The Daily
Six good people a day — music, film, science, a book, an artist, a show. One theme per week, deepening daily. Theme-indexed — the calendar is not date-locked; it deepens by order, not by deadline.
Live now
Carl Sagan introduced Kip Thorne to Lynda Obst in a 1980 blind date; she became a Hollywood producer, and together they conceived the film twenty-five years on. Thorne’s real physics built the wormhole and Gargantua — and the VFX renderer produced published research papers. Seven days into how it got made, the wormhole, the black hole, time dilation, and what it means when the equations are finally put down.
Upcoming weeks · staged
These weeks are drafted and source-verified. Dates are TBD — they queue in order, not on a clock. Each is labeled upcoming · draft until it goes live.
Dune
Frank Herbert spent five years researching and building Arrakis — ecology, religion, politics, language — before the novel was done. Denis Villeneuve spent five hours of film to carry the first novel. Seven days into the world-building as ethics, the score’s invented instruments, the warning Herbert buried in the hero, and the Arabic and Islamic foundations beneath the Fremen.
Lost World
NWA 12774 — a 454-gram meteorite from the Sahara. In 2026, CU Boulder’s Aaron Bell read the pressure recorded in its crystals — the strongest evidence yet that this fragment once sat deep inside a planet that no longer exists. Seven days into the geobarometry, planetary differentiation, the Grand Tack and Nice Model (frontier theory, labeled as such), and what a dead world still teaches.
The year ahead
Fifty-two weeks. One theme per week, one true thread per day. Theme-indexed — no hard dates. The order is the curriculum; the calendar will deepen as weeks are drafted and cosigned. Every entry below is a draft placeholder until it is staged and source-verified.
Science & Cosmos
- W001 Interstellar Kip Thorne, Hans Zimmer, Gargantua, wormholes — the week the equations and the film became the same thing. Live
- W003 Lost World (NWA 12774) A protoplanet the size of the Moon, destroyed 4.5 billion years ago — found in a Saharan meteorite. Staged
- W ·· Cosmology week Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Pale Blue Dot — the view from the edge of the solar system. Draft pending
- W ·· Black Holes & Relativity Einstein, Kerr, the Event Horizon Telescope’s 2019 image of M87* — the theory and the photograph. Draft pending
- W ·· Astrophysics Stellar evolution, supernovae, the elements we are made of — from formation to dispersal. Draft pending
- W ·· Contact & SETI Sagan’s novel and its physics, the real search for signals, what detection would mean. Draft pending
Literature & World-Building
- W002 Dune Herbert’s five-year ecology, Villeneuve’s five-hour adaptation, Zimmer’s invented instruments — world-building as ethics. Staged
- W ·· Albert Camus A full week — absurdism, the stranger, the myth of Sisyphus, the resistance. Not a single slot: he earns the room. Draft pending
- W ·· Contact (Carl Sagan) The novel as a scientific and philosophical argument — faith, evidence, and what we owe each other across the cosmos. Draft pending
History & Human Rights
- W ·· Human Rights — Strange Fruit Billie Holiday, MLK, Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching movement. Gated 18+ dispatch links. Next in queue after the staged weeks. Queued
- W ·· The Suffrage Week All-women: Stanton, Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Alice Paul, Ethel Smyth. The 19th Amendment and the fight behind it. Proposed
- W ·· The Harlem Renaissance Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston — 3 women, 3 men, the creative explosion of 1920s Harlem. Proposed
- W ·· World War II Marlene Dietrich or Vera Lynn as music anchor; the science, the literature, the resistance. A moral week, not a glory week. Proposed
- W ·· The Labor Movement & The New Deal FDR, the unions that survived, the ones that were dismantled — what workers built and what was taken. Draft pending
Music
- W ·· Nina Simone “Mississippi Goddam” / “Sinnerman” — a full week or a voices-of-the-movement day with Nina as anchor. Direction TBD. Draft pending
- W ·· Hans Zimmer deep-dive Beyond Interstellar and Dune — a week on the craft of film scoring, invented instruments, and the organ at Temple Church. Draft pending
- W ·· Dead Can Dance & Lisa Gerrard Language-agnostic vocal mysticism — a sound that was halfway to Arrakis before it was asked to go there. Draft pending
- W ·· Rage Against the Machine Zack de la Rocha, Tom Morello — the machine they raged against; the machine we build with now. The inversion. Draft pending
- W ·· Beastie Boys & The Tibetan Freedom Concerts Adam Yauch / MCA organized the concerts (1996+); the freedom-struggle thread running from NYC through Tibet. MCA passed 2012 — a Foundation week. Draft pending
Film
- W ·· Christopher Nolan The full catalogue — the architecture of time, memory, and moral geometry across a body of work. Draft pending
- W ·· Oliver Stone — Untold History The Untold History of the United States — the first time the corruption of the machinery was laid out with receipts. A graduate course in a documentary. Draft pending
- W ·· Raoul Peck Exterminate All the Brutes and I Am Not Your Negro — colonialism, empire, James Baldwin. Placed under Humanitarian. Blurb TBD. Draft pending
- W ·· Jodorowsky’s Dune The greatest film never made — how an unmade adaptation seeded Star Wars, Alien, and a generation of sci-fi cinema. Draft pending
AI & Technology
- W ·· AI Literacy — How It Works The Opaque Box — language models from first principles, what even the makers cannot read. The dojo’s foundation. Draft pending
- W ·· Anthropic & Dario Amodei Safety-first AI development — the argument behind the mission, the team, the work. Draft pending
- W ·· AlphaGo & Lee Sedol Move 37. The moment a machine played a move no human would have played — and what it meant for both sides of the board. Draft pending
- W ·· The Warning (AI Safety) Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares — the alignment problem, the stakes, the honest accounting of risk. A week, not a single card. Draft pending
Philosophy & Ethics
- W ·· Albert Camus week The full room — absurdism, the rebel, the plague, the myth of Sisyphus. He earns the week; he will not be compressed to a slot. Draft pending
- W ·· Ethics of Technology The question the 37th Chamber exists to hold: who benefits, who is harmed, and who decides? Draft pending
- W ·· The Dalai Lama & Tibet Tenzin Gyatso, the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, the Beastie Boys thread — compassion as political position. A living Foundation. Draft pending
Television
- W ·· True Detective — Season 1 Arguably the best season of television ever made — philosophy, time, Louisiana. A week on what the form can do when the writing is this serious. Draft pending
- W ·· Cosmos — Two Generations Carl Sagan (1980) and Neil deGrasse Tyson + Seth MacFarlane (2014) — what changed, what stayed, what the show cost and gave back. Draft pending
- W ·· Dark (Netflix) Time loops, family, paradox — where Interstellar separates a father and daughter, Dark loops time until characters parent themselves. Draft pending
- W ·· The Sopranos The show that changed television narrative — and what it built for everything that came after. Draft pending
- W ·· Hardcore History (Dan Carlin) The historian who makes the past visceral. Entry order: “The Destroyer of Worlds” first, then the Cold War series. Draft pending
Art & Visual Culture
- W ·· Jean-Michel Basquiat Neo-expressionism, race, class, and the art market — a Foundation (1960–1988), honored in full. Draft pending
- W ·· Chesley Bonestell Father of space art — painted worlds before any probe confirmed them; made a generation feel the cosmos was real and reachable. Draft pending
- W ·· Salvador Dalí Surrealism, the persistence of memory, the melting watch — and the honest accounting of what he said versus what we read into it. Draft pending