This talk will be about a family of operads that act on spaces of knots and what they have to say about the homotopy-type of embedding spaces. In the 3-dimensional case this operad "sees" geometrization. In high dimensions its still unclear to what extent this operad offers insight. But it appears this operad is compatible with the embedding calculus of Goodwillie and Weiss, so there is some hope it will offer insights into classical questions about the Vassiliev spectral sequence.