How topics in play work
The home page shows a few topics in play: a main name, and the names the Wire keeps covering together with it right now. It describes what is being covered; it does not predict anything. It is a fan tool for searching this site, not from S2 Underground.
How a topic is built
Each topic is a main name and the names the Wire keeps covering together with it. “Together” means inside the same report item (one “Region:” paragraph and its Analyst Comment), not just the same day’s Wire, because every Wire covers many theaters at once.
- A name joins a topic once it has shared a report item with the main name in 2 or more of the last 14 Wires, more often than chance would give (checked over the last 45 Wires, with a correction for testing many names at once).
- since is when the current run of shared coverage began: the first Wire behind the confirmation, kept for as long as the pair keeps passing the test; the Wire link opens the latest report where they appeared together, and hovering a name shows the sentence.
- Names in grey are pending: they shared an item in one recent Wire only. Very broad names (the United States, whole regions) are never members.
We checked this the same way as the recurrence score below: on 145 past Wire dates (April 1 – October 16, 2026) we shuffled which report item each name sat in, inside the same Wire, and re-ran the method. Shuffled data produced about 0.07 members per topic; the real data about 3.2, roughly 45 times more. It describes what is being covered together — it does not predict anything.
Behind the scenes: the near-term recurrence score
This list is no longer shown on the home page. It is still built every day, because it picks the main names for the topics above (highest score first), and we keep checking its accuracy.
Big news usually keeps going for a few days. If something huge is happening in the world, tomorrow’s Wire is more likely to talk about it again than about something random.
We use that idea to rank names that look more likely to show up in the next few Wires. Names only — not a crystal ball.
The simple idea
Think of a snowball rolling downhill. Once it is moving, it tends to keep moving for a while. That is momentum.
Some stories also have staying power: they come up Wire after Wire for weeks. A name that has shown up on most recent Wires is a good bet to show up again.
- Momentum — names that have been showing up a lot lately, and more than usual, get a boost.
- Staying power — names that appeared on many of the last 14 Wires get a boost, even if they were quiet for a day or two.
What the math is doing
We do not guess the future from thin air. We look at the public Wire text we already have, and only at what was published up to the as of date.
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Momentum — how often each tracked name appeared in the last week, whether
that count is rising, and whether it came up in the last three days.
Mi = fi + ΔfiMi momentum · fi recent frequency · Δfi change in frequency
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Staying power — on how many of the last 14 Wires the name appeared.
Wi = Wires mentioning i, out of the last 14Wi staying power · counts Wires, not mentions, so one very long report cannot dominate
The recurrence score is a weighted sum of these pieces, used only to put names in order. It is a ranking score, not a calibrated probability.
How we check it
Every change to the score is tested on past Wires first: for each past day, we build the list using only what had been published by then, and count how many of the top names actually came up in the next few Wires. The current version gets about 6 of its top 10 names right over the next three Wires, which beats simply listing the most-mentioned names. An earlier version also tried to group names that appear together; in those tests it did not help, so it was removed.
How it was shown
Until October 18, 2026 the home page showed this as a short ranked list of names, highest score first. Now the home page shows only Topics in play; the list still refreshes when new Wires land and feeds the topics and the predictive layer on the map.
Data
Built from the same public Wire material on this site. Free downloads live on the
Data page at
/data/
if you want to explore the corpus yourself.
What this is not
Topics in play only describe what recent Wires covered together. The recurrence score is not a promise that any name will appear. Neither is a forecast of real-world events. Not advice. Not an official S2 product. Reading the Wire still comes first.