Phronesis
Trails

Chains of ideas

Curated paths where each idea leads to the next. Start anywhere, follow the thread, end up somewhere you didn’t expect.

Trail7 steps

China, close up

Pandas, an ancient capital, its Muslim quarter, a noodle you can barely write, and an army in the ground.

  1. 1China owns nearly every giant panda on Earth
  2. 2How a meat-eater’s body survives on bamboo
  3. 3Pandas are almost absent from classical Chinese art
  4. 4Xi’an was once one of the largest cities on Earth
  5. 5Who lives in Xi’an’s Muslim Quarter
  6. 6A noodle dish whose name has 58 strokes
  7. 7The Terracotta Army was found by farmers digging a well
Trail5 steps

Eating China (and its travels)

A spice that vibrates, a dish its hometown rejected, and two words for one drink.

  1. 1Sichuan pepper makes your lips buzz at 50 Hz
  2. 2A noodle dish whose name has 58 strokes
  3. 3General Tso’s chicken is unknown in General Tso’s home province
  4. 4Fortune cookies are Japanese, by way of California
  5. 5Tea if by sea, chai if by land
Trail7 steps

Faith, festivals and calendars

Why Christmas is when it is, why Ramadan moves, and other things worth knowing about how religions shape time and daily life.

  1. 1Why Christmas is on 25 December
  2. 2Jesus was probably born “Before Christ”
  3. 3Why Ramadan moves about 11 days earlier every year
  4. 4The temple kitchen that feeds tens of thousands every day, free
  5. 5One of the oldest faiths, and Freddie Mercury’s
  6. 6The “Laughing Buddha” isn’t the Buddha
  7. 7Born Shinto, married Christian, buried Buddhist
Trail4 steps

Your plate is a passport

Foods that aren’t from where you think, and the myths that grow around them.

  1. 1The croissant is Austrian (sort of)
  2. 2Caesar salad was invented in Mexico
  3. 3Carrots used to be purple
  4. 4Spicy isn’t a taste. It’s pain.
Trail3 steps

Golden threads

Numerals, rabbits, Leonardo and the balance sheet.

  1. 1Fibonacci’s real legacy wasn’t the sequence
  2. 2Leonardo’s math teacher wrote the first guide to accounting
  3. 3The golden ratio is less magic than you’ve heard
Trail4 steps

Hidden messages

Palindromes, ancient word squares, ciphers, and the mathematics that breaks them.

  1. 1The Sator Square
  2. 2Palindromes are written into your DNA
  3. 3Julius Caesar’s secret code (and why it failed)
  4. 4In a room of 23 people, two probably share a birthday
Trail4 steps

How trends move

From royal courts to TikTok: why styles rise, die and come back.

  1. 1How trends spread, from royal courts to TikTok
  2. 2Why your parents’ clothes look ridiculous, and your grandparents’ look charming
  3. 3A skateboard, a bottle of juice, and a 43-year-old hit
  4. 4Do skirts really get shorter when the economy booms?
Trail12 steps

Kazakhstan, from the inside

Free wanderers, seven fathers, renamed in-laws, the world’s first apples and the first human in space.

  1. 1“Kazakh” and “Cossack” are the same word
  2. 2Why many Kazakhs can name seven generations of ancestors
  3. 3The Kazakh bride who renames her husband’s family
  4. 4Kazakh names that tell a story
  5. 5In a Kazakh home, a half-empty cup is a compliment
  6. 6The “last wild horse” descends from tamed horses of the Kazakh steppe
  7. 7Every apple you have eaten comes from Kazakhstan
  8. 8Kazakhstan’s national symbol might be a woman
  9. 9The city in Kazakhstan that provoked Genghis Khan
  10. 10The first human in space took off from Kazakhstan
  11. 11The country that gave up the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal
  12. 12Kazakhstan brought half of a dying sea back to life
Trail4 steps

Looking back at Earth

A photo, a record and a lonely point in the ocean that change your sense of scale.

  1. 1The Pale Blue Dot
  2. 2The mixtape we sent to the stars
  3. 3Point Nemo, where spacecraft go to die
  4. 4Why the sky is blue, and not violet
Trail4 steps

From looms to laptops

How punched cards for weaving silk became the foundation of computing.

  1. 1Computers began as looms
  2. 2The computer that was designed in 1837
  3. 3The first computer programmer was a poet’s daughter
  4. 4The first computer bug was an actual bug
Trail4 steps

Countries that do it differently

A flag drawn with a compass, a nation that measures happiness, and two that bent time.

  1. 1Nepal’s flag comes with geometry instructions
  2. 2Bhutan measures Gross National Happiness
  3. 3France has more time zones than any other country
  4. 4Kiribati moved the International Date Line
Trail3 steps

Right too early

People who saw what others didn’t, and were barely thanked for it.

  1. 1The doctor who said “wash your hands”
  2. 2A Hollywood star patented a secret radio system
  3. 3The man who decided the missiles weren’t real
Trail4 steps

Words, wires and keyboards

How a newspaper joke, an election and the telegraph shaped the way we write.

  1. 1Why do we say “OK”?
  2. 2The Victorian internet
  3. 3Why your keyboard says QWERTY
  4. 4Why English spelling makes no sense
Trail10 steps

Thinking machines: how AI began

From bronze giants and reasoning wheels to a summer workshop, a chatbot therapist, two winters and a bedroom GPU.

  1. 1The dream of thinking machines is thousands of years old
  2. 2The computer that was designed in 1837
  3. 3The first computer programmer was a poet’s daughter
  4. 4The chess-playing machine that had a man inside
  5. 5“Can machines think?”: Turing’s 1950 question
  6. 6AI got its name from a summer workshop proposal
  7. 7In 1958 the Navy said its neural network would one day be conscious
  8. 8The 1960s chatbot people confided in
  9. 9AI has gone through “winters” before
  10. 10From a bedroom GPU to ChatGPT
Trail4 steps

When numbers lie

Incentives that backfire, metrics that stop measuring, and how we misjudge ourselves.

  1. 1The cobra effect: when rewards backfire
  2. 2When a measure becomes a target
  3. 3The Big Mac index
  4. 4The Dunning–Kruger effect is not what the internet says
Trail5 steps

Words without borders

Baby talk, two kinds of “we”, a lost letter, a language with no relatives, and one that came back.

  1. 1Why “mama” sounds the same almost everywhere
  2. 2Many languages have two words for “we”
  3. 3“Ye Olde Shoppe” was always pronounced “the”
  4. 4Basque is related to no other language on Earth
  5. 5The language that came back after 1,700 years
Trail5 steps

The world’s kitchen

How dishes travel, change hands and end up with the wrong nationality.

  1. 1Tempura was brought to Japan by the Portuguese
  2. 2Japan learned curry from the British Navy
  3. 3Fortune cookies are Japanese, by way of California
  4. 4Ketchup started out as a fish sauce
  5. 5Before 1492, Italy had no tomatoes and Thailand had no chillies