You slip through the wall, falling into a maze of empty, yellow-hued corporate corridors that seem to stretch on forever. You are surrounded by nothing but the smell of damp carpet, the glare of uniform wallpaper, and the relentless, industrial hum of fluorescent lighting. This is the baseline reality of the Backrooms, a piece of vernacular digital culture that has struck such a deep nerve that a major cinematic adaptation is already underway. Kane Parson’s take on The Backrooms will soon be released via A24, and it looks to be a horrific encapsulation of the horror of the contemporary age.

Wittgenstein produced two distinct masterpieces that completely revolutionised his field, where the second functioned as a methodical, unrelenting dismantling of the first. The arc of his thought was not a gradual evolution, but a radical recantation in which he constructed a flawless palace of pure logic, watched it shatter against ordinary life, and then spent his remaining years learning how to walk on the uneven ground below.

This week The Guardian published a list of the 100 Best Novels. They polled the great and the good of the world of literature, publishing, and authorship and asked a whole cavalcade of people to give their top 10’s.

I was not surveyed. More’s the pity. So I thought I would put together my own top 10 list, all the same.

A collection that explores the fundamental nature of philosophical inquiry, tracing how we define the boundaries of thought, language, and the self. This list offers a comprehensive framework for understanding how we construct meaning and reconcile our personal experience with the scientific and cultural images of the world.

A selection that explores the foundational and contemporary intersections of human existence and technical intervention. From ancient warnings regarding the externalisation of memory to modern critiques of surveillance capitalism and biotechnological ethics, these texts examine how tools shape our cognition, social structures, and moral landscapes.

A reading list tracing the path from established Critical Pedagogy to the emerging Post-Critical movement. Post-critical thought offers a subtle pivot, moving away from constant "debunking" toward a "pedagogical love" for the world. Together, these works challenge the "learnification" of schooling, arguing instead for education as a space of intellectual emancipation, ethical flourishing, and a radical defense of the school as a public good.

I’ve recently made some updates to my entry for last year’s Itch.io One Page RPG Jam, Habemus Papam!
It’s available via my Itch.io page (see the box above!) for a pay-what-you-want price.

I get asked, very often, how to get started with philosophy. If you’re not taking a specific class or course, or learning from a teacher, it can be hard to know how to go about putting everything in a meaningful order or finding texts and resources that will work well as an entry point. There are probably as many ways to go about philosophy as there are people giving it a go, but I’ve put together an introductory list for someone looking to learn more about philosophy on their own time.

To say that school is for learning is to miss huge amounts of what school and education are really doing. Learning can happen in all kinds of places and in all kinds of ways - lots of modern technologies, from YouTube to AI, can be really valuable tools for learning. But that is different from education.

Learning is a part of education, but it's never the whole picture. The goal of learning is that we have some new knowledge or new skills, but the goal of education is connected with the kinds of lives we wish to live and the kind of world we wish to live in.

Back at the start of September, I was invited to give the opening keynote at the Festivalul Digital Predau Viitor - the Teach the Future Festival in Romania. The festival has been running since 2022, and in its 2025 edition, saw over 5000 participants join talks, workshops, and events for the biggest education conference in the region. It’s a powerhouse event and is both a really impressive feat of logistical engineering and an expression of enormous commitment to education and educators in Romania.

At the heart of both meaningful teaching and deep gameplay is the separation of our usual selves from our “learning” or “ludic” selves - between the everyday me and the “student” or “player” me. Who I am in the classroom or in the game is, in an important sense, a temporary me. This is a me that can experiment freely, make mistakes without fear, try new roles and rules, iterate, change, and shift. I can adopt new identities, new judgments, and try new activities.

Like so much in our lives today, learning has been accelerated and commodified to try and offer instant results at low costs. We can take short-form classes on YouTube, SkillShare, Udemy, and dozens of other platforms. We can sign up for real-life classes and workshops. We can self-teach or join online communities. All of them offer quick skills at low prices. Inevitably some of that will be snake oil, people on the grift looking to extract money from those who want, or need, to learn new skills, improve their education, or expand their knowledge. Some of it, though, is high-quality, thoughtful, and impactful learning content. Telling which is which may be the trick, there.

Like a lot of people, there are times when I worry about what other people will think of the work that I do. I worry about whether my participants will find my workshops utterly transformative, I worry that those few brave souls who read my blog will like what I write and think I’m both very clever and exceptionally funny, and I worry about whether the partners and clients I work with will think my work is dazzling and brilliant. Simple aspirations.

In the discussion around generative AI a lot of the debate has focused around this same binary - truth and falsehood. Many are worried that the ability of generative AI tools to produce images, audio, video, and text may be used, or is already being used, to produce lies. Fake images, fake video, fake audio. That these powerful AI systems are a means of obscuring the truth or outright lying. We need, then, to clarify just what a lie might be, and why there is something more worrying hiding in plain sight.

Quite early on in Dune, we’re given this encapsulation of the power dynamics at play in the universe. There’s the Imperial Household, headed by the Padishah Emperor, the Great Houses of the Landsraad, the major political body, and the Spacing Guild, the entity that controls all interstellar travel. The Emperor’s power is grounded in status and the strength of his feared Sardaukar army, the Landsraad holds power through the political structures it wields and the treaties and conventions it defends, and the Spacing Guild maintains its power by exerting a monopoly on space travel. Three simple pillars of power.

If bad actors decide to release an AI-generated or computer-manipulated video or images of Joe Biden doing something that would sink his chances at a second presidential term then the world’s attention will fall upon them and every pixel will be minutely dissected by the best in the field. If images circulate purporting to show microbes in the soil of Mars, they will be examined forensically by the world’s experts. In both cases, I suspect the truth will out. But what happens when it’s not the headline-grabbing images that are manipulated, invented, or created by AI? We’re taking in hundreds, even thousands of images a day - the vast majority of which we’re giving no second thought to. It’s here that we’re most vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.

I’ve long advocated that, whatever field or discipline you work in, you should always be looking at what is happening elsewhere. That might be in neighbouring industries or practices, but it might also be in fields that are very distant from your own. As a learning experience designer, I’m keenly interested in the work of designers in a whole range of industries - game design, architecture, graphic design and, of course, product design. I’m looking at what’s happening in these different disciplines to see if there is anything exciting, interesting, or innovative that I might find use for in my work as a designer. What, then, might a learning experience designer, take from Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Design?

There is a scene about 90 minutes into Wim Wenders' enchanting film Perfect Days where our protagonist, Hirayama, is cycling over a bridge in Tokyo with his niece Niko. As the two of them cycle back and forth, weaving across the bridge in the sunset they call out, back and forth to each other, “Next time is next time, and now is now.” In a film that says very little explicitly, this seems like a pretty clear mission statement.

There is a big funnel.

A huge, great, hungry thing.

Being endlessly shovelled into one end of this funnel are lots of “things.” Books, films, music, TV shows, articles, websites, podcasts, activities, memories, jokes, conversations, meals, experiences, art.

At the other end of the funnel, there is a tiny, little trickle.

The trickle is orders of magnitude smaller than the great gouts of stuff being hosed into the big end of the funnel. That trickle is the work that we produce - the things we write, the lessons we teach, the art we make. Whatever it might be. That’s not to say that everything we do in our daily lives is the output of this great funnel, it is the distilled creative product that we make.

In his interview with Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki on the release of his masterpiece Spirited Away, Robert Ebert asked Miyazaki about the moments of rest in his films. Moments that showed what Ebert called “gratuitous motion” - a character sighing, sitting for a moment, looking to the distance. Moments that didn’t serve to advance the plot, or provide the audience with action, or provide comedy or drama in themselves.