Learning Et Al.
Learning Et Al. (“learning it all”). A daily research digest around a provocative question, built from the papers and news that match your interests.
After leaving research, I didn’t want to stray from the literature, but I didn’t want to read entire papers either. I wanted to see what’s out there and find new things to be curious about.
The Core Idea
Every digest starts from a real research topic, not a keyword. The system walks the OpenAlex taxonomy from one of your interests down to a specific topic, writes a provocative question around it, and gives you the two or three papers that argue best together.
One Digest Per Day
One digest each morning, generated while you sleep. You can regenerate, but you have to say what was wrong with the one you got. The value is curation, not volume.
02How a Digest Gets Made
Discovery
01Topic SeedOpenAlex taxonomyLast 8 excluded
02Question GenTheme-firstGrounded in topic
03RetrievalBM25 + EmbeddingsRRF + MMR diversity
04SelectionComplementarityRe-rank + drop
Synthesis (10-12 LLM calls)
05Editorial PassEvidence-outwardHeadline + order
06SkeletonRoles + tensionsStructured JSON
07ProseArgument arcNot summaries
08Critique + ReviseSelf-refineCoverage gate
What Makes It Work
01Structure before proseA summary of papers from different fields just lists them side by side. So the synthesis first decides which source supports the question, which complicates it, and where the tension is, then writes, fact-checks, and revises. A digest costs about a cent and a half.
02Relevant, not redundantCandidates are ranked with BM25 and embeddings fused by Reciprocal Rank Fusion, then picked by Maximal Marginal Relevance so you never get six versions of the same finding.
03Staying interestingTopics from the last eight digests are excluded and interests decay daily, so themes don’t converge to a template within weeks.
04No riddle headlinesA deterministic check rejects headlines like “Can technology read your mind without touching it?” before they ship, because the headline is also the email subject line.