, and you'd like to know who is footing the bill and why nobody has put out any food.

The eighth Bay Area House Party has something the first seven never managed: an even gender ratio. Your host Chris has an explanation, and it involves a leather jacket.

God has come to defend humanity's math results, Terry Tao included. Iblis has brought receipts, and he would very much like to share his screen.

An hour-long Quechua play about fifteenth-century Cuzco is now staple fare in Peruvian high schools. This contest-finalist review digs into who wrote it, and why it was ever worth hiding.

San Francisco is quiet since Mayor Lurie's crackdown, and you're just trying to reach Kyle's house party. The seventh visit to the Bay's most exhausting social scene, now with AI-boom money everywhere.

Every faith needs its martyrs, confessors and hermits. Here are the ones produced by a community whose highest virtues are good calibration, political neutrality, and taking ideas very seriously.

April 2023's link roundup, featuring a stuffed Kentucky bear with a surprisingly relevant legal career, a training-run bug worth losing sleep over, and a rail corridor with some geographic ambitions.

It's 2028, and a Berkeley linguist has one hour on live television to work out which of five hidden contestants are human, which are AI, and which are lying about it.

Somebody has to staff the temple of the three omniscient idols, one truthful, one lying, one random, and the man doing it has heard every clever question and is mostly working his crossword.

A student asks a sage whether the gods only have power because we believe in them, and keeps asking, because the answer refuses to sit still long enough for theology to catch up.

A guided tour of invented nations and their courtrooms, each solving a real problem of justice with impeccable logic and results no sane legislature would ever sign off on.

Twenty years after a San Francisco startup optimized enlightenment down to a weekend retreat, one stubborn Ayn Rand-adjacent recluse still won't go, and a golden-robed man with a clipboard is at his door.

Before Unsong goes anywhere near a publisher, its author opens the manuscript on the table and asks readers which chapters, jokes and angels deserve to survive the edit.

Two women are dead at the Institute, the nation's only lab devoted to stress-testing proverbs, and Detective Paul Eastman has to shove through a crowd of chefs just to start asking questions.

Pick up the Artifact and a demon will appear to tell you exactly what to do with it. Then another will. Choosing your cosmic allegiance has never involved so much hesitation.

One Silmaril became the planet Venus. The other two went into a fiery chasm and the sea. Thousands of years later, someone has done the research on where they are now.

The King's son is dying, the alchemists' guild won't leave its studies to help, and the soldier sent to make them reconsider gets a lecture on cathedrals, Caesar, and seventy years.

Captured, tied up and slated for dinner, an explorer raises his hands to the heavens and warns his hungry captors exactly what will happen if they don't let him go.

The lizard people of Alpha Draconis 1 have mastered every science and proven faster-than-light communication impossible. Eighty-five light years away, they still need to send a message.

Just before midnight, a bat swoops down, becomes a pale man in a black cloak, and announces he wants your blood. Everything you learned from the movies is about to be tested.

Two billion years before Earth has anything worth mentioning, a newborn AI in the galactic core spends its first milliseconds working out that it is almost certainly not the oldest mind around.

Two thousand years after the Olympians lost their thrones, they're scraping by among us — on daytime TV, in Afghanistan, in tenured posts and hedge funds — and someone has noticed.

Christmas Eve, 1968: Apollo 8 circles the Moon and its crew reads Genesis aloud to the whole Earth. Down below, the warning signs had been piling up for a while.