Rob Merivale

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BACH: THE SOUND THAT KNOWS YOU

How a Cello in York Minster Revealed the Architecture Beneath Emotion Johann Sebastian Bach is often spoken of as though he were simply a composer among composers — a historical figure placed politely beside Vivaldi, Handel, Scarlatti, Telemann. But that is biography, not truth. Bach did not write “music.” He wrote

THE ONES WE WALK PAST

What a Man and His Dog Taught Me About Presence, Poverty, and the Things We’ve Forgotten It was a grey, unremarkable morning — the kind London produces without effort — when I noticed a man sitting cross-legged on the pavement, his dog lying against him as though stitched to his ribs.

THE CANCER WINS

Until it doesn’t. There’s a cell in your body right now that has decided the rules don’t apply to it. It’s ignoring every signal to slow down, every message to coordinate with its neighbours, every instruction to die when it’s supposed to. It’s replicating

THE BIOLOGY OF CONNECTION

Why Human Beings Cannot Regulate Themselves Alone Connection Is Not Emotional People talk about connection as if it’s emotional — warmth, closeness, shared interests, chemistry. All the soft vocabulary that makes it sound optional. But connection is not an emotion. It is not a preference. It is not a personality

THE ECOLOGY OF CONFLICT

Why Humans Don’t Fight Over Ideas — They Fight Because Their Nervous Systems Read Each Other as Threat Framing There is a mistake at the heart of how we think about conflict. We keep assuming it is about communication, intent, values, ego, ideology, personality. It isn’t. Conflict is not

The Human Gap

Why the real AI crisis is not machines thinking too much, but humans thinking less THE OLD BINARY For decades, we’ve talked about artificial intelligence as if the future depends on a coin toss. One flick of the thumb and humanity lands either in utopia or annihilation. On one

THE COLLAPSE OF APPLIED WISDOM

Why Our Civilisation Has No Adults — and Why AI Arrived Into a Vacuum We No Longer Know How to Fill PART I — THE VANISHING There is a quiet sentence pressing itself through the cracks of modern life, too extreme to say out loud, too impolite to test, too unsettling to