Pillar III · Nourishment
The Table, The Knowledge, The Joy
Food, health, and the skill to take care of yourself. Where Limbic Literacy protects against what harms you, Nourishment feeds what you need — the generative counterweight. Where House of Viridian is not a framework but a table. Pull up a chair.
- Knowledge
- The relationship between food and health, season and ingredient. Prevention over treatment.
- Skill
- Cooking without instruction cards. Making stock. Reading a market, in any city in the world.
- Joy
- The carbonara at Luciano’s. The long table. Joy is also prevention.
A two-cent discount
The Dutch cabinet wants to scrap the reduced beer duty for small breweries. It saves the treasury 2 million euros and costs the drinker 1 or 2 cents a glass. What disappears is in neither figure.
Statins, Cholesterol and the Shifted Normal
What if the normal cholesterol level wasn't set by science, but by commerce?
The Military Academy Napoleon Built and Russia Wants to Leave
Napoleon's legacy does not sit in his wars. It sits in institutions he created and that Europe still uses now. That makes him more interesting than we think.
The Building as Character
How Wes Anderson filmed architecture as if it had voices.
Seven years of dreaming
Live to ninety and you will have slept for thirty years and dreamt for seven. Nobody knows exactly why.
Taste after the elite
W. David Marx writes that in 2026 good taste oppresses no one, because the elite no longer has it. What that means for the charge of snobbery.
Practice slowly
The cellist Tina Guo sums it up in a single line: speed is a by-product of accuracy, not the other way around. Why that holds for far more than music.
Coquilles St. Jacques · Lovage Foam
Pan-seared scallops on butter-toasted sourdough, with warm lovage foam siphoned over the plate. Three elements on one plate: a classical sear, a modernist foam and a crisp base.
Ireland and Battery Storage: Green Technology Without Regret
A small island that stores megawatts of solar and wind power. This is how inclusive technology scales: local, sustainable, independent.
When AI Becomes Your Trainer
Algorithms can give you a schedule, but they can't understand your body.
Five hundred million kilos
A country with food banks is letting half a billion kilos of potatoes rot. That is not a harvest problem.
What the IPCC Said That We Did Not Want to Hear: Hurricanes Are Not Getting Worse
The IPCC made a finding that is uncomfortable: there is no evidence that hurricanes and floods are increasing. That does not mean climate change is not happening. It means our narrative must be more nuanced.
The Cocktail Bar as Theater
Why a Japanese cocktail bar is not a restaurant, but a space where craftsmanship becomes visible.
The Four Romans: One Technique, Four Dishes
Cacio e pepe, gricia, carbonara and amatriciana are not four dishes that resemble one another. They are four solutions to one technical problem.
The machine said twelve, it was twenty-six
AI is a wonderful tool and a poor witness. What one wrong walking time in a travel guide teaches about where to trust a machine and where not to.
Netherlands as Food Leader: Innovation Without Land
Small country with no land. Yet a larger food producer than many bigger countries. How? Through continuous innovation in how.
Abidjan, Where Food Still Nourishes
In cities where supermarkets don't dominate, you still eat what food actually is.
When Everyone Can Make Films, What Makes Film Art?
The paradox of beyond technical constraint: now almost everyone can make a film in two days.
The pub as practice room
We are on top of each other and falling apart at the same time. There is a place where you learn the antidote.
Why the Western Balkans Exposes European Identity
Europe likes to say: we are a community. But what we are really saying is: we are an economy. The Western Balkans want to join the club, and suddenly we say: wait, what are the actual rules?
Where did the work go
At an art fair a gallery sells a work, and then often loses sight of it. On a blind spot the whole art market shares.
Il Gattopardo Rotterdam: Innovation on the Plate
A restaurant that reinvents itself. Not through fashion, but by looking at guests. This is design in the real world.
Carbonara, 1939, Batavia
A national myth fell over on a single newspaper archive. The historians changed their minds within a day.
Eight Years of Fitness Knowledge Summarized
The truth about training takes longer to understand than you want, but is simpler than you expect.
Designing Against Something
Why much great design does not try to achieve something, but tries to prevent something.
Reading a city on the hill
A map lies about distance. In a hill city like Lisbon the straight line is rarely the real one. What it costs to learn a neighbourhood on foot.
How Frank Ankersmit Pointed Out Freedom as a Basis for Inequality
Historian Frank Ankersmit argued something radical: giving everyone equal freedom does not mean equality. It means: the strong can get stronger. That is the paradox of liberal democracy.
LAION-400M: Billions of Images, Openly Shared
A dataset of billions of images that anyone can use. This is what inclusive technology looks like: not centrally controlled, but open to all.
Rural America, Farmers and Forgotten Food Wisdom
In American farmland, something is disappearing that contains centuries of nutritional knowledge.
The Uffizi and the Question of What You Preserve
What does 443 years of museum history say about what we call artwork?
Eighty-five ways to tie a tie
In 1999 two physicists proved that there are exactly eighty-odd aesthetic tie knots. Why that limit is more beautiful than infinity would be.
Why the EU Court Said E-Bikes Are Not Motor Vehicles, and What It Means for Law
The EU Court had to choose: is an e-bike transportation or is it a vehicle? The answer says much about how law works in modern times.
Six Startups That Started With Nothing
Von Braun, Jobs, Bezos, Musk. They didn't start with inheritance. They started with observation and daring.
The Waiter and the Secret of Good Food
Sometimes a waiter teaches you more about nutrition than years of study.
Ogilvy and the Craft of Branding
Why David Ogilvy did not underestimate product names, and what this says about design.
How Nigeria Controls Its Economy Through Banks, and Why It Fails
Nigeria tried to fight inflation by controlling the banking sector from above. It created no stability. It created corruption, informal markets, and paralyzed economies.
The Negroni limit
The number of cocktails seems infinite, but it is not. Taste imposes limits, and those limits can be calculated. A half-serious survey of a finite space.
Winner Take All as Summer Reading for Serious Entrepreneurs
Anita Elberse's book on profit concentration. Not depressing, but essential for anyone who understands the economy doesn't work on soapboxes.
The Elimination Diet as Identity Project
We've created a culture where diet is identity, which obscures the real issues.
Ulysses at Its Hundredth Birthday
What does it say about great art that Ulysses after a century is still found unreadable?
Why the Russian Railroad Boss Knows More Than Europe
America built highways. Russia built railroads. Europe talks about connectivity while its transport fractures. The lesson is not in asphalt, but in strategy.
What saffron is
Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world, and the most adulterated. How to tell the real thing from the fake, and why that knowledge is worth having.
Neurodiversity as Asset, Not Diagnosis
The ADHD brain, the autistic brain, the dyslexic brain: these are not flaws. These are different ways of thinking that are genius for certain tasks.
The Sixties, When Nobody Was Obese
What changed between then and now was not genetics, but what we eat and how we live.
The Sculpture Everyone Photographs
What happens when an artwork becomes so famous that no one actually sees it anymore?
What Barbara Baarsma Tries to Tell Us About Rights
Economist Barbara Baarsma proposes: put labor rights in a trading system. More tradeable, flexible contracts, less permanent work. The problem is: rights are only rights if they are not tradeable.
The table as a starting point
Why Nourishment begins at the table: food, knowledge, and the skill to take care of yourself.
Entering Venture Capital as an Outsider
Venture capital feels to outsiders like a closed world. But it's just a market. And markets respond to value, not pedigree.
Nutrition Is Passion
Eating is not only physiology. It's how we tell each other that life is worth living.
Chappelle and the Return
What does it mean when an artist disappears for twelve years and then returns? Not stronger, not wiser. Simply: different.
Reading a market, in any city
Why reading a market is a basic skill we are losing: which season it is, which ingredient, which quality.
Asylum Numbers: What They Say and What We Lie With Them
The Netherlands talks about asylum seekers as a number. That number says much about our fear, but almost nothing about reality. How we use numbers to avoid thinking.
The Laundromat as Unexpectedly Good Investment
Setting up a washing machine and collecting money sounds unsexy. But it might be the smartest thing a beginning entrepreneur can do.
When Medicine Was Just Marketing
The history of pharmaceuticals teaches us to be cautious about what companies promise.
Joy is prevention too
Critique without joy turns sour; joy without critique turns naive. Nourishment needs both.
Menswear Illustrations as Document
Why fashion drawings from the early 20th century say more about craft than contemporary photography.
How Energy Transition Harms the Poor: The British Lesson
Britain wanted cheap green. Instead it got expensive green, and poor households pay the bill. That is not an accident. That is the lack of thinking about invisible groups.
What Consumers See and Don't: Baymard's UX Research
Baymard Institute spent decades examining online shopping behavior. What did they find? Most design choices were made incompetently by people who never observed.
The Food Bank Is a Symptom, Not a Solution
Food banks hide the real problem: structural inability to feed yourself.
The Courtyard of Budapest
What happens when you fold an entire Hungarian city in miniature into a courtyard, and why is this the pinnacle of Art Nouveau?
Money That Recognizes Fear: Why the Rich Withdraw
Large family offices are shifting their investments from public to private assets. That is not a financial signal. It is a society signal: even they no longer trust public order.
The Seven Billion Dollar Question: Thiel on Concentration of Power and Value
Seven billion dollars. PayPal, Facebook, SpaceX. How does value concentrate into a few big bets? And what does that mean for an inclusive economy?
Health Is Not an Expense
Viewing your health as a cost is a fundamental accounting error. It is something that yields returns.
Lalique and the Moonstone
Why René Lalique wove his glasswork into jewelry, and what it means when an artist reaches for stone instead of pigment.
The Price of Alliance and the Problem of Silence
Biden backed Israel unconditionally in Gaza and thereby lost his voice in the conflict. That is not moral, it is tactically stupid. Alliances only work with leverage.
Slack's Many Lives: How Real Companies Grow Through Reinvention
Slack wasn't always a chat app. It started as something completely different. How a company can transform while remaining true to its core.
Supplements Are Not Food
Good nutrition comes first. Supplements fill gaps. They never replace the actual work.
How to Be an Artist
David Bowie on what it means to be creative, and why storytelling is not the same as truth.
Clean Energy and Expensive Energy: Two Policy Mistakes
Europe imagined that wind and sun would be cheap. It became expensive. Then we tried to make it more expensive on purpose by making gas unnecessarily dear. That became chaotic.
26 at 40: Biological Age and the Energy of Entrepreneurship
It's not about how many years you've lived. It's about how you've lived those years. This determines whether you still have the energy to build something entirely new.
Movement Is Not a Hobby
A routine built on compound movements and mobility solves more than any supplement ever will.
Art That Irritates
The question great art faces is not whether it is beautiful. The question is whether it disturbs your equilibrium.
Day 200: When a War Becomes Normal
By day 200 of a war, death tolls have become incomprehensible and nobody counts anymore. The world reorders itself around a conflict that has become permanent.
DNA Difference: European versus American Startup Mentality
Two continents, two visions of how you build a company. The differences go much deeper than money alone.
What You Don't Measure, You Can't Guide
Blood tests reveal what's actually happening in your body. Without that data, you're navigating in darkness.
The Beauty of Lace Against Skin
Why fine lace against your skin is more than craft. It is the boundary between function and desire.
What Trump Does With Power, and What Power Does With Us
Eric Weinstein posed a sharp question: what happens when someone gets power without institutional restraints? And how does a democracy recognize the moments when the system itself becomes negotiable?
What No One Sees: Thiel on Undervalued Startup Categories
Peter Thiel teaches us where the real innovation opportunities lie: not in the visible playing field, but in the gaps everyone overlooks.
Health as Priority
Health is not something you maintain casually. It is an active choice that must compete with everything else seeking your attention.
Prevention as a forgotten discipline
Why we spend billions on repair and virtually nothing on prevention.
Why good design is invisible
The best designs do not stand out. They work.
Never again, not me, not now
On the failure of collective memory and why 'never again' is a promise nobody keeps.
The return of the city-state
How cities are outpacing the nation-state and why that has consequences for how we organize our food.
The illusion of control in complex systems
Why more measurement does not lead to more grip but to more blindness.
How the Veneto builds for centuries, not for quarters
On a building tradition that treats sustainability not as a label but as a starting point.
The myth of technological neutrality
Technology is never neutral. The question is always: for whom was it designed?
Connection without Capture
Privacy as a design principle, not an afterthought.
The Sum Has a Name: the CPB confirms the pattern, not the architecture that produces it
A response to the May 2026 CPB report on tax burden in the Netherlands. The system is progressive on paper and regressive in practice. The CPB names the pattern with full propriety, but cannot, from its institutional position, name the architecture that produces it.
Limbic literacy
Why digital resilience is not an individual responsibility.
Adaptive reuse
Why the best buildings already exist.
The Italian piazza as social design
Why the best public spaces are not designed for efficiency but for encounter.
The Discriminating Eye: on what is lost when a culture stops telling things apart
A pamphlet on recovering the older, finer sense of the word "discrimination" — to distinguish, to tell things apart. On heritage brands across their life cycle, the inversion of quiet luxury, the object as tool rather than self-expression, and what is lost when a culture can no longer choose what to value.
The Tigelliera on the Table
The Tigellino chain in Bologna serves tigelle pre-filled, from the kitchen. In Modena the press sits on the table and guests fill their own. The same bread, an inverted social logic — and a lesson in how to preserve tradition without lapsing into folklore.
Multipolar food security
What geopolitics has to do with your plate.
The empty runway
Why Europe can no longer tell its own story.
The Bauhaus legacy and the return to craft
How the most influential design school of the twentieth century forgot its own principles.
The Architecture of Silence: Why the Dutch Tax Authority's data vault is not an incident
The Dutch Tax Authority's data vault is not an incident but a structural pattern. This paper analyses why concealment is rational organisational behaviour, why punitive responses are counterproductive, and what transparency architecture could address the problem at its root.
Design in Production
Why design does not stop at the drawing table and what that means for how we build organizations.
The art market and the disappearance of the eye
When price becomes the only measure, the ability to see vanishes.
Change is not the problem
The problem is that we treat change as a problem.
Navigating versus planning
Why organizations get stuck in their own methodology and what the alternative is.
Wabi-sabi and the imperfect
A Japanese aesthetic that the West urgently needs.
When the State Starts to Feel: Rousseau, Weber, and the Failure of Youth Care
Youth care is not failing because there is too little empathy. It is failing because the state is not fulfilling its own function. Rousseau will not save Lex without Weber.
395,000 Unemployed — So What?
NU.nl reports 395,000 unemployed. But the real number tells a different story.
Metamorphoses at the Rijksmuseum
Why we need the old masters to understand our own transformations.
Saffron and the disappearance of ingredient literacy
Knowing what saffron is goes beyond following a recipe. It is a form of literacy that is vanishing.
Fermentation as cultural heritage
From kimchi to sauerkraut: how the world's oldest preservation method risks disappearing.
Reading the market
Why buying local is not a lifestyle choice but a trainable skill.
Broth as medicine
On the forgotten foundation of the kitchen and why your grandmother's recipe is medicinal heritage.
43,000 civil servants and nobody ordered them
The Dutch central government grew by 38 percent in six years. Nobody voted for it. Everyone benefited. And now everyone wants to cut back.
The illusion of control
Why local councils struggle with affiliated organisations — and why ownership is the only real answer.
Trend scan 2026: seven domains, one message
The Dutch Interior Ministry mapped the major trends facing the Netherlands. The connections between them tell a more important story than the trends themselves.
Wishful thinking about America
Europe is in acute danger, but we act as if it will be fine. On a historical pattern of denial.
Can Gucci Make Luxury Out of Artificial Intelligence?
On Demna's debut, the emptiness of our time, and the displaced who seek belonging in price tags.
Unheard of, but heard everywhere
About the angry citizen, political simplification and the loss of stratification in society.
Connection without Capture, also in the kitchen
Viridian's design principle, applied to food.
Prevention is cheaper than treatment
About my father, complementary medicine and the revenue model of the health industry.
The carbonara at Luciano in Rome
About the dish that changed my idea of cooking.
Recognizing seasonal vegetables at the market
Being able to read a market is a skill. In any city in the world.
The majority is always wrong
About groupthink, conformism and the courage to think differently.
The Johari window and other mirrors
About self-knowledge instruments, Big Five and the question of whether you can measure yourself.
37 cities, a suitcase and a city guide
The city as a teacher. About Monocle guides and traveling as a method.
Design as a way of thinking
Design is not aesthetics. It is a method of thinking about how the world works.
Drawing broth as a basic skill
The recipe that is not a recipe. Why stock is the foundation of cooking.
The paradox of the Dutch international position
Small country, big footprint. Almost twenty years later: is that paradox still there?
Slow Food and the Ark of Taste
About forgotten vegetables, endangered cheeses and why culinary heritage matters.
Food Rules — three lessons from Michael Pollan
Seven words that make an entire diet book redundant.
Five books that shaped my thinking
No ranking but five short stories about books and the moments when I read them.
The advisor no longer exists (and that's good)
How the profession of strategist has changed. From expert to co-creator.
What does a city say about its residents?
About visions of the future, Monocle guides and the question of whether you can design a city.
The return of the slow thought
Why start writing again. What has changed since 2011.
Why the government doesn't learn
If many policies don't work, why does the government remain so attached to them?
Wine, tasting and the art of mindful tasting
Finding words for what you taste. An exercise in language and attention.
The aglio e olio method
A simple dish as a metaphor for craftsmanship. Why the simplest things are the hardest.
Liberation Day and the luxury of discomfort
About freedom, polarization and the courage to differ in opinion.