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Literature · Satire · Social Observations

Essays, satire, stories and a few inconvenient observations about the world we have grown accustomed to calling normal.

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Latest Writing

The latest published work from the English edition of INI.

01
Mars Needs Politicians

Mars Needs Politicians

On New Worlds, Old Habits, and the Trouble with Starting Over

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Cheap Answers

Human stories

Free to read

Cheap Answers

Most of us are not short of answers. We have careers, savings plans, health metrics, books, podcasts — and a reading list for whatever remains unresolved. One quiet evening, an ordinary man begins to notice how neatly certainty can organise a life, especially when the untidy parts are treated as exceptions.

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The Relative We Turned Into an Insult

Power & society

Paid writing · €1.99

The Relative We Turned Into an Insult

We have composed operas, founded institutions, launched spacecraft, and acquired an impressive vocabulary for distinguishing ourselves from the animal kingdom. The monkey, unfortunately, has continued to behave in ways we recognise rather too well: imitating others, competing for attention, occasionally making a spectacle of itself. In a forest, such behaviour is merely animal. In a boardroom, it may qualify as strategy. And yet, when we want to insult someone, it is still the monkey whose name we borrow.

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INI

New Writers

Alex Buday

Founder & Writer

Alex Buday writes about power, money, history, human nature and the quietly absurd machinery of everyday life from a Central European perspective. His work moves between literary satire, personal memory and cultural observation.

Notes

Latest Notes

Alex Buday

Jonathan Swift and the Civilised Uses of Stupidity 19 October 1745 — Jonathan Swift died in Dublin. Swift understood that human stupidity rarely needs to raise its voice. Give it a respectable vocabulary, a few figures and perhaps a committee, a…

Jonathan Swift — Portrait by Michael Dahl, 1734. Finnish National Gallery. Public Domain (CC0).Read note →
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Alex Buday

Freedom Is Perfectly Respectable Until… 16 October – The anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s birth Victorian society rather enjoyed listening to Oscar Wilde mock the very world it lived in. It was pleasant to laugh at hypocrisy, especially in a comfort…

Oscar Wilde, 1882. Photograph by Napoleon Sarony. Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons.Read note →
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Alex Buday

The Bear Who Didn’t Want to Be More Successful. A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh was published a hundred years ago. The bear hasn’t done much work on himself since. He would still like some honey and someone to wander off with. Preferably not too fa…

The Bear Who Didn’t Want to Be More Successful.Read note →
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Essays, satire, stories and brief observations from different points of view, without convenient answers. Explore the latest writing, or open the notebook in Notes.