Standards
How we know what we tell you.
Writing about somebody else’s culture is easy to do badly and hard to do well. These are the rules we hold ourselves to, published so you can hold us to them too.
Provenance
Every piece is labelled with where it came from.
- Field
We were there.
Original reporting. A market we walked through, a workshop we sat in, a person we spoke to directly. The strongest label, and the rarest — it takes time and money, and we would rather use it honestly than often.
- Archive
Somebody else was there, and we licensed it.
Museum collections, licensed photography, historical records, published ethnography. Attributed by name, with the licence stated wherever the licence requires it.
- Desk
We read carefully and checked twice.
Research assembled from published sources without direct access. The most common label on a young publication, and the one we are most careful to admit to. Desk work is not lesser — pretending it is fieldwork would be.
You will find one of these three marks at the top of every piece on this site, alongside its topic and reading time. If a piece has no mark, that is a fault — please tell us.
The rules
Four commitments.
Two sources, one from inside
No claim about a living culture goes out on a single source. Wherever it is possible, at least one source comes from inside the culture being described — a speaker of the language, a practitioner of the tradition, a scholar from the place. A fact that only exists in outsider accounts is a fact we treat as unconfirmed.
No synthetic imagery, ever
We do not publish AI-generated pictures of people, places, garments, food or artefacts. Not as illustration, not as placeholder, not with a disclaimer. A publication whose entire promise is we got this right cannot show you an invented photograph of a market that does not exist. Where we do not have a real image, you get no image.
Every photograph is credited
An uncredited photograph does not go on this site, however good it is. Each one carries the photographer’s name, the place, the year and the licence or permission it runs under. Where a person is identifiable, we need their consent as well as the photographer’s. An unattributed image of a real person is somebody’s work and somebody’s face, taken twice.
Corrections in public
When we get something wrong we fix it where the mistake was published, say what changed, and leave the correction visible on our corrections page. Quietly editing the post is not a correction — it is tidying up after yourself and hoping nobody noticed.
Where we know we are weak
The honest part.
We are new, small, and mostly working from a desk. That means our early range is limited to what can be verified without travel, and the DESK label will sit on most of what we publish for a while.
We are also aware that a publication about the whole world, written largely from one part of it, carries an obvious bias in what it notices and what it finds strange. The correction for that is submissions — which is why we ask for them on every page.
If we have got something wrong about your culture, we would genuinely rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.
The long version
One cultural story a week that deserves more than sixty seconds.
Deep research. Named sources. Real context. No cultural clichés.
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