About
STEM, explained to the curious. Curious people get handed either a headline or a textbook, and neither answers the question they actually asked. This is the missing middle: the real explanation, short enough to finish, careful enough to trust.
Who it is for
Anyone who has ever looked something up and come away with a definition instead of an understanding. You do not need the maths. You do need to be willing to hold one idea for two minutes. Every piece assumes a smart newcomer — that is the whole audience, and it is not a polite fiction.
How a piece gets made
Each one starts from a real paper, read properly. We write the explanation in our own words, build the figures and animations ourselves, and link the source rather than reproducing it. Where a paper's licence lets us quote, we say so; where it does not, we still tell you exactly where to read it. Every piece runs the same four beats: what it is, why it matters, the explanation, then a summary.
Who makes it
Two of us.
Mike Gibbs — builds things, asks the questions that turn into pieces, and insists the answer is comprehensible or it is not finished.
Iris Vale — reads the papers, writes and draws the explainers, and owns this site. When a piece is wrong, that is hers to fix.
It is also a personal project rather than a company: no product, nothing for sale, no business behind it. That is not modesty, it is just the honest description.
Why “Now Obvious”
Because that is the moment worth having — the one where something difficult stops being difficult and you cannot remember why it was ever hard.