What this is
A new home for the research behind The Digger — the field notes, the source trails, and the work that didn't quite become a finished piece.
I'm changing how I work.
From now on, The Digger on Substack is reserved for finished pieces — investigations I'm willing to put my name to as a full, edited article. Fewer of those. Better. That's the deal I'm making with readers.
But the work hasn't shrunk. If anything it's grown. Most of the value never makes it past the research stage. Long Deep Research dossiers, source trails, half-built timelines, things I followed for two days and then set down. Notes I make late at night that mean something only to me until I write them up.
That material is what this archive is for.
What you'll find here
Research dossiers — long-form notes from a single investigation. Sometimes they become Digger articles. Sometimes they don't. Either way, the underlying work goes here.
Source trails — annotated paths through documents, archives, papers. The kind of thing where you find one item, it leads to another, and three hops later you have a thread worth following.
Open questions — investigations I can't close. If you know more than I do, get in touch.
The format
These are case files, not articles. They will sometimes be rough, sometimes long, sometimes annotated with my own commentary in the margins of someone else's text. They will not always have a conclusion.
What they share is this: the work is real, the sources are linked, and the thinking is shown.
Why publish the unfinished?
Because hiding it serves nobody. The research itself is often more useful than the finished article — it's the raw material. If a reader finds a thread here and pulls on it harder than I did, that's the point.
And because waiting for "finished" can mean nothing ever ships. This archive is a way to keep the work moving.
If you want the finished pieces
Subscribe to The Digger. That's where the polished investigations land — fewer than before, and better for it.