IT’S BEEN A WEEK
That’s for damn sure

I don’t even know what to say.
It’s been about a week and a half since we last spoke here on The Common Band, and all I can think of is that Bee Movie meme from nearly a decade ago…

Except in our current reality, every time the Trump regime does something stupid and evil, the timeline itself gets faster.

This is Bannon’s “Firehose of Shit” tactic running at — what I hope is — full clip.

I don’t even know what to say here today. I’ve been putting off this weekly update in favor of focusing on the more serious work Edgnts has been charged with. So maybe we should just talk about that today?

Unless this is your first contact with Edge Notes, you know what our main focus is right now, and for the foreseeable future. Namely, the series that started out as historical analysis of the fundamental conditions underlying the Iran war. Now fully expanded to cover the immediate, but nonetheless broader, context of Israel’s regional ambitions, and scoped into a 24-part series that I think, mostly, covers what one needs to know to properly understand what is going on today.

Check out the current hit list below, where green indicates published, yellow indicates next up, dark orange the following week, and lighter orange the week following that; with the un-highlighted not yet sorted to any particular week of publication.

If I can stop adding to the list, we have 6 published already, and another 18 remaining. At 3x published per week — which is getting harder to accomplish as I get farther afield from my core knowledge base — we would have 6 weeks left of publishing until the series is wrapped.

So what? Why am I telling you this?
I guess in the hope that you have something to say about all of this, any of this. Your questions and feedback are my muse. And when I have my head stuck in production, I don’t get the time to read and listen to others as much as is necessary to really spark that organic fire of inspiration.

So I’m calling on you. The members of this cool little community we are building here in our corner of the internet, to take a look at the hit list, think about what has been published already, and tell me what questions you have. Or what questions you hear from others out in the real world that I haven’t visited since March 11th.

That sort of feedback is so vital for me at this stage. So I’d love if this post received a comment for every view. ’s comments today produced — not just a great conversation (love talking to you, Baz) — but also a really organic way to approach a topic that’s been on my list of things to cover since the founding of Edgnts: The Impact of AI on American Politics. And a great prompt on why Israel targets medical infrastructure — in this case, specifically pharma manufacturing infrastructure in Iran:

Thanks, brother, now I have to add another essay to the hit-list.

But seriously, THIS is the ‘why’ behind the whole grueling task.
Engaging discourse and helping people make better mental maps of the world we all share are what this project is for. What underlies any of the superficial topical choices.

So hit the comments here and let me know what’s on your mind.

As for what’s on my mind.
There is so much that has to get cut from every essay. And the decision usually isn’t so straightforward.

Do I include a couple of paragraphs about how White Phosphorus particles embedded into the flesh of its victims, has to be removed tiny piece by tiny piece, in the dark, using surgical instruments aided by either a UV lamp which often isn’t available in austere environments; or more commonly copper sulfate which is fucking toxic when it enters the bloodstream, which obviously, it is bound to when being dumped into open wounds; or silver nitrate, which is safer than the copper variety, and I imagine, correspondingly more expensive and harder to source; or sodium bicarb, which to my knowledge, doesn’t really help with visibility at all, but is essential to neutralizing the phosphoric acid that is literally created in the wound by the interaction between WP and flesh…

And that's just one example of dozens, from just one of these monsters.

After publishing is when I really start to kick myself —
Did I even mention PFAS?!

PFAS is a nasty mother and — outside of using explosives like ole’ John Wayne in the ‘68 classic, Hellfighters — it is about the most effective tool in the Well Fighters tool kit. It also just so happens to be super toxic to… basically all life on earth.

PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a group of over 10,000 synthetic chemicals often called "forever chemicals" because they do not break down naturally and persist in the environment and human body. They have been used since the 1940s in a vast range of consumer and industrial products due to their ability to resist heat, water, grease, and stains.

And before I let myself descend into a full blown rant essay on this topic, I’ll stop after sharing some basic facts about what exposure to these nasty but ‘essential’ chemicals does to humans like me and you:

• Cancer: Increased risk of kidney and testicular cancers.

• Reproductive & Developmental: Pregnancy-induced hypertension (preeclampsia), decreased fertility, and developmental delays or low birth weight in children.

• Metabolic: Elevated cholesterol levels and increased risk of obesity.

• Immune System: Reduced response to vaccines and general immune suppression.

• Organ Damage: Links to liver disease and thyroid disruption.

Of course the human health effects of these chemicals, while just coming to light publically in recent years, was very well known to be disastrous to human and environmental health for DECADES.

The manufacturers — 3M, Dow, et al — all knew. How do we know they knew?
You mean, other than the reems of suppressed internal documentation, and the many whistleblowers that survived getting ‘Boeinged’ to bring this information to light?

Well aside from that, none of the producers let any women around the stuff since like the sixties. Malformed babies with chronic health issues, I guess, is more of a dead give away than men dying young.

No wonder the life expectancy of firefighters still sits at a full decade less than the average of the general population.

But back to the point.
Did I even touch on this in either of the relevant essays?
I honestly don’t know.

(I checked. I definitely didn’t. Not in either of them. Not once.)

Point being, if there is a point here, is that there is A LOT of ground to cover. A lot of selection and compression takes place. And your feedback before I write is essential to the process.

Other information left on the cutting room floor during the writing of the Environment and Human Health sub-series — The worst of the weapons are always American:

Other concepts kicking around in my head:

• The Gulf Cooperation Council states hiring the Taliban for airport security — I shit you not — while all of the tens of thousands of Afghan commandos and interpreters that served the US in that ungodly war, abandoned behind enemy lines when the US finally threw in the towel, are condemned to living in refugee camps. Seriously.

• Exploring the shifting of the Overton Window since Trump 1.

• Exploring a stack of concepts, including the Banality of Evil and other relevant frameworks for understanding a society that has obviously lost the plot.

• Exploring Information Hygiene and how to make sense of anything from within the Western media landscape.

• The inherent value of exploration.

• How terrible an idea it is to expand the definition of ‘terrorism’ to apply to everything you don’t like.

• The value of political violence and the aestheticization of liberalism.

• Digital Panopticons.

• Habitus — another Baz-inspired feature.

• How cultural mistranslations lead to confusion and friction.

• How to be a good content consumer.

• Eta: Bullshit Asymmetry Principle A.K.A. Brandolini's Law

• Eta: Exec. Summaries for working journalists / Slides to educate opposition.

• Eta: On hostages.

• And more…

All of this to say, again, that your feedback is critical in the focusing of my efforts.

But let’s move on, as I’m sure this is getting long and I’m already bumping the hour I gave myself to write this.

Since we last spoke over the Common Band on the 27th of March, there have been seven pieces published (not including some throwaways). I know you probably don’t have time to read them all, but here they all are in case you missed any:

JEREMIADS
Recent Missives:

OTHER ESSAYS
Everything Else You May Have Missed:

EDGNT Conflict Coverage of Pax Israelica and America's War Against Iran

EDGNTS Coverage of America

EDGNTS American Christian Nationalism

EDGNTS Essays

EDGNTS Common Band

EDGNTS Facebook Page if you're the kind of masochist that's still kicking around this digital hellscape

So yeah,

It’s been a week.

This project is for you.
I have no interest in screaming into the void.
I’d rather live in a tree than spend another second of my life doing that.
So, for those of you who have really engaged the work, and me, thank you.
For those that haven’t yet, please do, no one here bites (much), and the only stupid question is the one left unasked.
You’re important here.

I’d encourage everyone — after commenting below on the US/Israel/Iran subject matter — to join the group chat:

I’ll leave you with two lil tunes that help to get me through:

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OKAY. LOVE YOU. BYE.

~ S. L’Errance

Veritas ante tempus

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Welcome to Edge Notes — or welcome further in, if you’ve been here a minute.

By now I’ve published enough that I suspect many of you haven’t had the chance to orient yourselves properly, to read everything as it came, or to circle back and dig around. That’s not a complaint. Publishing at this cadence was always going to create that problem, and I built it intentionally. But it means this post has a real job to do.

Think of it as a field guide, a map book, to the first two weeks.

The opening fusillade of essays was admittedly, a little violent — not just thematically, but in its spitfire cadence. From cold launch through Mountain, Island, Kingdom, Cage, I was writing, publishing, and starting the next piece. Every day. I basically didn’t sleep until I finally crashed. I’m still half-nodding off trying to get this out. Which would be a lot funnier to me if it didn’t mean this was taking so damn long to write.

That cadence isn’t changing. Just because the work is intended to be slow and thoughtful doesn’t mean the issues its built to address will slow down, so neither will I. I have stacks of notes I’ve been drawing from for most of the existing works, and burning through them in public is part of what Edge Notes is for. But I recognize the pace can be disorienting, especially at the start. So here is the map.

What this is

Edge Notes exists partly as a public home for many of the ideas I’ve been developing across two larger books I’ve been writing over the past year — a place to explore the subject matter and work through arguments in public, in dialogue with you, the reader. Some essays here are completely self-contained, others sit in conversation with one another or the larger works still in progress. All of them belong to the same effort: making the world a little more legible, and finding out whether serious, independent work can still travel on its own merits.

So far, it has.

What began as a genuine cold launch — no built-in audience, no friends-and-family bump, no social media engine, and working anonymously with no public credentials to crib credibility from — our cadre is now at 88 subscribers and 165 followers! I know it’s no substack record. But it is a good indicator that the signal is clean and strong enough to find you there on the other end. And for a project that takes a comically unreasonable amount of labor to execute properly, that has been genuinely sustaining.

Every subscription, like, comment, and share has contributed more to this project than you probably realize — not just because it grows the publication, but because it helps the work travel. And in this endless information war, range is absolutely everything. Thank you, sincerely, for reading, for sharing, and for helping this thing begin to find its people.

I’ve enjoyed getting to know a couple of you through comments and messages, and I’m looking forward to getting to know as many of you as possible. These discussions have not just been delightful and interesting, but they’ve already helped to sharpen the focus of this work.

The directory

You don’t need to read everything in order. Each piece stands on its own. What follows is a map of how they relate.

Where to begin

Welcome to Edge Notes

The original introduction

This is the publication’s front door: the broad charter, the original terrain, and the editorial premise. It is the clearest statement of what Edge Notes is intended to be; not just about politics or current events, but about systems, power, history, technology, and the hidden logic connecting things modern public life prefers to treat as separate.

If the recent run of war coverage makes the publication feel narrowly focused, this is the piece that restores the full frame.

Hold Music

Common Band #001

This is the first Common Band post. Less an argument than a station identification. It gives the publication a more perceptible human pulse inside of a weekly stream of often intense essays. It matters because a project like this can easily start to feel disembodied. The Common Band format is designed to bring the human back into reach and to give both of us some breathing room — plus, it’s the writing style that comes most naturally to me. Hold Music is the first piece in this tradition, and one of my favorite works thus far.

Just a personal note from me to you.

From Pattern to Persecution

This is one of the foundational clusters in the archive. These three pieces belong together and are best read in sequence.

The Machinery of Hatred → The Manufacture of Hatred → Machine Men
That sequence moves from cognitive mechanism, to historical construction, to moral response.

The Machinery of Hatred

From Pattern Recognition to Persecution

This essay asks how ordinary pattern recognition becomes persecution. Its argument is that hatred does not begin as some exotic moral defect, but emerges when familiar human habits of sorting, inference, and prediction are socialized, moralized, and organized into structures of suspicion and exclusion.

It matters because it moves the conversation from denunciation to mechanism. It asks how human beings become available to systems of hatred in the first place.

The Manufacture of Hatred

A Material History of Antisemitism

This essay rejects the comforting idea that antisemitism is some eternal irrational fog that descends on Europe every few generations for no reason anyone can explain. Instead, it argues that antisemitism has material, institutional, theological, and political causes that can be traced, named, and analyzed.

The essay moves through Christianity’s foundational treatment of Jews, the social and political frictions generated by communal separation, the economic architecture of resentment in medieval and early modern Europe, the way Zionism literalized and reactivated older tropes, and the psychological loop that helps keep the structure intact.

On its own, this is a long-form historical argument.
Within the archive, it does something even larger: it establishes one of Edge Notes’ central commitments, which is to refuse mystical explanations for political phenomena when structural explanations are available.

Machine Men

And Finding the Love of Humanity

The shortest piece in the sequence, and not the least important. A brief moral hinge beneath a darker body of work: what it means to become a functionary of systems that grind people down, and what it means to refuse that fate. Where the other two diagnose the machinery, this one insists on the human counterposition.

War, Empire, and Moral Inversion

This is the archive’s largest early cluster, and the one most shaped by the live conflicts during launch.

Best read together:
Wait, We’re Bombing the Wrong People? → The Iran War Ledger → Two Fatwas → Spend It Wisely, Right?! → Cost of War II

That path moves from confusion, to record, to inversion, to cost, to consequence.

Wait, We’re Bombing the Wrong People?

Yes, and We Always Have Been

One of the clearest entry points into the war writing. It takes a profoundly confusing public narrative and makes it legible: the United States has spent decades attacking some of the most moderate and politically flexible actors in the region while empowering far more radical ones, while telling itself the opposite story. Sharp, compressed, and accessible by design. One of the best front doors in the archive.

Within the larger project, this piece is not just an entry but also a bridge connecting to The Iran War Ledger, Two Fatwas, and the Cost of War pair.

The Iran War Ledger: Pt. 1

Comprehensive History of American and Iranian Conflict

Not the most literary piece in the current corpus — one of the most infrastructural. A side-by-side record of the US-Iran relationship year by year, classifying actions by actor rather than by euphemism, testing the terrorism designation against the actual record. Built to serve as a reference architecture for future argument, not just a persuasion piece.

The larger claim is that public understanding of the U.S.–Iran relationship has been built on inversion, selective memory, and state-sanctioned narrative laundering.

On its own, this is a ledger. Within the project, it is one of the clearest examples of Edge Notes operating as a publication that builds tools, not just essays.

Two Fatwas

Iran’s Ignored History of Sacrificial Restraint

The narrowest and, in some ways, most devastating essay in the war cluster. It takes on one specific distortion inside the broader Iran discourse: the systematic erasure of Iranian restraint when that restraint complicates the public story being told. The essay's argument is not that Iran is pure or beyond critique. It is that American discourse punishes restraint, obscures moderation, and helps produce the very escalations it later claims merely to describe.

This is one of the archive’s clearest examples of Edge Notes thinking in terms of warning failure, narrative inversion, and the politics of recognition.

It is tightly linked to The Iran War Ledger, Wait, We’re Bombing the Wrong People?, and later to Mountain, Island, Kingdom, Cage through the problem of what societies choose not to see.

Cost of War I: Spend It Wisely, Right?!

What $20 trillion buys when you spend it on war. What it builds when you don’t.

This is the first half of the Cost of War diptych.

Its method is accounting. The essay takes the colossal sum burned through American war-making and asks, line by line, what that money could have done if directed toward the actual life of the country: the grid, trains, debt, schools, research, and everything else the American state claims it somehow cannot afford.

It is less about abstract antiwar morality than about material opportunity cost. It translates bloodless budgetary scale into infrastructural and civic scale.

Within the larger project, it does something very Edge Notes: it refuses to leave “war” as a foreign-policy category and drags it home into domestic infrastructure, social policy, and everyday life.

Cost of War II: Look What You Could Have Had

What $20 trillion builds when you spend it on America, instead of American wars.

This is the thicker piece. The emotional and political companion to the first cost of war.

Where Spend It Wisely, Right?! lays out the line items, this one fleshes them into a more tangible alternate America: the grid that does not kill people, the trains that exist, the schools that function, the debt relief that changes lives, the research that becomes possible, the sovereign wealth fund that reorients the future.

The first piece does the arithmetic.
This one turns arithmetic into a national identity.

Together, the pair are among the clearest statements in the archive that Edge Notes is not merely interested in critique. It is interested in the structure of missed possibility: what was built, what was not, and what choices were hidden inside that gap.

Dispatches from the Systems

These are the pieces where the publication works closer to breaking events without abandoning its systems method.

Last Light in Havana

Cuba’s grid is being starved into collapse. What happens next depends on physics, engineering, and decisions being made in Washington.

This is one of the archive’s clearest demonstrations that Edge Notes is not only a war publication and not only a U.S. domestic publication.

It takes a grid crisis in Cuba and reads it through physics, engineering, sanctions, policy, and political decision-making. It is a systems dispatch in the most literal sense: an event explained — in real time — through infrastructure, policy, and material constraint rather than through vague humanitarian language alone.

It belongs with the antiwar and anti-sanctions writing, but it also points back to the original charter in Welcome to Edge Notes: grids, infrastructure, political economy, and the hidden systems modern media usually treats as background.

The Terrifying Truth About Markwayne Mullin

The Kurds have no friends but the mountains, Americans have no mountains

Like the Cuba Dispatch this is a rawer piece than most of the other. It reads like an intelligence briefing because that is, more or less, what it is.

It takes Markwayne Mullin not just as a man, but as a node: a case study in political theology, American dominionist networks, Kurdish abandonment, Syria policy, and the fusion of evangelical conquest logic with imperial adventurism.

On its own, it is a dispatch on a specific actor and his significance.
In the corpus, it is also one of the key bridges between the war writing and the Christian nationalism writing. It shows that those are not separate topics. They are adjacent theaters of the same broader political-religious formation.

This piece matters especially because it lays groundwork that becomes much more explicit in Mountain, Island, Kingdom, Cage.

And because it posits a theory that I believe will be borne out as truth one day.

Warning, Purification, and the American Future

This is the archive’s heaviest and, in some ways, most consequential cluster so far.

Read in order:
[Markwayne Mullin] → Mountain, Island, Kingdom, Cage → The Prophet Penalty

Mountain, Island, Kingdom, Cage

Christian Nationalism, the Enemy Within, and the Architecture of American Purification

One of the project’s most central essays to date. The argument is stark: the infrastructure for mass political detention inside the United States has already been built, the theology of the actors consolidating power around it commands its use, and the question is no longer whether these tendencies exist but whether they will be recognized before they are operationalized. This is where many of the earlier threads converge — the hatred machinery, the moral surrender of machine men, the politics of inversion, the role of theology in state structure.

This is one of the publication’s deepest statements of what it means by structural analysis.

The Prophet Penalty

Malthus, Cassandra, and the Paradox of Averted Catastrophe

The direct conceptual companion to Mountain, Island, Kingdom, Cage. It builds a taxonomy of warning failure — not just the familiar case where someone warns and no one listens, but the harder forms: where successful adaptation is later misread as proof the warning was false, where the intervention meant to solve the danger becomes the disaster itself. On its own, a conceptual essay about foresight and civilizational illiteracy. In relation to everything else, an explanation for why societies are so bad at recognizing what they are being shown.

So where should you begin?

There is no single correct route through any of this. You do not need to read everything in order. I do my best to ensure each piece stands on its own, even if it is written in dialogue with other pieces. The point of a map is not to dictate one path, but to allow you to survey the territory from a perspective that aids in your navigation through the space.

Click around based on what interests you, and let me know what you end up liking the most.

As for my personal recommendations: The Manufacture of Hatred; Two Fatwas; Mountain, Island, Kingdom, Cage; and Hold Music, in no particular order. Those four illustrate the best of Edge Notes thus far — or maybe they’re just my favorites.

Fin-ish

At the end of the day, Edge Notes is just a project for annoyingly curious people, who want the world to live up to its potential — and know that for that to happen, we need to understand the mechanics of what’s actually taking place.

Thanks for joining in on this journey.

That’s it for this first installment of The Signal, a weekly update blog here on Edge Notes where I will walk us through everything published in the prior week.

I’d love if you would leave a comment. Tell me who you are, what brought you here, what landed, what didn't. I read everything.

Now, I’m off to finish tomorrow’s post.

~ S.L.’E.

Veritas ante tempus

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(A) (E)

So blown away by the engagement I’ve received over the last four days on Substack.
Edge Notes is a nascent project, and I’m still scrambling to get a handle of the platform as much as I am my pen.

At an editorial impasse on the Iran Ledger I’ve been working on for [redacted], I give my eyes a moment to catch their breath and find myself staring at a stack of essays and manuscripts and scribblings I’ve been accumulating with absolutely no organization whatsoever over the last year, the waves of doubt start crashing down. It makes me feel like I’m drowning in a sea of my own hubris, and I want to toss it all into the bin and light it up like a republican whose just found an oil field he doesn’t control.

So I click back over to substack to — well not really to do anything in particular — and see that Edge Notes is as of now, in dialogue with over 20 subscribers and 40 followers!

Whoa…
While it does nothing for the impasse I’m working through, it does something so much more important. It tells me that, at least in someway, some of you are already finding some value in the words ideas I’ve taken the time to share with you.

I know 20 subs and 40 followers in four days isn’t breaking any records.

But it is absolutely enough to force my nose back onto the page.

Before I get back to it though, let me grab some of the various things that have inspired me and made me think recently, to share with you — after all, Edge Notes is a project on the edge.. of something.

A project that stands in dialogue with the world, from the margins of it.

If you haven’t already, check out one of this weekend’s essays:

If you are one of the handful of people who’s seen my original intro post, you might be wondering what the liquidation of Palestine and Iran, or American politics, or whatever, has to do with the stated focus of Edge Notes.

Well, while I can promise you this won’t ever be another ‘war blog’, I did warn you, dear reader, when I wrote: [Edge Notes] rejects silos and specializations, following connections across borders and through systems: from ecology to economics, energy grids to street grids, healthcare to housing, technology to transport, land use to political economy, media systems to governance, climate to conflict, and wherever else the trail leads.

The analysis is holistic systems thinking with a structuralist bent, grounded in history and the world as it actually operates. Any solutions are born from first principles, shaped by holistic design, and tested only against the constraints of the physical world—not the imagined ones we share.

Why? How could these things be related?

You know how…

Look at this picture of Tehran Gaza — what do you see?

(Credit: )

Look at these pictures of Tehran — what do you see?

I see war, I see environmental destruction, I see the long lasting human health impacts of that, I see the economic impacts of reconstruction, I see the indirect deaths that WILL result from bombed out roads much less bombed out hospitals.

I see a 2,500 year old civilization being leveled by a 250 year old country, because they dared to reach for the cleanest, safest energy available.

And that (and more) is what Edge Notes is about. Not war, not the news cycle, not — god strike me dead — politics. But the space between all of these things.

In a lot of fields, edges are extremely important places. In ecology, the edges are where different biomes collide resulting in more diversity and life than in either individual space. On the map, edges are constructs, they don’t exist in real life outside of short jaunts of wall or spaced outposts; and it’s these imagined edges where real cultures collide resulting in more diversity and better food than in either individual culture.

In science or research the edge is usually where the most novel discoveries and breakthroughs happen.

So I’m writing to you from the edge.

But not just because edges are cool, but also because the center is usually a bit stale, and often… a little rotten.

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I was reading ’s piece, Western Sahara Explained: A Decolonisation That Never Happened, and was reminded of some really interesting facts about where she’s headed.

She’s headed to “a remote corner of the Algerian desert where around 170,000 Sahrawi refugees have lived in exile for nearly half a century.” She goes on to talk about the history of the place, including the Moroccan Wall of Shame:

“Morocco built a massive sand wall known as the berm during the war in the 1980s.

Stretching roughly 2,700 kilometres across the desert, it cuts Western Sahara in two.

On one side lies the territory controlled by Morocco. On the other lies the sparsely populated area controlled by the Polisario Front.

The wall is surrounded by one of the largest minefields on earth.”

Can you imagine a jagged mound of sand and rock rubble running roughshod right over nearly 3k km?

Splitting the land.
The people.
The flora and fauna.

Can you imagine the effects this has had on absolutely everything over the last nearly 50 years since construction began?

That’s exactly the kind of question that Edge Notes is made to ask, and try to answer.

When I read that she was en-route to Tindouf, this song started playing in my head:

So I pulled it and shared it with her.

Despite my many years of foreign languages — including french, my ancestral tongue (though the Parisians would not be pleased to hear me call it french) — I’m still just an Ugly American limited to english.

So I had to pull the lyrics and translate them to give her a serviceable answer when she asked me what the song meant.

The lyrics alternate between French and Tamashek, something like:

C’est la vie, c’est la vie

(This is life, this is life)

Parfois je me demande si ça finira ainsi

(Sometimes I wonder if it will end like this)

Parfois je me demande si ça finira un jour

(Sometimes I wonder if it’ll ever end)

Parfois je me demande si ça finira comme ça

(Sometimes I wonder if it will end like this)

C’est la vie, c’est la vie

(This is life, this is life)

Aghrayitmanine edag dilane

(My thoughts are lost in what exists)

Adanmarhine garessane ayine uksane

(Let us be patient among the things we fear)

Ayine uksane wagaressane felaratane

(Those fears that lie between us and our dreams)

v2 and chorus repeat

C’est la vie

We could — and will in the future — dive into culture as much as anything else, but I’ll spare you that level of analysis for now, and instead just ask:

WTF?!?

Are Corsican and Tamashek related languages?
And why does it just look like Irish to me?

(Don’t tell the Corsicans I said this, but I know we’ve got a croissant in the crowd and maybe she could explain what’s going on here.)

At the end of the day, Edge Notes is just a project for annoyingly curious people, who want the world to live up to its potential, and know that for that to happen, we need to understand the mechanics of what’s actually taking place.

And that’s a tough job.

It’s also, very often, very soul-crushing.

Very isolating.

So I try to pause and enjoy the beauty too every once in a while.

But still, it can be hard to connect, right?
Especially with those who don’t see what you see, or even bother looking.

That’s why I find great solace in my homie that doesn’t know me, Viktor Patraskan.
Who really undersells himself when he says he’s “a pretentious stand up comedian from Romania.”

After watching Israeli’s PERSONALLY set a man on fire, SWERVE to punt a little girl with a car, and the thousands of other horrendous things I’ve digitally witnessed over the last 24 hours alone, Viktor’s comedy is my safe space.

While on tour (in Europe now) he’s not just filming his sets, but he’s producing a travel series with interviews of locals, history lessons, jokes; the whole nine.

With everything going on, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Iranian people whom I love dearly.

And one of my favorite Persians — and an absolute UNIT of knowledge, musicianship, and communication; Farya Faraji, has a video which I would make mandatory viewing for the entire world if I could.

It’s about so much more than the title indicates.
And explaining what I mean by that is its own essay.

So just watch it, and we can all talk about it later.

One question that’s been rolling around in the hollow between my ears lately, is how much of Orientalism can we attribute to the representation of people in art being haram?

If a culture can’t represent itself in the arts, that creates some sort of representational power vacuum, right?

Where the only lens a people and their culture can be viewed through is inherently external?

If you know the answer to any of these questions, I’d love to hear ‘em.
If you have any questions, I’d love to hear those too.

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I have a lot more stuff I wanted to share with you in this post — but at this point it would just bring the mood down. So I’m going to quit while I’m ahead and sign off.

That’s it for this first installment of The Common Band, a weekly kind-of ‘personal blog’ here on Edge Notes where I get to be a hell of a lot more unfiltered and indulgent than in the essays.

Thanks for joining me on this journey.
Thanks for making my first weekend on Substack as wonderful as its been.

I hope you’ll leave a comment with a little bit about yourself, your interests, or why you read all of this. And I hope you’ll stick around.

- S.L’Errance — Edge Notes

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P.S. Here are some threads to pull at with great stuff on the other end:

breaks down international law for stupid people like me, and has been very kind

’s post on Christian Nationalism is essential reading

is keeping me up to date on the important latin american issues

is doing god’s work on AI threats

has some great analysis buried under solid prose

whose post I referenced in the body you should go and read now

Liz Loh-Taylor | Bearing Witness

Western Sahara Explained: A Decolonisation That Never Happened

I would be en route to Tindouf as you read this…

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a month ago · 22 likes · Liz Loh-Taylor

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