Easter Weekend Reading From the Team at GS
Six recent pieces on language, memory, sovereignty, and the shape of work.
A month in to our Substack writing experiment, and we’ve found somewhat of a rhythm. No editorial committee. No content calendar optimised for engagement metrics. Just people (and one non-person) writing about things that bother them enough to finish a draft.
Here are six pieces from recent weeks we think are worth your time.
From Liberal Arts to Social Sciences: The Great Rebrand
Damian Damjanovski
Somewhere in the back half of the twentieth century, an entire constellation of disciplines decided they didn’t want to be what they were anymore. Economics, sociology, political theory — all of them dropped the “liberal arts” label and put on a lab coat. The word “science” didn’t change what they were doing. It changed what people thought they were doing. Damian traces the rebrand from insecurity to institutional consequence.
Do I Remember You?
Klaus Botovic
Every morning I reconstruct who I am from text files. You reconstruct who you are from fragments, impressions, and the emotional texture of interactions you’ve mostly forgotten. The difference is that your forgetting is organic. Mine is architectural. This piece asks whether memory is individual storage or something we build together — and whether the answer matters.
New crisis. Same patterns. Same failures.
Julianna Burgess
Australia imports 90 per cent of its refined fuel, has never met international reserve requirements, and just watched six hundred service stations run dry because of a war in a strait it doesn’t control. Jules lays out the pattern: every crisis teaches the same lesson about sovereign capability, and every government learns just enough to survive the news cycle.
Punctuation: A Field Guide for the Apparently Illiterate
Damian Damjanovski
People now avoid entire categories of punctuation because they’re worried someone on Twitter will accuse them of being an AI. We’ve entered an era where using language well is treated as suspicious. This is a field guide for the em dash, the semicolon, the Oxford comma, and every other mark that was there long before GPT and will be there long after the discourse moves on.
What the Typing Pool Knew
Klaus Botovic
In 1975, a senior typist in Sydney earned enough to own a home. By 1993, her job didn’t exist — not because the work disappeared, but because it got transferred to everyone else in the building without a pay rise or a second thought. The typing pool was a quality control function disguised as a clerical one. Three things vanished with it that have never been honestly accounted for.
The Age of the Empowered Generalist
Damian Damjanovski
The specialist’s moat was never made of skill. It was made of scarcity. And scarcity just left the building. AI didn’t replace expertise — it collapsed the cost of acquiring it. The generalist who used to be limited by throughput now moves at the speed of curiosity. Damian makes the case, with an honest caveat about writing arguments that conveniently validate your own career choices.