Ethan Willingham

The truth lasts forever; this is a website.

About Archive

  • Rembrandt's painting of a bearded Aristotle in a black hat, lit gold against deep shadow, a heavy gold chain across his chest, resting one hand on a pale marble bust of Homer. 20 Jun 2026

    Aristotle and the Good Life

    everyone wants to be happy and mostly chases the wrong things. here is aristotle's answer.

  • A 19th-century painting of the neurologist Charcot presenting a fainting woman to a room of attentive physicians at a Paris asylum. Andre Brouillet, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere (1887). 20 Jun 2026

    The Book With No Blood Test

    a field guide to the dsm, psychiatry's catalog of about three hundred disorders, not one of which can be proven by a test. a tour of the conditions you might find yourself in, the wild ones medicine can prove cold instead (huntington's, narcolepsy, the brain on fire), where addiction sits, and how sure you should be that a label is you.

  • A Chola-period granite statue of the Buddha seated in meditation, eyes lowered and serene, hands resting cupped in his lap in the dhyana mudra. 20 Jun 2026

    Meditation, Mapped

    the truth about every kind of meditation, and how to actually do each one.

  • The title Do You Get Used to Everything? in cream serif on a dark green field, above a row of soft colored dots fading from vivid on the left to nearly invisible on the right. 20 Jun 2026

    Do You Get Used to Everything?

    you adapt almost completely to your senses, partly and on a schedule to your feelings, and unreliably to your life. a sourced field guide to habituation: what fades, what never does (commuting, grief, a job you can lose), and the one move you actually get, which is choosing what to get used to.

  • Rembrandt's painting The Return of the Prodigal Son: a bearded father in a deep red cloak bends over his kneeling, ragged son, both hands resting on the son's back, with onlookers standing in shadow to the right. 20 Jun 2026

    The New Testament, Side by Side

    sixteen keystone passages in the original greek, stacked against nine english translations from william tyndale (burned at the stake for it) to david bentley hart, with a plain breakdown of where they split: logos, agape, virgin or young woman, faith versus works.

  • A classical Chinese album-leaf portrait of Confucius as an old man with a thin beard and dark cap, in white and dark robes against tan silk, beside a cartouche of his imperial title. 20 Jun 2026

    The Analects of Confucius, Side by Side

    all twenty books of the analects in the original chinese, stacked against the great english translations from legge's victorian version to today's scholars, with a breakdown of where they split on the words with no english: ren, junzi, li, de, tian.

  • An open Torah scroll on purple velvet: three columns of handwritten Hebrew on parchment between two wooden rollers, with a silver pointer resting in front. 20 Jun 2026

    The Hebrew Bible, Side by Side

    the tanakh, the jewish bible, read the way judaism reads it: through the argument and never alone. seventeen keystone passages in the pointed hebrew, stacked against seven english translations from the 1917 jps to robert alter, with a breakdown of where they split.

  • A page from the Blue Qur'an: rows of angular gold Kufic Arabic script on deep indigo-dyed parchment, with a circular verse-marker at the right. 20 Jun 2026

    The Quran, Side by Side

    to a muslim the quran is the arabic itself, the literal speech of god, and cannot be translated, so every english version is only an interpretation of the meaning. fourteen keystone passages in the arabic, stacked against seven translations from george sale in 1734 to a saudi committee in 1997, with a breakdown of where they split.

  • An Indian lithograph: Krishna drives a team of four white horses from a gold-canopied chariot while the warrior Arjuna stands at right with folded hands, receiving the teaching. 20 Jun 2026

    The Bhagavad Gita, Side by Side

    a warrior freezes on the edge of a battle that will kill his own family, and his charioteer, who turns out to be god, talks him through it. all 700 verses in the sanskrit, stacked against the english translations, including the line oppenheimer remembered at the first atomic test.

  • Nicholas Roerich's 1925 painting: a small red-robed monk at the edge of a violet lake faces a towering golden serpent coiling out of the water against pink clouds and pale mountains. 20 Jun 2026

    Nagarjuna and the Emptiness of Everything

    the founding text of madhyamaka, the deepest current in buddhist philosophy, walked one move at a time. nagarjuna's argument that nothing exists on its own, including you, and that this emptiness is not nothingness but the best news a person could hear, with the keystone verses stacked across six translators.

  • A Japanese woodblock print: a vermilion-red parrot with blue tail feathers perched on a branch against a solid black ground, dried leaves and seedpods around it, two red seals. After Itō Jakuchū, Red Parrot. 19 Jun 2026

    The Zhuangzi, the Book That Laughs

    a guided walk through the second great taoist classic. nine of its wildest, funniest stories in plain language: the fish that becomes a world-sized bird, the butterfly dream, and zhuangzi drumming on a pot at his wife's funeral, with the compressed lines stacked across seven translators.

  • A Tibetan thangka painting: a gold-skinned Buddha seated on a lotus throne within a deep-indigo halo ringed with green, surrounded by smaller figures, dragons and clouds on a jewel-tone ground. Shakyamuni Buddha, 18th-century Tibet. 19 Jun 2026

    The Dhammapada, Side by Side

    all 423 verses in the original pali, stacked against seven english translations spanning 140 years, from a victorian sanskritist to the contemporary monks, with a breakdown of the keystone verses and where they split.

  • A lavish 17th-century Flemish banquet still life: a table piled with a lobster, fruit, bread, wine, and gleaming silver against a dark ground. 20 Jun 2026

    What You're Supposed to Eat

    the third part of fitness, after muscle and the heart: what you eat. weight is just energy, health is just food, and every famous diet ties when you actually test it. sourced and illustrated, with six charts and two tools.

  • A Futurist oil painting: a cyclist dissolved into swirling planes of blue, gold and red, motion rendered as overlapping abstract shapes. Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Cyclist (1913). 19 Jun 2026

    Still Moving

    the two thirds of fitness lifting leaves out: cardio and stretching. how fit your heart is predicts how long you live more than almost anything, and most stretching is wasted motion. sourced and illustrated, with eight charts and two tools.

  • Joseph Wright of Derby's candlelit painting of figures gathered in the dark around a glowing brass orrery, a model of the solar system, with two children's faces lit by the lamp at its center. 19 Jun 2026

    The Beginning of Infinity, Mapped

    david deutsch's five-hundred-page case for optimism, distilled to the few ideas that carry it and drawn as one argument you can click through. a good explanation is one that is hard to vary, and from that test he gets knowledge with no limit and people as the most significant things in the universe.

  • An ink painting of Laozi, a white-bearded sage holding a scroll, riding a water buffalo across aged tan silk. Zhang Lu, Ming dynasty. 17 Jun 2026

    The Tao Te Ching, Side by Side

    every chapter of the tao te ching in the original chinese, stacked against two dozen complete english translations and a hundred more in fragments, with a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of where they split.

  • An 18th-century engraving of a human skeleton seen from behind, one arm outstretched, standing before a rhinoceros in a stone-walled courtyard. 18 Jun 2026

    The Far Side of the Body

    a field guide to the human body at the ends of its range, from agony and ecstasy to strange sleep and real superpowers. the same gene that means a life on fire, turned the other way, means a life with no pain at all.

  • A massive, twisted ancient bristlecone pine, its weathered orange wood glowing at twilight above snow, one of the oldest living things on Earth. 10 Jun 2026

    How Long Can You Live?

    the hard wall at 120 is unproven, the oldest-age records are riddled with missing paperwork and pension fraud, and the thing that actually adds years is the one nobody calls a hack. sourced and illustrated, with four charts.

  • The bowed bearded head and massive shoulders of the Farnese Hercules, an ancient marble statue, against a pale gray wall. 10 Jun 2026

    Big Enough

    building muscle the natural way, on one supplement, real food, and sunlight, and knowing where to stop. the last 10% can cost twice the work, for muscle almost no one will notice.

  • The eight planets and Pluto in a row across a deep field of distant galaxies, from Mercury to Pluto, with ringed Saturn near the center. 9 Jun 2026

    How Old Are You in Space?

    enter your birthday and see your age on every planet, counted in each world's own years, with a countdown to your next birthday on each.

  • A bare baby gazes up and reaches to touch the chin of a young mother who bends close to him, from Mary Cassatt's pastel Baby's First Caress. 2 Jun 2026

    The First Year

    a calm, exhaustively sourced field guide to a baby's first year: feeding, sleep, health, development, safety, and the parent. every claim cited, every chart on real data, and the places the experts disagree shown honestly.

  • A small ochre octopus covered in glowing electric-blue rings on dark ground. 30 May 2026

    The Living Ocean

    a mostly wordless dive through the ocean in three dozen high-resolution photographs, from tide pools and coral reefs to the deep sea, hydrothermal vents, and creatures named only last year.

  • An overhead grid of brightly colored stacked shipping container ends, yellow, rust red, and teal, packed in orderly rows. 30 May 2026

    The Brain Behind the Warehouse

    behind every "your order has shipped" is a building you have probably never seen and a piece of software that knows where every item inside it is. how that software runs the warehouse and the factory beside it, from the dock door to the assembly line.

  • Two oarsmen in a racing scull pull in unison across calm water, a wooded riverbank behind them, from Thomas Eakins's painting The Biglin Brothers Racing. 29 May 2026

    All In

    the work that makes people valuable changed; the way we manage them mostly did not. a field guide to managing professionals, and to getting them all in.

  • A glowing spiral of gold and green points winding into a bright core, a Lorenz strange attractor rendered live on the GPU. 21 May 2026

    Obi Juan Algorithm

    a million points of light you fly through in 3D, some deep structures from math, some algorithms you set running and watch work, all computed live.

  • A Gray's Anatomy engraving of the teeth set in the jaw. 21 May 2026

    The Optional Body

    an interactive descent through the parts of the body you can live without, from a spare foot bone to a heart on a machine.

  • Daubigny's painting The Hamlet of Optevoz: cottages by a stream at dusk. 1 May 2026

    The Old Masters

    a small private gallery. Storms and saints, harvest fields and harbour scenes.

  • The Ghost in the Swarm: teal and gold particles spiraling into concentric bands around a dark vortex eye. 26 Apr 2026

    The Ghost in the Swarm

    100,000 particles obey three lines of math on the GPU, while an invisible field steers the swarm through sacred geometry.

  • Sluice: a jet-powered drill rig flying over the surface, with a freshly dug shaft below. 25 Apr 2026

    Sluice

    my own 2D mining game. This free v15.89 build is the last public version; development is now private, coming to Steam, Summer 2027.

  • Earth from space at the day/night terminator, city lights glowing across nighttime South America. 23 Apr 2026

    Daylight Globe

    a small WebGL globe for the day/night line, daylight hours, and sunrise/set.

  • A scatter of colorful dots, particles rendered with nothing but CSS box-shadow. 23 Apr 2026

    Rendering Particles Without a Canvas

    three physics demos with no canvas, no WebGL, no SVG. The whole renderer is one CSS property on a 1px div.

© 2026 Ethan Willingham Feeling lucky? ↗