Imagine you have just landed on this planet. You have no nationality, no party, no church, no team. You look around and see remarkable things: a population that has mapped its own genome but cannot stop half its members from being hurt by the other half at home. Cities of twenty million people that nobody, strictly speaking, governs. Institutions that promise heaven and collect congressional votes. Waste that always affects the people with the least say in the matter.
An extraterrestrial would not get angry about any of this. He would log notes.
That is the method of this blog, and it is why the tagline reads “One ET’s Notes on the Planet.” Not because I think I am above the subject; I incarnated here too, and some of these topics have touched my life directly. The ET is a discipline, not a costume. It forces me to describe human arrangements the way an explorer would: what is actually happening, how the machinery works, what the numbers say, who benefits, who pays.
This produces a site with an unusual structure, so here is the map.
The Open Files are the issues I am actively investigating. Each file has a status: Watching, Digging, In Development, or Closed. A file is never an argument; it is a thread I pull on, sometimes for years. When a file produces something substantial, it becomes a long, sourced article built to be useful to anyone researching the same question, including journalists and researchers who need the receipts. Shorter pieces like field notes, case studies, updates to open files, they get tagged to the issue.
The Column is the one place where I take positions. You are reading it now. Keeping opinion in a marked container would be quality control. If I let advocacy leak into the files, the files stop being trustworthy, and trustworthy files are the whole point.
A few commitments, so you can hold me to them. I have no funders and no institution behind this site; nobody pays for these conclusions. I write nonpartisan by construction, which does not mean neutral about facts; it means the facts are gathered before the verdict, and you get to see both. And the files stay open. When new findings change a picture, I update the file.
Why do this? Because I believe knowing is the first step toward caring, and only people who care contribute to solving anything. Here, I wear the hat of a documentary filmmaker, and some of these files may one day become films. But film or no film, the work starts the same way it starts for any newly arrived observer of this planet: look closely, write it down, reflect on your work.
