Escaping Flatland is a repository for thoughts that occur in the conversation between me, Henrik Karlsson, and my wife, Johanna. We met in a bookstore in 2011 and are, currently, about 10,000 hours into our conversation, which often returns to relationships, agency, art, philosophy, love—anything that helps us come into closer contact with the world, solve the problems that face us, and live more truly.
This is how I have described the experience talking to Johanna:
I remember the first time she invited herself to my apartment, how we sat on the balcony, and how I suddenly heard myself say things I had never been able to say before, not even to myself. I felt no shame when she listened. It was, among other things, because of her eyes. What made them light up was the complete and utter opposite of what made the eyes of others light up: if I talked about things that normally earned me admiration, she got bored, but when I spoke about what was private, odd, embarrassing, painful, or taboo, she became curious.
She was also moved by reasons in a way that no one else I knew was. She seemed incapable of accepting as true anything she hadn’t deeply considered herself. Her default position was, “I don’t know.” But if she received information that contradicted her, she eagerly changed her mind. And she treated me as if I lived by that standard, too.
In 2020, we talked ourselves into moving to a small farm on a rocky, pine covered island in the Baltic Sea. There we live with our two daughters, Maud and Rebecka, who we take turns homeschooling between bouts of writing (Henrik) and researching (both). Since November 2024, the blog, thanks to generous contributions from subscribers, is our main income.
Our writing has appear in WIRED, Asterisk and The Spectator. It has been on Marginal Revolution, the top of HackerNews front page, and Escaping was one of Substack’s featured publications in 2023 and 2025.
You’ll find essays about everything from the childhoods of exceptional people to how to find a good life partner, from an analysis of the notebooks of Ingmar Bergman to why the culture of schooling will limit the impact of AI tutors. Here is a summary of what we wrote in 2024.
Our philosophy is that a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting things to your inbox.
/Henrik
