Welcome to Mortimus
Mortimus is a newsletter that aims to advance the power of Consilient Thinking.
We live in a world that insists on sorting itself into neat categories. History belongs in one drawer, science in another. Economics lives upstairs, psychology downstairs, and never the twain shall meet—except they do, constantly, in ways that would be comic if they weren't so consequential.
Mortimus began with a simple observation: the most interesting questions refuse to stay put. Why do some societies collapse while others endure? How does a virus become a political issue? What transforms a scientific discovery into a cultural obsession? These questions are transgressors, hopping the boundaries of disciplines.
These aren't puzzles for historians alone, or scientists, or economists. They require what E.O. Wilson called consilience—the recognition that knowledge, like life itself, doesn't respect rigid bounds.
We are researchers, storytellers, designers, and analysts with a singular mission: create a platform that pays homage to the complex brilliance of the world around us, while providing us with the tools to make sense of it.
About Us
Mortimus is the brain-child of
and . We are based in Toronto, Canada. Our backgrounds are in Economics, Finance, and Computer Science, but our scope is much, much wider.Here’s us in our natural habitats:
We came to writing through the back door. Our time in venture capital and private equity taught us to see patterns across industries, to spot the connections between seemingly unrelated trends. But we kept bumping against the same limitation: the most important insights couldn't be reduced to investment memos or board presentations. The questions that mattered most—the ones that transgressed disciplinary boundaries—needed a different kind of space.
Writing online offered what the corner office couldn’t: the freedom to follow ideas wherever they led, without the constraints of quarterly returns or exit strategies. More importantly, it let us reach people grappling with the same complex questions we were asking.
Mortimus is the cornerstone of our broader ambitions. We're building a media platform that takes consilient thinking seriously—not just as newsletter content, but as the foundation for podcasts, courses, and collaborations with thinkers who share our conviction that the world's most pressing problems require interdisciplinary solutions. This newsletter is where we test ideas, develop our voice, and build the community that will drive everything else we create.
What to expect
The Core
Our writing at Mortimus is a discovery mechanism: helping us discover ideas, unseen connections, and improve our analogizing skills. The flaneur-ing series act as short snippets—seeds of connected ideas that we want to explore. These eventually blossom into longer pieces, which form the core of our thinking:
Reviews
Essays and Book reviews also form an important part of Mortimus. Reading and researching is such an important part of our lives that we often post our musings and analyses of certain books and topics as separate essays. As an example, here are two essays - one on reading Fernand Braudel as a student, and the other about the incentive mechanisms in academia:
We hope you enjoy your time at Mortimus. As we build this out, we’d really appreciate supporting our work—and consider sharing Mortimus with somebody that you think might enjoy it:
