Slow thoughts

Spies, coders, journalists—they all rely on intuition, improvisation, and experience. It’s tradecraft.

They call it “weaponized randomness.” I had no idea what it really was until I stumbled across it in three consecutive books.

It’s been a good reading year.

If there’s nothing fundamental about ‘elementary’ particles, if nature never bottoms out, then what remains to hold on to?

Mapping out the primitives of a field is a useful way to understand its landscape. In the case of quantum technology, this approach proves especially challenging—but equally rewarding.

Evolution has created a nasty cognitive hack that ethologists call the super-stimulus. I’d like to propose a term for a related behaviour.

Richard Ford wraps up the Bascombe saga and leaves the reader with a sense of miracle.

Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is a coming of age story—not only for an exceptional science writer, but for the entire cosmos itself.

He is Poland’s most popular science fiction author, with his work adapted for both the silver screen and a Netflix original series. He also engages deeply with geopolitics, on Earth and beyond.