Browse the archive
Topic: Mortality
-
Well Calibrated
Approx. 15 min read
An insurance statistician notices her own premium jump for no reason she can explain, and using her insider access to the pricing model, she reverse-engineers the signal into a date. Telling no one, she quietly restructures her entire life around it. When the date comes and goes, she goes back to the data and discovers she misread what the number was actually measuring.
-
The Kitchen of Bright Meadow
Approx. 14 min read
A linguist who has spent her career documenting the last speakers of dying languages takes a modest grant to record a tongue spoken only by eleven residents of a single nursing home. The speakers share no common background, yet they agree, precisely and without metaphor, on words for objects that do not exist, and every one of those objects belongs in a kitchen. As she builds the lexicon, the frame she has always used to understand her work begins to come apart.