About

The Spine is an experiment in whether daily news can be synthesized across the political spectrum into a single narrative that a reader can actually trust, without that reader having to do the comparison work themselves.

What it is

Each morning, The Spine pulls top stories from eight mainstream outlets (left, center, and right of center) and asks Claude to produce one integrated story per cluster of related coverage. The shared facts lead. The narrative flows. Where coverage diverged, the divergence is called out inline, not in a separate "what each side is saying" box. Where both sides missed something, we flag it. Every source is linked.

The article layout is the product. The left side of every story is a "spine" tracing the verifiable facts of the piece: vote tallies, dollar figures, dates, direct quotes. You can read just the spine to get the factual skeleton, or read the right-side narrative for the full picture.

What it isn't

The Spine is not a replacement for reading the original reporting. It is a morning brief that saves you the labor of comparing six versions of the same story. Every source is linked; if a synthesis raises a question, click through.

It is also not a neutral omniscient narrator. Large language models have their own tendencies. We publish the full synthesis prompt on the methodology page so you can see exactly how the sausage is made.

Who's behind it

The Spine is a solo project by Timothy Bolger. I built it because I couldn't trust my news feed anymore and I wanted a single place to catch up each morning without feeling like I was being recruited.