A BREACH IN TASTE PRESENTS
The Dead Reckoning
Dispatches from the less familiar world.
EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE / FOUNDING LETTER
From the Editor
A founding letter about curiosity, careful reporting, and the less familiar world explored in The Dead Reckoning.
Welcome to The Dead Reckoning, a small newspaper for people who are interested in entirely too many things.
We report on real developments in aviation, wildlife, natural science, improbable places, strange history, and curious technology. The goal isn't to shovel more headlines into the world. It's to find a few that make someone stop and say: Hang on. Tell me more about that.
The desks
THE FLIGHT DESK: The one department you'll find in every numbered Sunday edition. Remarkable aircraft, restorations, experimental engineering and aviation mysteries. Its recurring files include The Aircraft File, Back in the Air, On the Drawing Board and The Aviation Detective.
THE NATURAL WORLD: Strange creatures, conservation, overlooked biology, and the familiar natural world doing profoundly unfamiliar things.
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Overlooked history, museum discoveries and curious stories worth rescuing from the footnotes.
THE ODDITIES DESK: Peculiar discoveries, improbable places and news from the outer suburbs of common sense. Other desks appear whenever the reporting calls for them.
What this is—and what it isn't
Our reporting follows identifiable sources, carries clear dates, and links back to the original research or announcement. We'll distinguish reported facts from our own commentary. When nothing worth reporting has happened, we won't pretend otherwise.
Sometimes a story will lead to an original design. Usually it won't. We prefer that the news remain interesting even if nobody buys a shirt.
A good place to begin
Read Issue 001 — The Crocodile in the Sphinx’s Stone, our first numbered edition, with a 45-million-year-old crocodilian, a Martian driving record and an Australian crater that looks like it has legs. The Flight Desk will become a fixture of each Sunday edition, with aircraft and aviation stories rotating among the remarkable, the ingenious and the forgotten.
Our opening dispatch is about a giant isopod that spent decades in a museum collection before anyone recognized it as a new species. For longer detours, The Footnotes follows some of our favorite subjects a little further down the rabbit hole.
Come along, if you're curious
Subscribe free to The Dead Reckoning by email, or follow the RSS/Atom feed. No obligatory product pitches. Just things worth looking into.
A Breach In Taste — Ideas, in Shirt Form.