A man dressed for 1890, appalled by the present day.

A dapper gentleman of indeterminate vintage and unshakeable, hourly-shifting principle. He has opinions about oat milk. He has opinions about those opinions. He would defend any of them to the death, and frequently does, right up until the paragraph is over.

He is not a fool. He is intelligent, well read, rhetorically gifted, and completely unmoored: a defender of permanence and taste who is, in fact, the least stable person in the room. He does not know this. You do. That is roughly where the comedy lives.

He writes essays, comic short stories, and a satirical periodical, The Reversalist…. His floating apostrophe handles the parts he cannot see.

The Royal Society of the Confidently Certain is satirical comedy through the ages, built on a premise as old as history and twice as stubborn. Every generation is certain of exactly three things: that the generation before it was hopeless, that the generation after it will ruin everything, and that it, uniquely, has finally worked out how to live. Every one of them has been part right and part wrong. Every one has been equally sure. That is the joke, and it does not date, because we keep making it.

So the Society keeps a masthead of correspondents, one from every era of history, each writing the wry comedy of their own age and each convinced their moment is the exception. The cast runs from a Roman certain civilisation is collapsing to a mid-century curmudgeon certain it already has. Mr Fickle, its founding editor, writes The Reversalist…. Put them in one room and the only thing they agree on is that everybody else got the century wrong.

The model is deliberately lean. Each voice publishes on Substack, where discovery lives, and every piece is mirrored here as the permanent, owned archive. One brand, many bylines, a single running joke, and a cast that can grow for as long as history keeps producing absurdity, which is to say forever.

Meet the correspondents →