The Vanishing Public Company
The number of US listed firms has nearly halved since 1996. Regulation explains a small part of it. What replaced...
Authorship Under Volume
The cost of producing a plausible book has fallen near to zero. The question is what that does to a...
Capability Was Never the Bottleneck
The 2026 AI Index reports a sharp gain in agent capability. The deployment data tells a different and more important...
What PEARL Actually Showed
A year-long randomized trial of low-dose rapamycin returned a quieter result than the longevity press has acknowledged.
Four years of American industrial policy — what the record shows
The CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act became law in August 2022. The record, nearly four years...
The album, as object — what becomes of a sixty-year form
The album has been the organising unit of popular music for six decades. Under streaming, its everyday function has been...
On reading the Lancet Commission’s ’45 per cent’ figure correctly
The 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia prevention is substantive and important. The public life of its headline number — that...
What the first RCT of AI in cancer screening has actually shown
The MASAI trial has now reported its primary endpoint. The result is positive, narrow, and instructive — about what AI...
The case against treating AI infrastructure as a technology decision
The roughly seven hundred billion dollars of annual capital expenditure committed for 2026 by five firms is discussed as a...
What a library is for, when half a million books stop being lent
The 2024 ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive — and the half-million titles removed from digital lending in its wake...
What the evidence on GLP-1 medications and extended life actually says
The cardiovascular and mortality evidence on semaglutide and its class is now substantial in defined at-risk populations. Reading that as...
The case against reading benchmark scores as capability
Frontier language models have risen very rapidly on most published benchmarks. It does not follow that capability has risen at...
The Last Long-View Institutions
Sovereign wealth funds are not smarter than other investors. They hold longer time horizons because they are structurally insulated from...
The Archive and the Memory
Every civilisation has confused preservation with transmission. AI training on the cultural corpus introduces a new version of this very...
What GLP-1 Drugs Actually Do to Ageing
The weight-loss story is the popular story. The metabolic and inflammatory story is more consequential — and less settled than...
Reasoning Is Not Intelligence
The new generation of AI models produces longer inference chains. That this constitutes reasoning in any philosophically meaningful sense is...
How the IMF actually models catastrophe — a careful reading
The April 2026 World Economic Outlook presents three scenarios for the global economy. The most optimistic is already out of...
What a government owes a festival — and what it does not
The Home Office withdrew Ye’s travel authorisation and an entire festival collapsed behind it. The ban was defensible. The wreckage...
What the psychedelic evidence actually supports — and what the executive order does not address
An executive order signed with a podcaster in the room and a quip about wanting some directs fifty million dollars...
What the Beijing half-marathon actually proved — the unexcited version
A humanoid robot ran 21 kilometres in under 51 minutes. The engineering is impressive. The claims attached to it require...
Prices Are Not Forecasts
Prediction markets have become a preferred interface between political uncertainty and public belief. The case is that the prices being...
What the Farm Transmits
America lost approximately fifteen thousand farms in 2025. The loss of each farm is also the loss of what that...
The Nitrogen Debt
The world's food supply depends on a chemistry invented in 1909 and a supply chain routed through three contested straits....
Loneliness Is Not a Wellness Problem
The health consequences of social isolation have been quantified with precision. The policy response has treated it as a personal...
The Library That Doesn’t Know It’s Burning
Across two decades of digitisation, institutions have converted their archives without asking what they were losing. The photograph survives. The...
8 tech and science events worth attending in 2026. Ranked by signal, not scale.
The tech conference circuit has a noise problem. Most events optimise for attendance, vendor exposure, and networking volume. The events...
The attention economy’s biological cost. This is what distraction is actually doing.
The conversation about smartphones and social media has been conducted almost entirely in the language of psychology and productivity. The...
Prediction markets know things first. That is the question Congress is avoiding.
The Polymarket investigation frames the issue as one of insider trading. The more fundamental question is epistemological: what does it...
GDP is rising. The workers who used to drive it are not.
The standard economic metrics for assessing the AI transition were not designed for a transition in which the cognitive layer...
We didn’t develop a loneliness problem. We demolished the places where loneliness couldn’t survive.
The loneliness epidemic is framed as a psychological condition requiring psychological intervention. The evidence suggests it is the predictable consequence...
