A commonplace book — the one place on this site where the subject is whatever it happens to be.
The other four projects on this domain each keep to one subject: the Bible, money, the road, the body. This is the fifth, and it is the ordinary one — a blog in the old sense, where the through-line is the person writing rather than the thing written about. A piece of technology writing with no Bitcoin in it goes here. So does a geopolitics explainer, a note on a piece of news that deserved a longer look than the headline gave it, and the occasional argument about a book, a building or a record.
It is sorted into four sections so it has a shape while it is small: Science & Technology, The World, Arts & Culture, and Notes for whatever fits none of the other three. Tags run underneath, as on the other blogs.
Not advice — not financial, legal, medical, technical or any other kind — and no reply from me is either. The money writing lives at the Ledger, the health writing at the Regimen, and each of those says at length what it is and isn't. This one ranges over everything else, and disclaims it all once, in the small print at the foot of every page.
A commonplace book was the personal notebook a reader kept from the Renaissance on — a book of passages copied out, thoughts set down, things seen, sorted under headings so they could be found again. Everyone who read kept one: Bacon, Milton, Locke (who wrote a method for indexing them), Jefferson, Emerson. It was never a book about one thing; it was a book about whatever the keeper had been paying attention to, which is exactly the job this publication does.
The page at the top of the front page is the most famous notebook ever kept: a folio of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex on the Flight of Birds, in which mirror-written notes on how a bird holds its wings share the paper with a diagram of rigging and, elsewhere in the same codex, anatomy, hydraulics and lists of things to buy. Science, technology, the world, and the arts, on one page, kept by one person. The ambition here is a great deal smaller; the shape is the same.
Every entry ends with a button that opens a public reply on X, and a search that finds what other readers have said about the same page. For anything not tied to one entry — a question, a correction, something I should have read — there is a form that goes straight to my desk.