Spreadsheets And The Sea

Seeing Like A Spreadsheet

David Oks | 25th March 2026

There is no tool as "ubiquitous and yet so unloved" as the electronic spreadsheet. A sixth of the world's population use Microsoft Excel. Historians will one day write great works about how spreadsheets transformed economies. But nobody today can wax lyrical about them. Being able to see calculations laid out and work on them iteratively transformed the way businesses were run forever (4,500 words)

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William Blake, Remote by the Sea

Philip Hoare | Lapham's Quarterly | 30th March 2026

Before moving out of London to the coast in 1800, William Blake had never seen the sea. It changed him. "He’d imagined it endlessly in his art, in his head; now it was at the end of his lane. He could walk down there in his dressing gown and slippers, if he so desired. The sea hung there like a perpetually unfolding panorama, an unignorable flicker in the corner of his eye. Always different, always the same" (3,800 words)