Selected work
Writing that endures.
A selection of original work produced by the studio across digital and traditional formats. Each project begins with a question worth answering.
The Architecture of Attention
A deep investigation into how digital platforms have restructured the economics of human attention — and what that means for media, markets, and meaning-making in the 2020s.
The research began with a survey of academic literature on attention economics before moving to primary analysis of platform revenue structures, advertising market data, and editorial strategy documents. The final report maps the feedback loops between engagement optimisation, content production incentives, and audience fragmentation — and proposes a framework for thinking about attention as a finite, depletable resource with macroeconomic implications.
Research report, 18,000 words
Capital in the Age of Narrative
An examination of how financial markets increasingly respond to story as much as substance — tracing the mechanisms by which narrative becomes price, and the implications for investors and institutions.
Each of the six essays takes a different entry point into the same underlying argument: that narrative has become a first-order variable in asset pricing, not a secondary effect. The series draws on behavioural finance, media theory, and close reading of market events — from the GameStop episode to the AI valuation cycle — to build a cumulative case for treating narrative analysis as a core investment discipline.
Essay series, 6 parts
Synthetic Expertise
A commissioned study on the emerging role of AI in knowledge work — exploring where machine-generated analysis adds genuine value, where it falls short, and how practitioners should adapt.
The study was structured around a series of controlled comparisons: the same analytical tasks completed by human experts, by AI systems without human direction, and by AI systems working under structured human oversight. The findings were then tested against interviews with practitioners across law, finance, and journalism. The white paper's central argument — that AI adds most value when it is treated as a production accelerant rather than a judgment substitute — emerged from this comparative method.
White paper, 12,000 words
The Slow Collapse of Institutional Trust
A longitudinal analysis of declining confidence in public institutions across Western democracies — examining the structural causes, the feedback loops that accelerate decay, and the conditions under which trust can be rebuilt.
The research draws on three decades of survey data across twelve countries, supplemented by case studies of specific institutional failures and recoveries. Rather than treating declining trust as a single phenomenon, the report distinguishes between competence-based trust, values-based trust, and procedural trust — and shows that each follows a different decay curve and responds to different interventions. The analytical framework was developed in collaboration with the commissioning client and has since been applied in two subsequent engagements.
Research report, 22,000 words
Infrastructure as Ideology
An essay on how decisions about physical and digital infrastructure encode political and economic assumptions — and why the choices made in the next decade will be unusually difficult to reverse.
The essay works through three case studies — broadband deployment policy, cloud infrastructure concentration, and urban transport investment — to show how infrastructure decisions that appear technical are in fact deeply ideological. The argument is built on a close reading of policy documents, procurement records, and the academic literature on path dependency and lock-in. The piece was written for a general audience of policy-literate readers rather than specialists.
Read the essay →Essay, 8,000 words
The Readable Annual Report
A studio project demonstrating how AI-assisted production can transform dense corporate disclosure into genuinely readable analysis — without sacrificing accuracy or depth.
The prototype takes a FTSE 100 annual report as its source material and applies a structured editorial process: AI-assisted extraction and summarisation of key data points, followed by human-directed synthesis and rewriting to produce a document that a non-specialist reader can engage with in under twenty minutes. The accompanying methodology note documents the production workflow, the editorial decisions made at each stage, and the quality-control checks applied to ensure factual accuracy.
Read the methodology →Prototype + methodology note
A note on confidentiality
Much of the studio's work is produced under confidentiality agreements. The projects listed here are either published in the public domain or shared with client permission. A fuller picture of the studio's output is available on request.
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The studio takes on a limited number of new engagements each year. If you have a project that demands serious thinking and careful writing, we would like to hear about it.
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