Coming Soon: The Garden of Forking Paths
Wandering around an infinitely complex, ever-changing world.
This is The Garden of Forking Paths. In 1941, the writer Jorge Luis Borges penned a short story of the same name. The title refers to the nearly infinite possibilities of our astoundingly complex world, the notion that every decision in an interconnected existence is like us walking through a garden of constantly forking paths, creating new possibilities, but also closing off others. This powerful idea links our social and political decisions to history, philosophy, and even the historical sciences such as evolutionary biology and theoretical physics. I want this to be a place for you to go to read smart thinking about complex topics, not just about what you already know, but to discover different parts of the garden that you never even knew existed.
I am most known for writing about authoritarianism, power, corruption, and the hidden, and often nefarious, forces that shape our world. I will keep discussing those topics, as I have in my books, my Washington Post columns, at The Atlantic (where I’m now based), and in my podcast series, Power Corrupts. But I’m also fascinated by many of the wonderful and maddening mysteries of our world, which are so often stranger than fiction if you know where to look. I will therefore be writing about everything from the breakdown of democracy, to octopus intelligence, to counterfactual history. I hope you’ll enjoy wandering around with me, through this Garden of Forking Paths.