the dispatch
blog
essay
On Prompting as a Humanist Practice
Renaissance scholars spent years learning to ask the right questions of classical texts. We now call that skill prompt engineering. Here's what the studia humanitatis can teach us about talking to machines — and why the best prompters are usually the best readers.
studio notes
Making Episode 50 With an AI Co-Writer
How the da Vinci episode came together — what the model got right, what it got spectacularly wrong, and the one hallucination that was more interesting than the truth.
field notes
The Commonplace Book as Proto-RAG
Renaissance scholars kept commonplace books — handwritten databases of useful passages. Retrieval-augmented generation is the same idea at scale. Some things don't change.
review
Five AI Tools for the Intellectually Curious
Not productivity tools. Not workflow optimisers. These are the AI tools worth using if you care about thinking well.
deep dive
Why Montaigne Would Have Loved the Internet (and Hated Social Media)
The essay as a form was invented for thinking out loud. Here's what its inventor would make of our current information environment.
short take
The Algorithm is Not the Muse
A brief meditation on why recommendation engines and creative inspiration are fundamentally different things — and why confusing them is making us worse at both.