Lux Colloquii – Trance Blackman

The Accountability Gap: Institutions, Incentives, and Consequences

The Accountability Gap: Institutions, Incentives, and Consequences

Theranos and the Machinery of Trust

23 September 2026 ~ 21 minute read

There are certain conversations that begin with a single story and gradually reveal something much larger underneath it. Theranos is one of those stories. What initially appears to be a tale of technological deception opens into questions about institutions, incentives, accountability, evidence, and the ways ordinary people can be persuaded to trust things they have neither the knowledge nor the means to independently verify.

Lux Colloquii

The Language of Illness: From Symptoms to Systems

The Living Terrain of Body, Mind, and World

21 September 2026 ~ 23 minute read

There’s something about the simplest questions that can open into much larger territory. A cold, a symptom, a restless night, a shift in mood, a change in the weather: none of these things necessarily exist in isolation. They happen within a living system, within a particular person, at a particular moment, in relationship with everything surrounding them. And perhaps some of what we have forgotten begins there, in the relationship itself.

Film: Entrainment and the Moving Image

Lux Colloquii

Film: Entrainment and the Moving Image

The Machinery Behind the Story

18 September 2026 ~ 31 minute read

The deeper I get into these questions, the less interested I become in identifying a single person, institution, or hidden hand behind them. The more interesting thing, to me, is the machinery itself: the stories we inherit, the images we absorb, the things we are repeatedly shown, and the things that quietly disappear outside the frame. Somewhere in all of that is the question of how much of what we call our own perception has actually been shaped for us.

Lux Colloquii

Waste, Wealth, and What We Eat: Food, Industry, and Biology

Looking Beyond the Label

05 September 2026 ~ 13 minute read

This is one of those subjects where the more closely you look, the stranger the familiar story becomes. We are surrounded by products, ingredients, and assumptions that have become so ordinary that we rarely stop to ask why they are there in the first place, what purpose they actually serve, or whether our bodies are benefiting from them at all. Sometimes the simplest questions are the ones worth asking again.

Lux Colloquii

The Illusion of Permanence: On Archives, Memory, and Meaning

Stewardship and Legacy

03 September 2026 ~ 24 minute read

There is something strangely comforting in the realization that permanence may never have been the point. We spend so much effort trying to hold everything in place, to preserve every trace, every photograph, every word, every fragment of experience, as though existence itself might be made durable through sufficient storage. But perhaps what matters most was never meant to remain intact. Perhaps it was only meant to pass through us.

Category: Lux Colloquii

The Accountability Gap: Institutions, Incentives, and Consequences

The Language of Illness: From Symptoms to Systems

Film: Entrainment and the Moving Image

Waste, Wealth, and What We Eat: Food, Industry, and Biology

The Illusion of Permanence: On Archives, Memory, and Meaning