World Cup 2026: the saddest neighborhood in New York
Every time a team went out of the 2026 World Cup, a New York neighborhood took it personally. A daily grief index across 205 neighborhoods, built from Census foreign-born data.
the personal website of Dash Wieland
a fork in the road, what will you do?
An object pulled at random from the Met Museum's collection, a window to the past. Changes by the day.
an imagined voice
“I pressed the lid down to keep the dust out of the oil, and the clay was still warm from the kiln my cousin fired that morning.”
Access the archive
Tectonic Drift
Wherever you are standing has been somewhere else. Drop a pin and follow that patch of crust back through 540 million years.
Spurious Alpha
A toy that lets you bet on a market superstition — the moon, Mondays, prime-numbered dates — watch it beat the market, then watch it lose to doing nothing. Real S&P 500 data, and a lesson in why a rising tide makes any rule look like genius.
Pond
Draw a line and it makes music. A browser instrument with no notes, so there's nothing to get wrong.
Choral Hurdy-Gurdy
An infinite music box: four-part chorales composed and verified live in your browser
What's left when you leave a belief system
When you leave a system that had power over you, the natural thing to do is go after its contents. The theology itself. The specific rules and regulations that were used to evaluate you. The mythology about who's chosen and who isn't. The political line. We list out the contents… →
MCV
A programming language from the impossible library.
Losing races to skyscrapers
What it would take to compare the complexity of a skyscraper and a software product, and why the comparison ends somewhere uncomfortable.
Deaths of Despair Are Two Different Crises
A spatial analysis of US mortality data finds near-zero geographic correlation between suicide and drug overdose. The unified thesis obscures two distinct phenomena with different geographies, different drivers, and different policy levers.
Shame Arbitrage
Finding unfinished destigmatization in popular memes
Symphonia: Gothic Groovebox
Designing a digital groovebox that feels different
This is knowable
When I was a child, the Internet was born and phones crawled across the surface of the planet and the whole of human knowledge became accessible with a moment's effort. Querying the well of human knowledge was novel, then routine, then a fundamental part of our humanity as we… →
Website as art
A list of website features
A pound of Norse flesh? Tracking down a rare motif.
A Norse trickster god and a Venetian merchant walk into a courtroom. Both are facing death and both escape their sentence on the same, hyperspecific technicality. Surely these cases are related? While reading the Merchant of Venice recently, I noticed a similarity to a Norse… →
Protesting too much: the debate about AI art vindicates it as art
The outrage over AI art is the repetition of an old cycle.
Why this website exists
On notebooks, 52-hertz whales, and thinking publicly.