Other Things
The other half of the title. What is here is not the book and does not answer to it.
Writing
Shakespeare SpeaksTwenty Passages on Power and Politics
Twenty short passages in which Shakespeare comments on political power and rebukes the powerful, each given with its text, its location, a gloss, and a resonance: the connection to political theory, law or economics that the line anticipates or echoes. The tragedies and histories argue politics out loud, through crowns and crowds and tribunes. The comedies smuggle it in sideways, through fools and outsiders and castaways who can say what subjects cannot. A thematic index opens it and a closing synthesis puts the counter-case, because Shakespeare argues every side.
Oscar Film SynthesisA Cultural History of Best Picture, 1929–2026
Every Best Picture winner from Wings in 1929 to One Battle After Another in 2026, read alongside the 523 films that lost to them. The winners show what the Academy honoured. The losers show what it chose from, and that changes several of the stories the winners tell alone. Once the nominees are counted, no genre wins more or less than its share, so the data show no favour toward war or sports films and no prejudice against comedy. The musical vanished from the shortlist as well as from the final vote, and the data cannot say which came first. Money gives the clearer break. Until about 2010 winners tended to be the more popular films of their year. Since then they have cost less than the films they beat and no longer rank ahead of them on gross. The genre labels were assigned by two AI readers working blind to each other and to the original labels, and the essay says plainly that two readers from one model family are not two critics. Every principal claim carries a tier in a closing ledger, and whatever goes beyond the data is marked as interpretation.
Applications
Single web pages that run in the browser and keep working offline once they have been visited. Both can also be installed, which gives them their own window and an icon on a home screen or dock instead of a browser tab. How you do that differs by browser, so each app carries a bar at its head naming the path for whichever one you are using.
Brain Churna brainstorming workbench
Six stages carry a problem from its framing to an exported report. Frame the problem and the constraints that matter, generate raw associations, apply lateral provocations to unsettle what has already been assumed, combine elements to fill out the space, then weigh the candidates and score what survives. Three engines drive the association step, and the engine can be changed mid-session. One asks you to supply the words yourself. One queries the free Datamuse word-association service. One writes a prompt for whatever AI you already use and parses the answer back in. It is a single page that runs in the browser and works offline after the first visit. Your work stays on your own machine, and there is no account, no analytics and nothing behind the app to send it to. The one thing that ever leaves the page is a single word, sent to Datamuse, and only if you have chosen that engine. The method is a synthesis of general creativity techniques rather than any one proprietary system, and it ships no word list of its own.
Flavour Churnan ingredient-pairing engine
Three numbers decide every pairing. How much aroma chemistry two ingredients share, weighted so that a compound found in three ingredients counts for more than one found in forty. How strongly the free glutamate in one multiplies against the ribonucleotides in the other, which is the savoury arithmetic behind kombu and dried fish. And how unfamiliar the combination is, a term that multiplies the other two rather than adding to them, so novelty can only promote a pairing that already had a reason to exist. A contrast mode drops the first axis and hunts pairs that share almost no aroma directly while both connecting through some third ingredient, which the card names. Seventy-six ingredients, hand-seeded, every figure computed rather than lifted from anyone's book. Nothing here has been tasted, and a whole tab says so at length. Sixty-one assertions run against the live engine whenever the last tab is opened, so a claim that has gone stale shows as a red row instead of sitting quietly in the prose.
Projects
The Coupled Mapknowledge bound to practical wisdom
A cross-disciplinary atlas in two halves: the map of what is true bound, span by span, to the map of what to do. The claim the drawing makes is that most of human wisdom lives on the bridges rather than at either end. Fifteen bridges, each with its reading list, its fields and its own argument, and five lenses that can be laid over the whole thing, including one that marks where facts stop and judgement begins. The idea-names tagging each bridge come from Adler's Syntopicon and are acknowledged on the map itself.
The Baker Street Methodobservation, analysis and evaluation for public-facing professionals
The skills that make Sherlock Holmes an arresting character are not detective skills. They are assessment skills, and the claim here is that they are the same ones a district nurse uses on a first home visit and a GP uses in the ninety seconds before a consultation settles into a diagnosis. Doyle was Joseph Bell's clerk at Edinburgh in 1877 and wrote to him in 1892 that it was most certainly to him that he owed Holmes, so teaching the method back to clinicians returns it to where it came from. Thirteen half-day modules and an assessment day across six months, five families of competency, a portfolio and a simulated capstone, with a facilitator's script for every session. The counter-case runs throughout rather than arriving at the end, and the twelfth module is given over to it. Holmes works alone, dislikes emotion, reasons about people rather than with them, and infers from appearance in a way that is one letter from prejudice. Every one of those habits is a liability in a caring profession, and the course says so early enough that the last module is a harvest rather than a surprise.