The Present Tense

opening the collection…

WORLD

drag to move · scroll or double-click to zoom · zoom in until the countries open · click a headline to read it

NARRATIVES select one to see its headlines and the case for and against it

ABOUT

The day's headlines, and the narratives that run through them.

The Present Tense gathers hundreds of headlines from publishers in dozens of countries and lays them out as a field, roughly by geography, each one a link to the original report. Once a day a language model reads the whole collection and writes, in plain language, three to five narratives: only the joins that hold, so a quiet day has fewer. A narrative is an idea that joins unlike events: a price in one country, a strike in a second, a court case in a third, that turn out to share a cause, a mechanism, an actor or a shape.

The narrative is the idea; the headlines are its evidence; what it joins is listed at the top of each one. They are shown along the bottom of the page. Every edition is kept: lists where we were, each narrative says what it continues from the edition before and what has changed, and the field can be stepped back to the headlines an earlier edition read. Threads draws the narratives across days and carries the Chronicle, a running account of where things stand by these headlines, revised after each edition.

is a second register beside the headlines: yesterday's most-viewed Wikipedia articles in each of twenty-eight language editions, Bluesky's trending topics and the hashtags trending on a few Mastodon servers. It shows what people looked up and talked about against what publishers printed. It is context for the narratives, never evidence, and the model may mention it but cannot cite it.

"Walk this narrative", at the top of each one, steps through it a beat at a time with the field moving under it: the claim, each event and its headlines, each connection, each horizon back in time, and the case against. Each narrative says how firm it is: firm when the cause or actor is named in the headlines themselves, plausible when the join is a reading a careful reader could contest, tentative when the pattern may be an artefact of the sample or the day. Each also looks ahead, in a framed section apart from the evidence. It says what to watch for: one or two things that should follow, by a date, if its join is right. Later editions check them against their headlines, and Ahead keeps every one, kept, failed or still open, beside the firmness that was claimed. And it says where this goes: the past case the join most resembles and how that went, two or three paths it could take with one favoured, and where the decade points. That part is the writer's anticipation, drawn on what the model knows of history and politics and not only on the headlines, and the expectations are how the site holds it to account. The narratives are interpretations, not findings. Each one states a claim, shows which headlines it rests on, says what might connect them, and then sets out the strongest case against itself in a final section called The case against. Read both. The point is the argument, not the verdict.

Where we are, and the record

At the top of the narratives sits a paragraph from the Chronicle: where things stand today by these headlines, revised after every edition, with its threads as links into the narratives that continue them. The whole Chronicle, with every earlier version, is on Threads. Beneath it is the record: with each revision the Chronicle's keeper writes one sentence saying what the day is in the longer story since 1945. Those sentences are added to and never revised, so over months they become a history of the present written as it happened, by a machine that is held to what it said.

What you are looking at

Headlines come from the GDELT Article List, which indexes world news metadata: titles, links, publishers, languages and timestamps. Nothing else is copied. Each headline links to its publisher. The map places a headline at its publisher's country, never at the event's location. Headlines appear in English by default; the original wording is always one tap away (Original in the header), and a country's press is not that country's people. is every headline in the edition as a plain, searchable list.

Geography on this page is loose on purpose. Headlines are pushed apart so you can read them, so Europe swells and the oceans fill. Hollow rings mark countries we have publishers for but heard nothing from in this collection. That is a gap in our listening, not a silence in the country. Many countries have no publisher here at all. The field is partial and says so.

How we got here

Every narrative ends with four horizons, each anchored to the start of a regime the world is still living inside: since 2020, since 2008, since 1989 and since 1945. Each asks what that regime put in place that today's headlines are living inside. When a join is about something older than 1945, water, land, a border, a religion, the writer may add a fifth horizon that reaches further back and names its own starting year. They place the day's pattern on longer trajectories, sociological, economic, demographic, migratory, environmental, technological and legal, and they point to the moments and books they stand on. A ruler above them marks those moments, and a click on a mark finds it in the field. Zoom the field out past the world and it reaches back in time: today's headlines fade and the library's moments appear at their places, Masjed Soleyman in 1908, Suez in 1869, Petrograd in 1917, each a link, with dotted lines from the moments a narrative stands on to the headlines it joins. They are written as a trajectory, not a verdict: how the present might have arrived, with the dates and institutions named so the reader can check and disagree.

The tide

compares every collection with the one before. Headlines that arrived, stayed or departed are marked, and departed headlines can be shown as ghosts. The present is only legible against the recent past.

How it stays live

A scheduled job collects a fresh bounded sample of headlines, translates new ones, and asks Claude to write a new edition of narratives against a strict schema: a claim, sourced sections, a mandatory case against, and four historical horizons. Headlines are collected four times a day and read once, in a batch request that runs the same model at half the price; the headlines a narrative cites stay in the field until the next edition. The site refuses an edition whose citations do not resolve. Collection without a key keeps the previous narratives and marks them as older than the headlines.

How to help

The site is free, with no paywall and no advertising. Its only running cost is the model's fees for writing the narratives and revising the Chronicle. If you read it and want it to keep going, you can buy it a coffee. Donations pay that bill and nothing else.

Write to hello@presenttense.news. If a narrative joins things it should not, or misses a join it should have made, that is the kind of reading the site is for, and it is worth saying so.

Credits and limits

Concept and direction: Craig Smith. Headline metadata: The GDELT Project. Land: Natural Earth. The line "the future arrives as somebody else's maintenance" is Codex's.

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