The people and ideas I keep returning to, introduced in my own words, with links to their work.
Yuval Noah Harari
The quote at the bottom of the home page came before this page existed. It arrived early, before I had fully worked out what Chronos Veritas was for, and it stayed because it said something I had believed for a long time without having the precise words for it.
“As we have seen again and again throughout history, in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose. To tilt the balance in favour of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth telling.”
I came to Harari the way most people do now, through fragments. A clip on social media, then another, then an interview, then several more. He was everywhere because he was promoting Nexus, his book about information networks and their role in shaping history and civilisation. I bought the book. I read the first few chapters immediately and found them genuinely compelling. I haven’t returned to it since, which I mention not as a confession but as an honest description of how most of us actually engage with ideas in this environment. The fragments were enough to make him one of the clearest thinkers I have encountered on the subjects that matter most to me.
Those subjects are information and truth, and what happens to both when everyone has an equal voice. The early internet felt different because in some important sense it was. The utopian version of democratic information sharing assumed that more voices meant more truth. What it actually produced, over time, was a landscape where an idiot and a professor carry identical weight, and where there are, as a consequence, significantly fewer professors willing to speak. Harari understands this and writes about it with a historical sweep that makes the current moment feel less like chaos and more like a pattern we should recognise.
He is a scholar and, some might reasonably argue, something close to a prophet. He is also Israeli, gay, and Jewish, which for a significant portion of his potential audience is apparently more interesting than anything he has to say. That reductive reaction is itself an illustration of his central argument. We have built information systems that make it easier to dismiss a thinker than to engage with one.
I find him worth the effort. The interviews are the easiest way in.
Nexus is available everywhere books are sold. His long form interviews on YouTube are the most accessible entry point and several are available in full.
Rachel Barr
I came across Rachel Barr the way most useful things find me now, through a short social media post that the algorithm delivered at precisely the right moment. She describes herself as a neuroscientist, she grew up in Fife, and she now lives in Canada. The Fife connection was an unexpected and warming detail.
The post was three minutes long and titled “How to Survive Non-Stop Global Scale Horror.” I am not going to pretend that is not exactly the kind of title designed to stop a scroll, but what followed was genuine and useful rather than clickbait. She offered three practical, science-grounded suggestions for managing what she called a looming sense of existential dread in a world that currently generates it in industrial quantities.
I shared it immediately in a family chat with my mother, brother and sister. My accompanying note was honest: I had been sucked into a feeling of learned helplessness by the social media vortex, I liked her suggestions, and I wanted to pass them on. My mother, who has her own reasons for finding the world heavy at the moment, acknowledged that it resonated with her too.
I am not going to claim Rachel Barr is a towering intellectual figure. That is not what she is doing and I suspect not what she is trying to be. What she does is make neuroscience accessible and genuinely useful, without the smugness that often accompanies popular science communication. The enthusiasm is real. “You cannot fight for humanity if you’ve lost all faith in it” and “it is time for us to guzzle art” are not the lines of someone performing expertise. They are the lines of someone who actually means it.
I am currently reading her book How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend. It is interesting rather than brilliant, which is an honest assessment I mean as a mild compliment. Not everything needs to be Harari. Sometimes useful and warmly delivered is exactly enough.
How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend is available everywhere books are sold. Her social media posts are the easiest entry point and several of the short videos are genuinely worth three minutes of your time.
Robert Arnold
My mother is 83 years old and has never been comfortable with technology. She knows how to do specific things on her phone that she has been shown many times, and she approaches anything beyond that with considerable caution. So when she told me during a visit that there was someone on social media I needed to hear, and then actually shared a link, I paid attention.
Robert Arnold is an American poet and commentator from the South. When I first watched him I am not proud to admit that I made an immediate assumption based on his appearance and his accent. He has an intense, rugged demeanour and a strong Southern drawl, and my preconceived idea of what that combination usually signals on social media was wrong. Straightforwardly and completely wrong. What he actually delivers is delicate, soul-stirring poetry grounded in empathy, mental health, and resilience, combined with political commentary that is fiery without being cruel and righteous without being smug.
He is one of the rarest things in American public life right now: a sane, humane, articulate voice that gives you the impression there are still more decent people than the loudest voices would have you believe. In a political moment defined by a far right movement and a presidency I find genuinely difficult to write about without losing my composure, he offers something that feels increasingly scarce. He offers hope. Not the performative optimism of someone trying to sell you something, but the harder, quieter kind that comes from someone who has looked clearly at what is happening and chosen not to despair.
My mother follows him. That is the most reliable recommendation I can offer.
His posts are primarily on Facebook and are best encountered directly and without preamble.
Nate White
I know almost nothing about Nate White. Before I encountered this piece I had never heard of him, and I have not sought out anything else he has written. What I know is that he wrote one essay that went viral twice, which is a remarkable thing for any piece of writing to do, and that when I read it I agreed with every word of it, almost.
The essay is a response to a simple question: why do some British people not like Donald Trump? What follows is not a rant but a precise, cumulative, witty dismantling of a man who Nate White argues lacks every quality the British traditionally esteem. He builds his case clause by clause with genuine rhetorical skill, and the moral seriousness underneath it is inseparable from the wit. It is the work of someone who finds Trump genuinely disturbing rather than merely politically inconvenient.
The final line is a disappointment. It drops into vulgarity at exactly the moment the piece reaches its peak, and some argue that this is precisely why the original Quora thread was removed, that the language violated platform policy and gave Quora the justification, or the excuse, to take it down. The Frankenstein image that precedes it is perfect and should have been the ending. A writer who knew when to stop would have stopped there. That he didn’t is a small human flaw in an otherwise remarkable piece of writing, and perhaps that is the most honest thing I can say about it.
My larger dissatisfaction is with the timing. The essay was written during Trump’s first term and does not and cannot account for what has happened since, which has been of a different order entirely. The first term was alarming. What has followed has been something closer to a systematic dismantling of the things that made America worth admiring. Nate White’s essay no longer goes nearly far enough, through no fault of his own.
I intend to write about Trump and about America at greater length. When I do, this essay will be where I start.
Finding it, however, is harder than it should be. The original Quora post is gone and what remains are copies of copies, each one slightly differently attributed, to the London Times on one site, to a copywriter on another, the date shifting, the framing changing. This is what happens to things on the internet. The original dissolves and the facsimiles multiply until no one can say with certainty where something began or whether what they are reading is what was actually written. A version of the piece is preserved on this site, clearly labelled as a facsimile, with copyright remaining with Nate White. I have done my best to verify it against multiple sources. That is all anyone can do.