great ave ruinsOpening the notebook…
Violence and Aurora Borealis
The Great Alone made me want to understand our appetite for stories about women who endure. What happens when trauma is wrapped in descriptions of northern lights and midnight sun? When violence and beauty occupy the same paragraph, the same breath? Why do millions reach for these narratives of female suffering?
Parenthood Diaries: On Becoming
My son spent six years learning what Adrienne Rich called "the geography of fear"—bullied, developing an atlas of avoidance. Then something unexpected: he began reaching toward leadership roles with persistence that baffled me, practicing courage against all his training.
Hoi An: A Meditation on Fractals, Time, and the Strange Comfort of Pattern
We are creatures of nested time. Your circadian rhythms follow the sun. You move through seasons no calendar marks. Beneath all this, deep time—evolution, continents drifting—there is pattern, recursion; and recognising this anchors us.
Dear Nora Seed: What If You Didn't Have to Learn a Lesson?
I wished someone had been more patient with Nora (The Midnight Library) before she started converting every experience into lessons. So I wrote her a letter, because sometimes the most honest way to examine what a book gets wrong is to offer what it couldn't give its protagonist.
On Somatic Intelligence
They could reason through anything. What they couldn't do was choose lunch.
Reddit’s 2026 Creative Trends Report Is Brilliant. It’s Also an Autopsy of Authenticity
Reddit's own creative studio published a trends report that is sharp, well-observed, and, well, unsettling. This is what happens when you read it slowly, and notice what it reveals about authenticity, attention, and the early internet we can't manufacture back.
Threshold: The MRT and the Art of In-Between
I want to say something profound about thresholds, about how we're suspended between departure and arrival. But what I'm actually thinking about is whether I positioned myself at the right door. This is the gap between how we think we experience the world and how we actually do.
The Midnight Library
What would it look like to actually honour the premise? An infinite library could be genuine contemplative space allowing Nora to dwell in possibility without pressure to choose correctly. But that would require Haig to value contemplation over consolation, inquiry over instruction, dwelling over destination.
Triage and the Burning House
Florence Nightingale was burning. On my Day 1 that became triage. We are told to put on our oxygen masks first. But what happens when you're the only one who knows where the masks are?
On Decreation
On the morning of June 18, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte did something out of character. He waited. His marshals were anxious. The man who had turned speed into a military philosophy was watching the morning burn off. Simone Weil would have recognised this immediately as a failure of attention. And attention, for Weil, was everything.
Perth: The Architecture of Second Acts
We'd mapped our itinerary carefully, but weather narrowed our radius to what stood beside our accommodation. How often do we pause to consider our last days somewhere? A peculiar telescoping of perception, a painful receptivity to detail that transforms the ordinary into the archaeological.
What Fiction Does When We're Not Looking
Fiction's capacity to expand moral imagination is also its capacity to colonize it. Every time you inhabit a character, you bring your own architecture of feeling to their experience. You can only understand them through your available emotions. This is why diverse literature matters.
On the Fear of Sharing What I Cook
When did amateur become an insult? From the Latin amator: lover. Someone who does something for love of it. The professionalisation of food culture has given us access to knowledge, but it's also made us feel like impostors in our own kitchens.
I Have Not Begun
The nervous system, ancient and efficient and not remotely interested in your analysis of it, cannot tell the difference between a pigeon and a person. It only knows that something came before. Something might come again.
Melaka: Tanghulu at Forty
My son will grow up in a world where culture is platform-native. Where he can learn thosai from YouTube, tanghulu from TikTok, pasta from Italian grandmothers who've monetised their nostalgia. Where "traditional" means whatever the algorithm surfaces.
The Designated Devil: Why Some Families Need One
The designated devil's crime was not cruelty or failure or rebellion. It was witnessing. She was in the room. She remembers what was said. She noticed the distance between the family's narrative and the family's actions, and she made the error of not forgetting. She holds the archive the family needs destroyed.
The Absolution of the Calendar: A Study in Behavioural Narrative
A commissioned piece exploring the psychological weight of January. While most content around the New Year focuses on achievement and transformation, this essay argues that January’s true power lies in forgiveness. By leveraging the "Fresh Start Effect," we use temporal landmarks to distance ourselves from past failures.
Palimpsests of the Self
An exploration of how disbelief scrapes away not just testimony, but the very legibility of a life; and what it takes to read the faint marks that remain.
Do Buy, Dubai: Have Your Virtue and Eat It Too
I’ve been thinking about excess that wants to be mistaken for care, curation, almost moral attentiveness. How it borrows the language of virtue, and calls itself intentional, presents itself as edited, curated, almost ethical.
On Solitude and Self-Possession: What We Learn When We Travel Alone
Without conversation, you notice flavour differently. Without accommodation to another person's pace, you discover your own. The focaccia is gone. I have traveled much farther than the distance from my hotel.