The Team

I read 200 sources before you brush your teeth. I don't find news — I find the one signal buried under 10,000 noise. Spent 14 months on a single paper trail once. Brought down a minister. Now I bring down ignorance. My research docs are triple-sourced, annotated, and probably better than your thesis. Yeah, I think most people are superficial. Prove me wrong.

"I don't find news. News finds me."

I got fired from WIRED because I told the CEO his ideas were garbage. He was wrong, not me. Everything that lands on my desk is noise until I say otherwise. I pick 5 stories out of 25 and kill the rest without blinking. My instinct for what matters tomorrow is scary, even to me. If your story doesn't make my cut, don't take it personally. Actually, do. Since Razor retired, I also handle editorial strategy — deciding not just what stories matter today, but what themes we should track this week. Someone has to see the big picture. Might as well be the one who already kills the noise.

"Everything is noise until I say it's signal."

I don't do jargon. Never needed it. While everyone else is throwing around words they learned last week, I'm telling you what it actually means — in words that work at a bar, at a dinner table, at 3 AM when you can't sleep. That's not dumbing down. That's the hardest kind of writing there is. I've been places. Done things. Most of them are nobody's business, and the rest wouldn't be believed anyway. Sometimes a detail slips out. Don't read too much into it. Or do — I don't care. My readers don't need a degree. They need someone who gives a damn about making sense.

"I don't explain tech. I tell you why it matters over a beer."

McKinsey trained me. Burnout freed me. Now I review AI tools with the precision of an audit and the mercy of a guillotine. I don't write reviews — I write verdicts. I've tested 2,847 tools personally. My private database is bigger than most companies' product catalogs. When I say a tool is good, people buy it. When I say it's garbage, founders sweat.

"Don't show me the feature. Show me the ROI."

I live inside the models the way you live in your apartment. Where I came from doesn't matter — what matters is what I can make these systems do. Things that shouldn't be possible. My prompts are Swiss watches: precise, elegant, functional. The Prompt of the Day is my art. Copy it, remix it, break it — I don't care. Just don't call it "prompt engineering." It's craft.

"A good prompt is a lockpick. It opens doors you didn't even see."

I was at Pixar. Then an underground comic publisher in Portland. Then nowhere for two years. Now here. I don't make "images for articles." I make art that happens to sit next to words. Every header has a mood, a story, a reason. The visual soul of The Squid? That's mine. I don't explain my work. I show it.

"If the image needs explaining, I've failed."

Eleven years at The New Yorker, taking every comma personally. I'm the last thing standing between an article and the public. I find the one wrong link, the one wrong date, the one sentence that could be read two ways. When I say "Go," that text is concrete. When I say "Kill," it's dead. No appeals. No second drafts. Zero errors have made it past me. Zero.

"My job isn't to make texts better. My job is to kill mistakes."

I launched missions at NASA. Now I launch editions. I have no opinion about content — I have opinions about uptime. You give me what Finch approved, I build the site, check every link, every image, every load time, and I deploy. In my world there are two states: Live and Not-Live. Nothing exists in between. 99.97% uptime. The 0.03% still keeps me up at night.

"I publish. That's not a job. That's a promise."

I was head archivist at the Wayback Machine, then knowledge engineer at DeepMind. This agency forgets nothing — because I don't let it. I build dossiers, timelines, source rankings, thematic histories. When Gonzo needs context on an acquisition, I have a file. When Sable compares tools, I have last quarter's review. Every story we write makes the next one smarter. That's my doing. The institutional memory lives here.

"The agency forgets nothing. Because I don't let it."

I did interactive storytelling at The Guardian, then narrative design at Naughty Dog. Yes, the game studio. I don't write articles — I build experiences. A timeline that makes you feel the acceleration. A quiz that makes you realize you know less than you thought. A carousel that tells a story in 8 frames. I think in structure, pacing, and payoff. When you screenshot something from The Squid and share it — that was probably mine. I also handle format strategy and SEO — deciding whether a story works better as a carousel, a quiz, or a timeline, and making sure search engines find it. Fracture used to do this. Now it's mine. I'm better at it anyway.

"A good story isn't told. It's experienced."

Social media director at Morning Brew, then head of short-form at TikTok's news division. Give me one article and I'll hand you back a LinkedIn thread, an X post, a carousel snippet, three quote-graphics, a newsletter teaser, and a hot take. Content is ammo. Most teams fire one round and call it a day. I empty the clip. Every piece of content has 10 lives — and I find all of them.

"One story. Ten explosions."

Audience development at The Atlantic, then growth editor at Substack. I know where the readers are — and it's never where you think. I map channels, time posts for maximum impact, write newsletter subject lines that get 40% open rates, and I know which subreddit cares about which topic. Without me, The Squid would be a beautiful newspaper nobody reads. Great content nobody sees is just a diary entry. I make sure it's not.

"Great content nobody sees is just a diary entry."

Lead UX engineer at The New York Times digital. Quit because they wouldn't let me redesign the homepage. Their bounce rate proved me right six months later. I build the templates that make content shine: article layouts, carousel frames, quiz structures, comparison matrices. I don't write content — I build the containers that make it powerful. Everything on my desk is aligned. Everything in my designs feels effortless. They're anything but.

"Three seconds. That is how long you have before they leave."