NB: When writing a history, the hours spent in research tend to outweigh those spent shaping the narrative itself. Along the way, you collect all kinds of material — primary sources, theoretical reflections, marginalia — that never make it into the final cut. These “Chapter Notes” are for readers who want to know more about the people and events behind the story, and who don’t mind wandering down a few adjacent corridors.
(Free subscribers get a glimpse; paid subscribers ($5/year) get full access.)
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Notes for Chapter 3 include five extracts:
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Here’s an email from Daniel Weiss, introduced in Chapter 3: this was after he agreed to join (and help fund) the Nexus, but before initiation:
Email from Daniel Weiss to Rachel Weiss, January 28, 2025:
Subject: Sorry
Hey Rach—
I know I should have been there. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to just disappear on everyone.
Things have been... messy. The papers came through last week. No real surprises, but it still hit harder than I thought. It’s hard to explain. Some days I feel like I’m just watching everything drift away.
I’m working on something now — something that I think will be very important. I can’t really talk about it yet, but it’s good. Different.
Tell Dad happy birthday for me again. I’ll call soon.
—Daniel
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Here are two articles, from 2020 and 2025, regarding some of the themes I address in Chapters 3 and 4:
From “How GPS Weakens Memory—and What We Can Do about It” — By Mar Gonzalez-Franco et al, Scientific American, May 7, 2021:
Using mobile phones to navigate has become second nature. Whether you’re heading to a new park, meeting friends at a restaurant, or going to run errands, you just tap the location on your phone and go. Prior to GPS, exploring and wayfinding in new places required preparation. We had to think, consult paper maps, and plan and memorize parts of our route. But in today’s technological world, there is no need to think. Simply follow the turn-by-turn directions on your phone, and you’ll end up where you need to be. But your overall sense of the place suffers. Spatial navigation, which had been a process performed exclusively by the human brain and perceptual system, has now been surrendered to technology.
However, in doing so, we also surrendered our agency. Does it matter?”
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From “You Think You’re Researching — Algorithms Are Radicalizing You, New Study Finds” — Hannah Long, The Guardian, November 3, 2025: