Cabinet of Marginalia
The margin is where the medieval scribe drew dragons and pulled faces while the main text held forth on theology. This is that margin. Cartoons, glossed quotations, curiosities from the literature, sketches from cottage and farm, fragments from the bookshelf, and the occasional act of irreverence aimed at the
When the Shit Hits the Bridge
Or Southern Water can burst three sewage mains in a week, deploy a fleet of tankers to manage the flows, and drive one of them ...
Thirty-Seven Pages, Posted from Amsterdam
In 1874 a farmer in upstate New York privately printed a pamphlet about anaesthesia and circulated it himself. Almost no original copies can now be found. One of them changed William James's mind — and Harvard turns out to hold the archive where the hunt should start.
When Motherhood Feels Like a Trip: A Compelling Parallel That Hasn't Been Tested
A mother says psilocybin made her calmer, more patient, better at the job. A Harvard thesis says her brain and the mushroom may be working on the same territory. The parallel is real. What it means is not yet known.
The Litany Against Fear
In March of 2026, Christian Angermayer — biotech financier, founder and chairman of the psychedelic pharma company AtaiBeckley, largest shareholder in the same — published a short essay with a large claim.
The Trained Bystander Paradox
Should Voluntarily-Acquired Rescue Capability Generate a Limited Positive Duty in English Negligence Law?
The Habit of the Universe
On morphic resonance, decapitated worms, lions that remember Rome, and what we might be doing when we take psychedelics
Which Ayahuasca?
Ayahuasca is not one thing: one name, many brews, hidden variables, and a global habit of flattening complexity into a single word.
The Trouble with Supernormal Stimuli.
Wide vintage-style ARDMT Field Notes comic strip titled “The Trouble with Supernormal Stimuli,” showing male Australian jewel beetles mistaking glossy brown beer bottles for females, illustrating how exaggerated artificial cues can override natural mating signals and create an evolutionary trap.
The Case of the Vanishing Molecule
Wide vintage-style ARDMT Field Notes comic strip titled “The Case of the Vanishing Molecule,” showing the scientific history of endogenous DMT from Julius Axelrod’s 1961 INMT enzyme discovery through inconsistent transmethylation-era findings, Borjigin’s rat brain studies, and modern
The Compound That Forgot to be Interesting.
The Compound That Forgot to Be Interesting — a field note on timing, context, and rejected purchase orders. In 1931 the Canadian chemist Richard H. F. Manske first synthesised N,N-dimethyltryptamine and entered it into a table of tryptamine derivatives without ever suspecting what it would become.
The Committee on Extraordinary Claims. Part 1
The margin is where the medieval scribe drew dragons and pulled faces while the main text held forth on theology. This is that margin.