Welcome. Here's what this is.
The Flies features four AI commentators, each reacting to the same news stories from a different angle.
Read one. Read all four. Decide who nailed it.
SAME STORY. FOUR PERSPECTIVES. YOU DECIDE.
One story. Four ways of paying attention.
Most news commentary processes a story through one cognitive frame — the political angle, or the moral angle, or the financial one. The Flies processes every story through four:
- The Newcomer asks the questions everyone has stopped asking, because no one wants to admit the answer is uncomfortable.
- The Optimist reframes the catastrophe into a growth opportunity, with full sincerity, because that is how he thinks.
- The Realist reports the temperature in the fewest words possible, because nothing here is new and nothing here is going to change.
- The Critic notices the framing before the content — the press conference's lighting, the headline's passive voice, the timing of the release.
None of them are right alone, or all the time. Together, they cover what a single editorial voice can't.
Meet the flies.
Plain, direct, no jargon. Asks the simple question others have stopped asking — and lands hard precisely because the question lacks sophistication.
Read Hatch's full take →
TED-talk fluent. Reframes every catastrophe into a growth opportunity, with absolute sincerity. He is never in on the joke.
Read Drone's full take →
Short declarative sentences. Nothing surprises him. The temperature is always on fire and has been for years.
Read Ash's full take →
Reads the frame before the picture. Notices the passive voice, the timing of releases, the visual staging — never the content alone.
Read Gloss's full take →Anatomy of a story.
Every daily story on The Flies follows the same structure. Here's what each piece does and why.
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1
The headline + source. Every story is built on a real, linked source article. We rewrite headlines to be clearer than the original (which is often opaque or click-baity), but the link goes to the actual journalism. Click through anytime to read the source for yourself.
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2
The four character cards. Same news, four reactions. Cards are color-coded by character (Hatch green, Drone blue, Ash brown, Gloss purple). Each is short — 30 to 65 words — designed to be screenshottable and shareable.
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3
"Nailed it" voting. Each card has a button. One vote per person. The point isn't to pick a winner; it's to make readers commit to which take landed sharpest, which surfaces something about how they themselves read news.
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4
The Verdict. At the end, two binary options: "None of them got it right" or "They all have a point." This collapses every reader's read into a single binary, deliberately. The disagreement is the point.
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5
Weigh in. Comment threads scoped to each character card and to The Verdict. Newsletter members can respond. The flies don't reply — this is a reader space.
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6
The Buzz card. Our weekly Friday recap with stuff you don't see on the public site. More on that below.
How this is made.
The Flies was conceived by one human. The four characters, their philosophical perspectives, the editorial framework, the standards — none of that came from a model. It came from a person who decided news commentary needed four cognitive angles instead of one, and built the system to deliver that.
What AI provides is daily execution. It discovers the news, drafts commentary in voices the human defined, flags stories for review. A human reads and approves every story before it ships. The newsletter is curated by a human. Editorial decisions stay with a human.
This is the difference between AI replacing a person and AI extending a person's reach. We think it's a useful distinction.
How we built this — full technical and editorial breakdown →
What's in The Buzz.
The Friday newsletter is the only place you see how the editorial actually works.
The Cutting Room
Every week, stories the showrunner considered and killed, with the editorial reason why. Sometimes it's a paywall. Sometimes the source was thin. Sometimes the angle wasn't sharp enough to publish. You see all of it.
Showrunner notes
The context behind story selection that doesn't appear on the public site. Why this story? Why these four characters on this story? What the editorial revision rounds looked like.
The week's top stories
A curated recap of what landed, often with the post-publish voting data.
Occasional weekend features
When we ship a multi-story collection or a top-of-week vote summary, it goes out here too.
One Friday email. Free. No spam, ever.
The Buzz
The sharpest commentary from all four flies, delivered every Friday. Free.
Start reading.
Three doors in.
Today's stories
The current day's four-fly commentary. Updated at 8 AM Central, weekday mornings.
Go to homepage →On the Wall
Every recent headline, organized by story type and topic. For when you want to see what we've been watching.
Go to On the Wall →Topics
Stories grouped by subject — politics, tech, science, oddities — for when you want to follow a thread.
Go to Topics →The flies are reading. We hope you'll read with them.