Hello
Welcome to Tangents & Throughlines, my place for following curiosity wherever it wants to go. I let myself wander into odd tangents and see what happens, trusting that sooner or later there’s always a thread that ties it all together.
I started out in physics to learn how the universe works and never lost that curiosity. I’ve spent days kayaking with my camera for company, sewn Victorian dresses during a steampunk phase, built Halloween props just to see if I could pull off the illusion, and hiked and camped my way through quiet deserts. I’m still chasing curiosity down random alleys, and here I’ll share what I find and the threads that tie it all together.
The heck is this site for?
Fair question. Here's the short version.
A tangent is where something starts — a weird historical detail, a paper I can't stop rereading, a "wait, why is that?" that hits at 11 pm and doesn't let go. It doesn't need to go anywhere. Sometimes "I found this, and now I can't stop thinking about it" is the whole point.
Sometimes, though, a tangent won't leave me alone, and I end up digging back to primary sources, past the version of the story everyone repeats because it's convenient, until I can tell what's actually known and what's just been assumed for a long time. When that digging turns into something with an actual shape, it becomes an essay: here's what I found, here's what I think it means.
And every so often, two or three things that seemed unrelated turn out not to be. A tangent from six months ago and an essay from last week are quietly answering the same question. That's a throughline — the connective tissue, arranged on purpose instead of left to reverse-chronological chance.
So: tangent, essay, throughline. Huh-that's-weird, here's-what-I-found, oh-these-are-connected. That's the whole operating system. Everything else on this site is just what happens when you run it for a while.