The newsletter
IWhat Vertigo is
Vertigo is a letter about the three accelerations reshaping our time, and what they do to the people living through them. Not commentary on everything. One question, tracked carefully, twice a month.
Most writing about the state of the world asks you to be informed. Vertigo assumes you already are, and that information stopped being the bottleneck a while ago. What is missing is a way to hold it without either numbing out or spiralling.
So this is not journalism and it is not analysis. It is lived engagement with three forces that are accelerating at once. Each edition takes one signal, follows it honestly, and ends where it should end: not with a summary, but with a reframe you can carry.
If you are between stories, this is the letter I would want to be receiving.
IIThe three accelerations
Any one of these would demand serious recalibration. Together they produce something different, and it has a physical name. Vertigo: the sensation of the ground moving when you are standing still.
Artificial intelligence is restructuring how we think, work and decide whom to trust, faster than any institution built to govern it can respond. The interesting questions are no longer technical. They are about attention, agency, and what we quietly hand over.
The ecological contract is breaking, and the signals arrived years ago. What has not arrived is the resilience architecture, personal and institutional, that would let people act without either denial or despair. That gap is the subject.
The post-war order is fragmenting in real time. Whatever replaces it will shape everything downstream, including the stories individuals get to tell themselves about safety, belonging and the future.
IIIWhat lands in your inbox
Same shape every time, so you know where you are. Between 650 and 750 words, which is about five minutes.
The opener
One to three sentences, unlabelled. A moment, an image, or a question. You enter through a human voice, not through a world analysis.
The Pulse
The signals worth knowing this fortnight, across the three accelerations. Short, specific, sourced. No commentary on everything.
The essay
Four hundred to five hundred words on the one question that would not let go. This is the centre of the edition.
The Signal
One book, film, paper or object worth your attention, and why it belongs to this edition rather than any other.
IVA page from No. 25
Building What Could Hold
People who held together in compound chaos weren't, as a rule, the ones with the best contingency plans or the most robust organizations. They were the ones who had built something interior: a story that could absorb the shock without dissolving. A stable narrative. Not optimism, not performed stoicism. A thread back to themselves when everything external broke down.
VSubscribe
Join the people reading Vertigo. Leave whenever you want, no hard feelings and no follow-up sequence.
VIThe letter is one half of the work
Vertigo looks at what is happening to the world. The rest of my practice looks at what that does to a person, a team, an institution. If the letter keeps landing close to home, that is usually the signal.
7–9 sessions, 4 months. In the language that feels right.
Coaching for individualsInstitutions get between stories too. Diagnosis before prescription.
Work with organisations →