Welcome to Chaos Theory

my newsletter-slash-blog where I follow all the threads and rabbit holes, think and feel deeply about complex things, and get inspired by the unexpected. Updates to your inbox every couple of weeks, with selected essays published here. Add your name and email below to never miss a thing.

I’m leaving Substack

I’m leaving Substack

Hi friends, These past couple of years have been somewhat of a public unravelling as I’ve been figuring out where I want to go next. I’m no stranger to flying by the seat of my pants, following my nose, and figuring stuff out as I go (and it has worked out pretty well for me so far – from…

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I couldn’t really imagine it – until now

I couldn’t really imagine it – until now

My grandmother never told me much about her experience of the siege. We learned a lot about it at school – the 900 days, the 1.5 million dead, the heroism of the people, the Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, the “this side of the street is more dangerous during an aerial attack” (the…

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This dis-imagination machine.

This dis-imagination machine.

In the final chapters of Evgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, the authorities have finally figured out what was causing the turmoil that has permeated the otherwise perfectly calibrated society of synchronised workers and glass houses. The problem, it turned out, was that some humans…

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I’m a garden, not a machine

I’m a garden, not a machine

I keep thinking that it must feel weird for you to read me writing about gardening all of a sudden. Like, what does it have to do with photography? Probably nothing. Probably everything. I’m still figuring it out. My brain doesn’t work in a linear way. It swirls and shoots to random places, making…

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I decided to plant a garden

I decided to plant a garden

I decided to plant a garden. Like, an edible kitchen garden, with apple trees and herbs and radishes and peas. But also, wildflowers. Lots of wildflowers. There are three main problems with my plan: I have literally zero idea how to do any of it. I grew up in a high rise block of flats in a city,…

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Three things I didn’t know about pirates

Three things I didn’t know about pirates

There are at least three things I didn’t know about pirates: One: The Jolly Roger was a symbol of not so much a threat to others (“you are going to die”), but more of sheer defiance (“we know we are going to die”). Pirates knew that they had signed their own death warrants once on land, and…

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Fuck AI. Make your own terrible art.

Fuck AI. Make your own terrible art.

I had a bit of a flirtation with AI early on. It was fun and exciting to play with it and see if I could push the limits of what I myself could do. I was inspired by Jonas Peterson – a photographer and an early Midjourney adopter who seemingly mastered the art of AI (and made a…

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