Questions that keep coming back. Some of these become log entries; a few become films; most stay open for years. Nothing here is a promise. It is a record of what has my attention and how far the digging has gone.
If you know something about any of these, the contact page explains how to reach me.
Status is either one these:
Closed files stay visible at the bottom. A file might close badly, but could turn out to be the most interesting one.
World: Hidden Factores that Propagate domestic violence
Modernization was supposed to dissolve it. In most places it did not.
The question is what the actual load-bearing structure is.
Status: In development · Opened: 2022 · Last reviewed: Aug 2026
Tag: domestic violence · domestic violence
Germany: How do migrants think about other migrants?
Under pressure from the far right, migrant communities present a united front. That unity is a defensive posture, and it costs something: it leaves no safe room for the arguments happening inside those communities. Who is considered to have arrived properly and who is not. Which nationality resents which. Who gets called a refugee and who gets called an expat. Nobody wants to hand ammunition to the other side by saying this out loud, so it stays unsaid. The question is what the internal map actually looks like, and whether it can be filmed without being weaponised.
Status: Digging · Logs: none yet · Opened: 2026 · Last reviewed: Aug 2026
World: Who is actually flying the mega cities?
Twenty million people share water, power, transport and air in a system nobody designed and nobody fully controls. Somewhere there is a room where a small number of people make decisions that determine whether the whole thing works tomorrow morning; in most mega cities there are several such rooms, and they do not talk to each other. São Paulo, Lagos, Jakarta, Cairo and Mumbai are each running a different answer to the same problem. This one wants to be a series rather than a single film: one city per episode, same set of questions, wildly different results.
Status: Watching · Logs: none yet · Opened: 2026 · Last reviewed: Aug 2026
World: At what point does a religion start behaving like a political party?
Faith and the institution that administers it are not the same thing. The institution needs members, territory, funding and succession; those are the mechanics of a party, and they produce party behaviour, including the behaviour that ends in conflict between institutions that all claim the same God. The open question is where the line sits. Which parts of religious conflict are genuinely about belief, and which are about market share dressed as belief. Worth testing against the counterargument, which is that the same institutions also build most of the world's functioning mutual aid and get very little credit for it.
Status: Watching · Logs: none yet · Opened: 2026 · Last reviewed: Aug 2026
World: Nobody knows whose rocket hit the Moon
In 2022 an astronomer in Maine, Bill Gray, worked out that a discarded rocket stage was on a collision course with the Moon; its early trajectory came close enough to a South Korean lunar orbiter to cause real concern. Then came the part that stayed with me: the agencies argued about whose rocket it was. It hit, and the ownership question was never fully settled. We are a species that cannot even account for the objects it has left in its own backyard, and this is the backyard some people are supposedly "escaping" to.
Status: Digging · Logs: none yet · Opened: 2026 · Last reviewed: Aug 2026
