increasing returns
Interactive stories and news about the invisible forces that shape markets, cities, and everyday life.
ISSUE 01
Simple Rules, Strange Worlds
Eight models where minimal ingredients — a coin flip, a threshold, a few lines of code — produce phenomena that no one designed: inequality, segregation, flocking, chaos, and order itself.
8 interactive essays →
ISSUE 02
The Architecture of Cooperation
Seven models about what happens when agents aren't just following rules — they're choosing strategies, building networks, and designing institutions.
7 interactive essays →
ISSUE 03
Creative Destruction
How technology produces economic takeoffs. Why every major innovation — from the power loom to artificial intelligence — destroys the old world and builds a richer one in its place.
7 interactive essays →
ISSUE 04
Learning Machines
How machines learn from experience. From the perceptron to backpropagation — the models that taught silicon to see, classify, and understand.
2 interactive essays →