2026-03-24: Essay Surface and Tomberg Placement

What changed

The site now has a shared /essays reading surface instead of treating long-form prose as an exception hidden behind /about alone. The new surface includes the founding essay and a new reading edition for the Meditations on the Tarot essay.

The Library navigation now includes Essays, which places long-form writing inside the same public knowledge cluster as sources, concepts, figures, and imagery.

The Tomberg source page can now point readers toward the related essay, and the essay pages point back to their associated source entries where that relationship exists.

Why

The project has moved beyond a single founding statement. A dedicated essay surface gives long-form writing a scalable content model without forcing an immediate top-level navigation decision.

This keeps the site coherent now while leaving room for a future human decision about whether essays should eventually become a primary nav category.

Files and commits

Primary files in this work session:

  • content/specials/ep-00-founding-essay/essay.yaml
  • content/specials/meditations-on-the-tarot-essay/essay.yaml
  • site/lib/essays.ts
  • site/app/essays/page.tsx
  • site/app/essays/[slug]/page.tsx
  • site/app/components/SiteNav.tsx
  • site/app/page.tsx
  • site/app/sources/[slug]/page.tsx

Commit: pending in current work session

Type

User-visible and architectural.

Follow-up

  • Decide whether /about should remain the public canonical path for the founding essay or whether the essays surface should become canonical across all long-form prose.
  • Decide whether essays should gain a top-level navigation entry once there are more than two live pieces.
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