A week of noise, distilled into a single Sunday signal

The idea for the Distillery sprung up from an ordinary conversation between two long-time friends and colleagues. Over the course of that chat, Vahan, an investment professional by trade, complained about the state of the news. It wasn’t only the hours he was wasting every week trying to get adequately informed, it was that to him, the incremental value of each news item seemed to be low or even negative. By the time he was finished reading the morning’s financial news, whatever useful information he managed to squeeze out of them was already at least partially out of date. To make matters worse, the effort it took to shift through the deluge of low quality reporting, “click bait” disguised as journalism, and the blatant algorithmic bias of social media, was not just wasting his time, but sabotaging his cognitive capacity too through constant distraction and input overload.

He realized he wasn’t consuming the news anymore, the news was consuming him.

The other friend, Nat, an economist, knew exactly what he was talking about, because she was spending a lot more time knee deep in the muddy trenches of the 24 hour news cycle. The difference is, she was actually enjoying it. As a self-confessed news addict, she’s been “plugged in” for decades, tracking stories from all over the world and from all kinds of sources on daily basis, eventually developing a very efficient sense for isolating signals amid constant noise and identifying actually consequential stories even when they are buried deep beneath the silt of the daily cycle. After that chat, she saw a way to turn her (admittedly somewhat unhealthy) obsession into a solution and distilled. was born.

The idea was simple: Why not let Nat loose to do what she enjoys most and do the heavy lifting at the same time. All week long, she scans global news headlines, filtering out the fluff and cross-referencing sources to find and objectively verify the stories that actually matter in order to produce a single briefing delivered on Sunday. She “collects” and tracks the most impactful political, economic and business news as they evolve, ensuring the version you read on Sunday reflects the full arc of the truth rather than a fleeting headline or unverified “story” on social media. For every story that makes the final cut, dozens are discarded because they fail to meet our standard of reliability or are exposed as partisan or sensationalist noise. By the time we hit "send," what remains has survived a great deal of skepticism and the final product has been distilled down to the purest form of real information.

Every Sunday, we deliver a distilled, human-curated briefing that respects your time.

With no algorithms to please, no AI to hallucinate facts and no financial incentives to skew the narrative, we provide a reliable record that is strictly "by humans, for humans."