The Archive

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The world’s landmark books, essays, and speeches, each distilled into the same 30-second format, so one screenshot carries the whole idea. A new one published every day.

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All Classics Philosophy Science Religion History Speeches Founders' essays Founders' letters Regulations

The archive

Classics

The Invisible Man

H. G. Wells · science fiction novel, 1897

A brilliant but unstable physicist named Griffin discovers how to make himself invisible and arrives in the English village of Iping, where his erratic behavior and violent temper gradually expose his secret. Forced into the open, he recruits a tramp as an unwilling accomplice and confides his story to a former colleague, Dr. Kemp, who betrays him to the authorities. Griffin is hunted down by a mob and beaten to death, his body becoming visible only as he dies.

4 hrs → 50 sec11 Jan

Classics

The Island of Doctor Moreau

H. G. Wells · science-fiction novel, 1896

Shipwrecked naturalist Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where the brilliant, remorseless vivisector Doctor Moreau has spent years surgically reshaping animals into grotesque human-like creatures held in check by a chanted Law. When the Beast Folk begin reverting to their animal natures and Moreau is killed by his own puma creation, Prendick survives alone among the degenerating creatures until a drifting boat allows his escape. He returns to England permanently haunted, unable to stop seeing the animal beneath the surface of every human face.

3 hrs → 43 sec10 Jan

Classics

The Time Machine

H. G. Wells · science fiction novella, 1895

An unnamed Victorian inventor travels to the year 802,701 and discovers that humanity has split into two degenerate species: the frail, passive Eloi who live on the surface and the pale, subterranean Morlocks who tend machinery and prey on the Eloi at night. After losing his machine, surviving a forest fire in which his Eloi companion Weena perishes, and glimpsing a dying Earth tens of millions of years in the future, the Time Traveller recovers his machine and returns home, only to depart again and never come back.

3 hrs → 50 sec9 Jan

Classics

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James · novella, 1898

A young governess takes charge of two beautiful orphaned children, Miles and Flora, at a remote English estate called Bly, and becomes convinced that the ghosts of two dead former servants, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, are corrupting the children from beyond the grave. Whether the apparitions are real or products of the governess's obsessive imagination is left radically ambiguous. Her escalating efforts to force a confession from Miles end in the boy's sudden death in her arms.

3 hrs → 50 sec8 Jan

Classics

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens · novella, 1843

On Christmas Eve, the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead business partner Jacob Marley, who warns him that three spirits will come to give him a chance to escape Marley's fate of eternal wandering in chains. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge his lonely childhood and the warmth he once knew, the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals the joyful poverty of his clerk Bob Cratchit's family and the fragile life of Tiny Tim, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge a future in which he dies unmourned and Tiny Tim is dead. Scrooge wakes on Christmas morning transformed, raises Bob Cratchit's salary, sends the Cratchits a prize turkey anonymously, and becomes a generous second father to Tiny Tim, who does not die.

2 hrs → 50 sec7 Jan

Classics

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad · novella, 1899

Sailor Charlie Marlow recounts his journey up an unnamed African river to retrieve Kurtz, a brilliant ivory trader who has made himself a god to local tribes and abandoned every European moral restraint. Marlow finds Kurtz dying, witnesses his final whispered self-judgment, and returns to Europe where he lies to Kurtz's grieving fiancee about his last words. The story frames imperialism as a darkness that strips away civilization's veneer and reveals the hollowness beneath.

3 hrs → 50 sec6 Jan

Classics

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson · novella, 1886

London lawyer Mr. Utterson grows alarmed by his friend Dr. Henry Jekyll's mysterious connection to the brutal, universally repellent Edward Hyde. The truth, revealed in final confessions, is that Jekyll chemically separated his own dual nature, creating Hyde as the pure embodiment of his evil side, only to lose control as Hyde grew dominant and the transformations became involuntary. Trapped and unable to obtain the original drug formula, Jekyll writes his confession and dies as Hyde, who takes poison rather than face the gallows.

2 hrs → 50 sec5 Jan

Classics

The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman · short story, 1892

A woman diagnosed with a 'nervous condition' is confined to a barred nursery room by her physician husband and forbidden to write or work. Over the course of a summer she becomes obsessed with the room's hideous yellow wallpaper, gradually perceiving a woman trapped behind its pattern. By the final day she has torn off most of the paper, fully identified with the imprisoned figure, and is found creeping around the room on all fours while her husband faints at the sight.

27 min → 47 sec4 Jan

Speeches

The Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln · Gettysburg, 1863

In roughly 270 words, Lincoln reframed the Civil War as a test of whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to human equality can endure, and turned a cemetery dedication into a charge to the living: finish the work, so that government of, by, and for the people shall not perish.

2 min → 20 sec3 Jan

Regulations

The GDPR

European Union · regulation, applies since 2018

Personal data may only be processed with a lawful basis, people hold enforceable rights over their data, and the rules follow EU residents worldwide. Breaches must be reported within 72 hours, and fines reach 4% of global turnover.

88 pg → 40 sec2 Jan

Regulations

The EU AI Act

European Union · regulation, in force 2024-27

The first broad AI law sorts systems by risk: a few uses banned outright, high-risk uses carry heavy obligations, and general-purpose models owe transparency. It phases in through 2027, and fines reach 7% of global revenue.

144 pg → 40 sec1 Jan

Speeches

We Choose to Go to the Moon

John F. Kennedy · Rice University, 1962

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. A hard, public, dated goal organizes and measures a nation's energy. Commit, fund it, and move.

18 min → 25 sec31 Dec

History

The Federalist No. 10

James Madison · essay, 1787

Factions are inevitable because liberty produces them, so a constitution must control their effects rather than remove their causes. Madison's answer: a large republic, where representation and sheer scale make it hard for any faction to capture the whole.

15 min → 30 sec30 Dec

Classics

The Art of War

Sun Tzu · treatise, ~5th century BC

The supreme excellence is winning without fighting. Know yourself and your opponent, prefer positioning and deception to brute force, adapt to the ground you are on, and never fight a long war.

2 hrs → 30 sec29 Dec

Classics

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius · private notes, ~170 AD

The private notebook of a Roman emperor practicing Stoicism on himself. You control your judgments, never events; obstacles are material for character; you will die, so spend attention accordingly; and other people's opinions are not your business.

6 hrs → 30 sec28 Dec

Founders' essays

Default Alive or Default Dead?

Paul Graham · essay, 2015

One question determines a startup's strategy: at current growth and spending, do you reach profitability before the money runs out? Most founders cannot answer it, and the ones who ask too late meet the fatal pinch: default dead, plus investors who no longer want to help.

5 min → 25 sec27 Dec

Founders' letters

An Owner's Manual

Warren Buffett · Berkshire Hathaway, 1996

Buffett's booklet of owner-related business principles: shareholders are owner-partners, management eats its own cooking, performance is measured by per-share intrinsic value, debt is used sparingly, and results are reported with the same candor Buffett would want as a silent partner.

30 min → 35 sec26 Dec

Founders' letters

The 1997 Amazon Shareholder Letter

Jeff Bezos · Amazon, 1997

It's all about the long term, and it is still Day 1. Optimize for market leadership over quarterly optics, obsess over customers rather than competitors, make bold bets, and stay frugal. Amazon reattaches this letter to every annual report since.

12 min → 30 sec25 Dec

Founders' essays

Do Things That Don't Scale

Paul Graham · essay, 2013

Startups do not take off by themselves; the founders push, by hand. Recruit users one at a time, deliver service that cannot possibly scale yet, and treat the unscalable work as the education that produces the growth that eventually does scale.

15 min → 30 sec24 Dec

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