Vol. I, No. 1 · Sunday, 31 May 2026
Gossip, mostly. Footnotes, always.
This week · Issue No. I
A scientist and a saint walk into a bar, and each one points at the other. That's the whole joke. Bishops split the world over a single Greek letter; scientists end careers over a single decimal. And the punchline, when it lands, is going to cost you something.
Read it ›Also in this volume
We built a camera fast enough to freeze an electron and found quantum weirdness living inside birds. Somehow it keeps leading clever people back to God, minus the word God. Read › The Lab Leak
The one law of physics that never loses, the spiritual needs it tramples, and why the secular protest against decay (legacy, cryonics, "optimisation") is the same prayer in a lab coat. Read › The Pulpit
Descartes put it in the pineal gland. A Nobel physicist and an anaesthetist put it in quantum collapse inside your neurons. The address keeps changing; the search never does. Read › The Lab Leak
From the editor
I spent a lot of years in rooms full of very clever people who were certain they had nothing in common with the believers they liked to laugh at. They were wrong. Watching them be wrong was funny at first, then interesting, then a little alarming.
That's the whole idea here. People guard a dataset the way they guard a doctrine. A department splits over a decimal the way a church once split over a vowel. I find this genuinely funny, and also kind of important, mostly because saying it out loud means admitting I do it too. I do. You probably do as well. That isn't an insult. It's the subject.
So here's the deal. One story a week. Real gossip, reported out, from inside churches and labs and whatever wellness scheme is currently eating my group chat. Every spicy claim comes with a source. Nobody gets a pass. My own side goes first.
— Russell Rainwater
Editor · May 2026
Know something?
Tell me. The best things in here are going to come from people who saw it up close: the faculty meeting that turned into a knife fight, the pastor's suspicious new boat, the thing your wellness coach just instructed you to buy. Anonymity is the default. I don't need your name, and I won't keep what you'd rather I didn't.
Want to write something yourself? I'll happily run a sharp piece from a nobody over a dull one from a name. Here's what I'm after ›
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