About the Lantern

The Slow Lantern is a small magazine for people who like to think things through at a gentle pace. We write about mental models, ways of learning hard things, and old ideas from public-domain books, explained in plain words and with the reasons shown.

Our writers are ordinary curious people. We try things at kitchen tables and on train rides, we get some of them wrong, and we say so. Nothing here is a promise. It is what worked for us, offered so you can test it against your own days.

You will find four kinds of piece: essays on a single mental model, step-by-step guides to learning something difficult, classic ideas retold simply, and careful side-by-side comparisons of two approaches. We paraphrase the old writers and quote them only in very short lines.

Pull up a chair. Thank you for reading, and for being curious with us.