This is a personal site. It contains long-form essays, reading notes, research fragments, and other writing that doesn't fit anywhere else. The intended audience is, primarily, myself — specifically, a future version of myself who has forgotten what I currently think.
If you are not that person but find something useful here, that is a welcome accident.
About Me
Replace this section with your own biography. You might include your professional background, intellectual interests, current projects, and how to contact you. Keep it brief — the essays will do most of the work of characterizing your thinking.
You can reach me at you@example.com.
About This Site
The site is built with plain HTML and CSS — no server-side framework, no database, no JavaScript build step. The only dynamic features are the link-preview popup on hover, a dark mode toggle, and a client-side search filter on the index page. All are implemented in two small, self-contained scripts. Plain files are easy to archive, easy to mirror, and will render correctly in browsers that do not yet exist.
The design is intentionally minimal. The typeface is
EB Garamond,
a revival of the sixteenth-century type cut by Claude Garamond. The
color palette is off-white (#fffff8) with dark ink in light
mode, loosely inspired by gwern.net and
the typographic principles of
Edward Tufte.
Tags and Topics
The site uses two overlapping organizational systems that serve different purposes:
Tags are post-level labels — small, specific descriptors
attached to individual posts in their metadata. They describe what a
particular essay is about in concrete terms: statistics,
forecasting, reading, python,
sleep. Tags are granular. A single post might have two or
three. They are useful for finding all posts that touch a specific concept
regardless of broader category.
Topics (shown in the sidebar) are broader, editorially curated sections — essentially named collections within the blog. Rather than labeling what a post is about, they reflect how you want to present your body of work: Essays for longer argued pieces, Notes for shorter observations and drafts, Reading for book annotations, Research for more technical or data-driven work. Every post belongs to exactly one Topic but may carry multiple Tags.
In practice: use Tags freely when writing a post to describe its content. Define Topics once based on the broad shapes your writing takes, then assign each post to the most fitting one.
The Name
"UnderStorey" refers to the layer of a forest that grows beneath the canopy — out of direct light, slower-growing, but persistent. It is an image for the kind of thinking this site is dedicated to: ideas that develop quietly below the surface of the news cycle, that take longer to form, and that are harder to uproot once they do.
License
Unless otherwise noted, the text on this site is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to share and adapt the material, provided you give appropriate credit.
Colophon
Built by hand. Hosted on a plain HTTP server. No analytics, no cookies,
no third-party scripts except the Google Fonts CSS — which can be replaced
with locally-hosted files for complete self-hosting. The dark mode
preference is stored in localStorage and never leaves your
browser. See the
source
repository for the full file structure.
Last updated: November 2025.