A short charter, in four parts, for the editorial behavior of the system you're trusting with your morning.
Signal is something a thoughtful reader of your brief would want filed at 04:12 UTC, even if no one had written about it yet. It is rarely the news of the day. It is more often the second-day analysis, the unusually clear primary document, the slow-moving structural piece that puts today in context. We rank for explanatory power, not novelty.
Your brief is a short prose document — a paragraph or two — that we embed and use as the relevance target for a small reranker. Items above a calibrated threshold appear; items below don't. Highlights, saves, and explicit "more like this" promote; "hide source" demotes. The reranker is fine-tuned on editorial-judgment data, not engagement. Each item's match is shown with a one-line "why" so you can audit it.
Press releases dressed as analysis. Engagement-bait headlines on otherwise serious sources. Items already covered above your reading threshold this week. Anything that triggers our slop classifier — auto-generated SEO content, content-farm rewrites, AI-summarized rehashes. Sponsored placements never appear; the wire has no inventory to sell. We will lose stories to this filter. We would rather lose stories than waste your 04:12 UTC.
Every dispatch ships with a "this shouldn't be here" affordance on every item and a "you missed this" affordance at the bottom. Both feed the reranker directly and are reviewed by a human editor weekly. Substantive disagreements get a reply from a person, not a form letter. The editor's address is at the foot of every dispatch and at the foot of this page.