The Curious Engineer

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Res Obscura

resobscura.substack.com

Notes on the history of technology, medicine, science, art, drugs, and empire. Also: AI in research and teaching. Click to read Res Obscura, by Benjamin Breen, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

HistoryAI / MLScience

’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
60 from 5 Dec 2019 to 1 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (14 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://resobscura.substack.com/feed

2026 11

  1. Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo
  2. AI labs need to start funding historical research
  3. The "mechanical miracle" that ruined Mark Twain's life
  4. Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
  5. What is happening to publishing?
  6. Why they stopped building wooden stupas
  7. Are "Vintage LLMs" the start of a new humanistic field?
  8. The handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations
  9. Photos from my time in Iran, 2017
  10. The Secret History of Knocking on Wood
  11. What is happening to writing?

2025 16

  1. Why I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years
  2. How well can Gemini 3 make a Henry James simulator?
  3. Can automation help make the humanities more human?
  4. The Age of Books and the Age of Brainrot
  5. All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning
  6. OpenAI's "Study Mode" and the risks of flattery
  7. Why were Belle Époque cities beautiful?
  8. AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder
  9. Onfim's world
  10. When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
  11. AI legibility, physical archives, and the future of research
  12. Happy Lupercalia
  13. The familiar loneliness of the Kinetoscope
  14. When the Sackler Brothers studied LSD
  15. The leading AI models are now good historians
  16. 2,000-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past

2024 12

  1. Why did clothing become boring?
  2. A very deep history of Halloween
  3. Post-postal
  4. On 17th century "cocaine"
  5. Centuries of Childhood
  6. LLM-based educational games will be a big deal
  7. Why etymologies matter
  8. "He spoke of computers with some awe"
  9. How well can AI imitate an early modern doctor?
  10. The (history of) spice must flow
  11. Why drug history?
  12. I talked to Terry Gross!

2023 20

  1. Role-playing with AI will be a powerful tool for writers and educators
  2. Simulating an LSD trip in 1963 with GPT-4
  3. The most interesting things I read in 2023
  4. When technology follows art
  5. Margaret Mead, Technocracy, and the origins of AI's ideological divide
  6. How to use generative AI for historical research
  7. The open-stack library: a futuristic technology from the 18th century
  8. There should be more cash prizes for solving historical mysteries
  9. Simulating History with Multimodal AI: an Update
  10. Before psychedelic therapy for wartime trauma, there was narcosynthesis
  11. Translating Latin demonology manuals with GPT-4 and Claude
  12. Kikkuli!
  13. Historical maps probably helped cause World War I
  14. Simulating History with ChatGPT
  15. Experiencing scientific revolutions: the 1660s and the 2020s
  16. Why Early Modern Books Are So Beautiful
  17. Why did it take psychedelics so long to become popular?
  18. Wilfrid Voynich: Bookseller, Revolutionary, Amateur Cryptologist... Suspected Spy?
  19. Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work?
  20. Res Obscura is now on Substack

2019 1

  1. Res Obscura Newsletter: December, 2019