Reflections on Systems,
Governance & Resilience
Books, films, and ideas, read together.
Written from inside regulated systems.
2026
Forthcoming
Policy Is What Arrives: Lipsky, Ishiguro, Kurosawa, and the Discretion Compliance Cannot Name Reading Lipsky's Street-Level Bureaucracy through Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Kurosawa's Ikiru
The Knowledge That Has No Field: Scott, Achebe, and the Limits of Legibility Reading Scott's Seeing Like a State through Achebe's Things Fall Apart
Carrying the Fire: Wildavsky, McCarthy, and What Resilience Is For Reading Wildavsky's Searching for Safety through McCarthy's The Road
The Spire Problem: Why Big Projects Fail and What It Means for Governance Reading Flyvbjerg's megaproject research through Golding's The Spire
When Accidents Are Normal: Governing Tight, Complex Systems Reading Perrow's Normal Accidents through Crichton's Airframe
2025
Everything Is Connected, Not Neatly: Meadows, Le Guin, and the Ethics of Digital Governance Reading Meadows' Thinking in Systems through Le Guin's The Dispossessed
Chaos, Control, and the Limits of Prediction: Labatut's Warning for Technological Governance
Technology, Industrial Mobilization, and Total War: Malaparte's Witness to Systemic Transformation
Information Control and Governance in Sealed Systems: Power Dynamics in Howey's Wool
How Paul Auster's 'City of Glass' uses the labyrinth of city life to explore grief and fragmented identity
Dreams of peace, shadows of betrayal: John le Carré's 'Call for the Dead' and the birth of George Smiley
A prescient portrait of Putin's famous spin doctor's deeply cynical politics in Giuliano da Empoli's 'The Wizard of the Kremlin' Giuliano da Empoli on Putin's spin doctor