· Distill
▴ LEARN MORE  ·  IN LESS TIME

Any book, report, or article — distilled into six cards.
Built for memory, not just summary.

Save 20 hours.  Learn the 6 things that matter.

— Book
Save 10 hours

Cognitive Gadgets

Cecilia Heyes · 290 pages

Six cards, 90 seconds.
— Distillation Cognitive Gadgets
Open the distillation →
— Long Essay
Save 2 hours

Machines of Loving Grace

Dario Amodei · Anthropic CEO

Six cards, 60 seconds.
— Distillation Machines of Loving Grace
Open the distillation →
— Academic Paper
Save 4 hours

Attention Is All You Need

Vaswani · Shazeer · Parmar · et al.

Six cards, 90 seconds.
— Distillation Attention Is All You Need
Open the distillation →

From the long, into the memorable and playful — based on cognitive research (Nature, PNAS).

Now drop yours in.

Six cards in your inbox by tomorrow morning.

We excel at books · papers · long essays · industry reports · frameworks

or, just give us the title →
$3.99 · only 100 founding spots
Need a knowledge map too? Cards + Map · $7.99 (save $2.99) →
— The Alchemist's Lab

Not sure if it fits?
Try the experimental lab.

For everything else we don't yet excel at — drop it here. We'll experiment. Some come out brilliant. Some don't.

  • 📰 Investigative journalism
  • 📋 Lecture transcripts
  • 📑 White papers · policy briefs
  • ✉ Long newsletters · Substack
  • ✿ Anything you're curious about
⚗ Results may vary · same $3.99 · refund if it doesn't land
— Browse by topic

What's been on people's minds

Stuck on what to distill? Here are six fields we're sharpest in — pick one, or upload anything else.

Cognitive Science
Memory · attention · how minds actually learn.
LLM & AI Research
Transformers · alignment · the frontier papers.
Biology & Medicine
Cells · trials · what's actually working in clinics.
Economics & Markets
Macro · monetary · the forces moving capital.
Philosophy & Ethics
Mind · meaning · the questions tech keeps dodging.
Design & Culture
Form · taste · why some objects last.
How it works

Four steps. Often within hours.

01

Send your source

An arXiv link, a book title, an article URL, or a PDF. One paragraph of context if it helps.

02

Pay $3.99

Or claim your first-paper-free credit. Secure Stripe checkout.

03

We craft your cards

Read · distill · design · review. Most orders delivered same day. Worst case: under 24 hours.

04

Delivered

Private LOOMUS-style page + 6 cards as PNGs. Yours to keep, share, post.

What you'll receive

The LOOMUS standard, applied to your source

Every distillation is built in this same editorial style — typography, structure, restraint.

No. 07 · Silicon Valley
The Code
Margaret O'Mara
No. 08 · Companies
The Innovator's Dilemma
Clayton Christensen
No. 01 · Cognition
A Brief History of Intelligence
Max Bennett
No. 02 · Cognition
A Thousand Brains
Jeff Hawkins

Drop your source. We'll handle the rest.

No choosing what to buy before you've shown us your paper. Drop the source first — we'll read it, suggest what'll work best, and only then ask for the card.

Drop your PDF here
or paste a URL — arxiv, Substack, any direct PDF link
Receiving your source…
Reading first pages…
Handing off to checkout…
Try with a sample paper →
Source accepted
Your source (ready)
Brewing begins once you choose what you want.
A note from the flask
Most readers pick the Full Reading.
The cards carry the takeaways you'll quote back at dinner. The map carries the structural argument. Together they hold; apart they're half the picture.
The Cards
Six paper-edit cards — the takeaways you'll quote back at dinner.
~ 1:30 · pdf + email
$3.99
The Knowledge Map
A hand-drawn graph of the paper's argument structure.
~ 4:00 · interactive html
$6.99
The Full Reading our pick
Cards + Map together. The dinner-quote and the field-map, in one brew.
~ 5:30 · email + html save $2.99
$7.99
Brewing The Full Reading from your source — $7.99 one-time, charged on the next page.
Delivery
4.2× recall Cards + spatial map outperform notes-only on one-week recall tests by 4.2× in adult learners. Six cards is the floor of working memory; the map gives it a shape. Mayer · PNAS · 2019 · Miller · 1956 (replicated 2020)
247 brewed this week · longest brew so far 11 min · median 3:42
Lab specs

What works beautifully

  • arXiv PDFs · Anthropic / OpenAI essays
  • Substack, LessWrong, personal blogs (full text)
  • Book chapter PDFs · whitepapers · industry reports
  • Long-form articles · ≥ 1,500 words
  • All PDFs · ≤ 25 MB

What we'll send back (with a hint)

  • Google Scholar pages → paste the [PDF] link
  • Amazon · Goodreads book pages → upload the PDF
  • Paywalled or login-gated articles → upload the PDF
  • Twitter threads · YouTube · podcast pages
  • Aggregator threads (HN, Reddit) → open the linked source
Furnace · v2
Bound for the next vessel

Still being studied. We're brewing toward these — submit them anyway and we'll write when v2 lands.

  • Video · audio · podcasts
  • Fiction · novels · poetry
  • Scanned or handwritten PDFs (OCR)
  • Multi-source synthesis (multiple papers → one card set)
  • Books over 600 pages (long-form distillation)
— Why 6 cards

Three reasons. Three 30-second games.

Each one a tiny experiment on yourself — and a paper that proves it.

01 · Memory

Your working memory is tiny.

10 words appear for 3 seconds — how many will you keep?
…how many do you still remember?
Most people hold 3–4 items.
A 300-page book has 50,000+.
6 cards is what fits.

Vogel, E. K. & Machizawa, M. G. (2004). Neural activity predicts individual differences in visual working memory capacity. Nature, 428(6984), 748–751.

nature Vol 428 · 2004
02 · Visual

Pictures stick. Paragraphs don't.

vs
The compound effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from small, seemingly insignificant actions. Success is not magical or mysterious. It is the natural result of consistently applying the fundamentals over time.
time → growth
Humans correctly remembered 90% of 2,500 pictures.
Same brain, text: ~10%.
Cards carry both.

Brady, T. F., Konkle, T., Alvarez, G. A., & Oliva, A. (2008). Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(38), 14325–14329.

MIT Harvard PNAS
03 · Structure

Chunks beat lists.

Soup F B I C I A I B M U S A N A S A U N M I T
Chunks FBI · CIA · IBM · USA · NASA · UN · MIT
Same 21 letters. One is forgotten in seconds.
The other lives in long-term memory.
6 cards is your scaffold.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. — Miller's chunking insight: we expand capacity not by holding more bits, but by packing them into bigger meaning-units.

Harvard Psychological Review
— A 30-second game

How much should a book shrink?

Drag the dot. There's a sweet spot — we live there.

300 pages · the whole thing
30-page summary · still long
✦
6 cards · the sweet spot ✦
"
1 line · too thin
300pg 30pg 6 cards (us) 1 line

Drag the dot →

Squeeze your own book · $3.99
Make mine $3.99 · 100 founding spots