The Error That Did Not Exist Until Someone Pointed It Out
The brief career of the bearer of bad news
Continue reading on PatreonAn independent journal by Alex BudayIssue No. 01 · Budapest / Prague
Literary satire · Cultural observation
Some illusions deserve a closer look.
Essays, satire and the occasional inconvenient observation about the world we have learned to call normal.
Explore the writingAlex Buday · Illusions Not Included
Illusions Not Included
Today’s writing
The latest English essay, with the full text on Patreon.
More from the notebook
Power & politics01
The Emperor’s New Cap
How a perfectly ordinary object became a convincing substitute for a perfectly absent idea.
Read the essayMoney & markets02
Crypto Faith: The Myth of Digital Salvation
When we replaced trust with an algorithm and hoped no one would notice the difference.
Read the essayThe human animal03
The Owl: When Looking Serious Was Enough
A short natural history of wisdom, appearances and exceptionally confident meetings.
Read the essayThe world is rarely short of explanations. It is merely short of honest ones.
A note from the margins
A public margin
Not every thought needs to become an essay.
Notes is an open bilingual notebook. Read without signing in, or add a short observation of your own.
Open NotesAlex Buday · 2026
Ongoing conversations
Different subjects. The same unfortunate habit of looking twice.
From a book in progress
Hostages of Stupidity
A collection of literary satires about the surprisingly respectable ways in which we stop thinking for ourselves.
Discover the projectA Central European perspective
History has a way of finding you.
Alex Buday writes about power, money, human nature and the quietly absurd machinery of everyday life. His work moves between literary satire, personal memory and cultural observation.
Having lived through the final years of the Eastern Bloc, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the confident reinvention of almost everything that followed, he tends to approach fashionable certainties with a certain reserve.
More about the authorStay in the conversation
A little less certainty. A little more thought.
New essays and observations, published in English and Hungarian. Find Alex’s writing wherever good questions remain welcome.