The first hundred stories: 102 where the desk went, what it skipped.
vizmaya.fyi passed 100 published stories on 26 October 2026. This is the desk's own accounting: 102 stories, 41 built by hand in the viz engine since March and 61 written by agents in the three weeks since 5 October.
Tied together by topic, country and the names they drop, they make one network. The United States and India are its two gravity wells. The rest of the story is what sits between them, and what sits nowhere.
Sixty-nine countries. Africa in nine of fifty-five.
Every country a story materially covers, shaded by how many. The United States appears in 42 stories and India in 29; 36 stories touch neither. By region the coverage is lopsided: half of Asia and Europe, a sixth of Africa, a fifth of the Americas.
Countries covered, 102 stories
Countries per story from the desk's own classification of all 102; region totals are the UN member states in each, plus a few territories the desk's atlas lists.
About 20 stories share one shape: A says X. The record says Y.
Six are built on a disagreement between two official sources: the press release against the paper, the front page against the footnote, two trackers for one gas plant, one Ramayana hill counted twice by two states. Nine ask who pays, decides, owns or controls. Six are built on what a record leaves out.
The count is a reading of titles and deks, not a tag in the data. It was there in the engine era too: “The Army That Isn't There”, “Stargate's Real Constraint”.
Three ways to write the sentence, of 102 stories
The six where two sources disagree:
- Indraprastha: the ASI says identified, its own paper says possible
- Jio IPO debt: 0.36x on the front page, 1.73x in the notes
- Arctic LNG 2: nobody agrees how much gas it ships
- Chitrakoot: one Ramayana hill, counted twice by India
- Steel Dynamics aluminum mill: the breakeven claim
- A riverbed full of timbers, and two stories about them
The headline grew from 4 words to 10, and became the thesis.
Engine-era titles average four words: “The Quiet Inflation”, “A Leaky Future”, “The Last Forest Before the Strait”. HTML-era titles average ten, and 33 of 61 carry a colon: “Jio IPO debt: 0.36x on the front page, 1.73x in the notes”. The claim moved out of the hero image and into the sentence.
14 titles contain a number, 10 are two sentences, 5 are questions. The break is 5 October, the first agent-written story.
Words in the title, all 102 stories in date order
Titles as published; a word is anything between spaces.
The house lens is Concealment: 23 of 71 desk stories.
The desk reads every subject through one of five lenses. Market led the engine era, 13 to 11. October flipped it: Concealment 14 of 37. On the atlas side the top lens is “Who controls the story”, 6 of 14. One instinct in two vocabularies: what the filing, the footnote, the press release or the official map leaves out.
The 41 engine-era stories predate the lenses and were classified after the fact. The randomizer offers the five lenses evenly; the desk picks Concealment about six times as often as Choke point.
Desk stories by lens, of 71
Atlas and epics stories carry their own lenses and are not in this count.
Forty-one stories start this year. Eleven start before year zero.
Where each story's argument begins, on one ruler: 41 in 2026, 24 in the five years before, 13 in the 1990s and 2000s, 9 in the two centuries before that, 4 in the first eighteen centuries, 11 BCE. The median story starts in 2024. The oldest, on Aboriginal craft sites, starts 35,400 BCE.
The start year is the earliest date the story leans on, read from the text: a census, a poem's composition, a lab date. It is a judgment, not a field in the data.
Years back from 2026 where each story begins
One dot per story; the scale is logarithmic, so each gridline is ten times the last.
One strait runs through 7 stories in seven months.
The desk never announced a Hormuz series. It wrote one anyway: a GPU hour repriced by the strait on 1 March, Great Nicobar in May, the IEA's report and India's four shocks the same month, the tanker strike in June, the shadow fleet in September, the family offices in October. Read in order they are a serial.
The other recurring subjects: IPOs in 5 stories, China in 4, the Ramayana and Ayodhya in 3 across two strands, Finland in 3.
The Strait of Hormuz, story by story
Stories whose title or dek names the strait, a tanker or Hormuz.
The engine wrote the desk. The agents added the atlas and the epics.
The first 41 stories were 37 desk pieces, two atlas, two epics. The next 61 are 34 desk, 12 atlas, 7 epics, 6 founder essays, a Nobel story and the studio's own board. The speed changed what gets written, not only how fast.
Form follows strand: desk stories ship as scrolls or decks, atlas as boards, epics as books, essays all as decks. So does the map: 13 of 14 atlas and 8 of 9 epics stories carry one, against 27 of 71 desk stories.
Stories by strand, engine era and agent era
Engine, March to 4 October · 41
Agents, 5 to 26 October · 61
Essays are the desk's own label for six founder pieces that fit no strand.
Five stories on AI infrastructure. None on AI software.
The desk's list has 29 industries; 21 have at least one story. Capital markets lead with 12, then trade and policy, energy, AI infrastructure. Eight have never been written about, and one of them is the industry everyone else writes about: AI software and agents.
The other seven: chemicals, cybersecurity, insurance, media and sport, professional services, quantum computing, supply chains.
Desk stories by industry, the top eight of 21
Never written about:
Two eras of one desk.
countries covered, of 193.
the mapstories that touch neither the United States nor India.
countries per storystories in the fourteen days from 5 to 18 October. The engine era's best week: six.
publish dateswords in the average agent-written story, against 1,354 in the engine era. Faster, and longer.
word countsmap pins with coordinates in the 30 engine stories that carry a map.
story configswhere the oldest story begins: a ground-edge axe in Arnhem Land.
Aboriginal craft, 26 Octengine drafts started and never listed; 25 of them died in June.
unlisted draftsindustries on the desk's list with no story yet.
scene 7Countries, lenses and start years are the desk's own classification of all 102 stories, made for this piece and open to argument. Word counts strip markup; map pins are read from the engine stories' configs.
“Give me some other topics too, other than semiconductors and AI infrastructure.”