When a forest’s apex predator disappears, a certain kind of silence descends upon it. The prey animals exhibit different behaviors, such as being less cautious when grazing and being bolder close to the water’s edge. The vegetation shifts. The entire ecosystem undergoes abrupt, irreversible changes that are initially almost undetectable.…

While the lights are off, hundreds of robots labor through the night to construct electric vehicles in a factory in Ningbo, which is located just south of Shanghai. A few engineers in robot maintenance, a quality control team, and the steady mechanical rhythm of arms welding, assembling, and moving parts…

There is a rusted metal cap bolted into a concrete floor somewhere in the northern Russian Kola Peninsula, close to the Norwegian border, surrounded by Arctic forest and the kind of silence found only at the edge of the inhabited world. It’s not big. There is nothing dramatic about it.…

When oil futures cross a round number on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange floor with the speed at which they crossed $100 in early March, there is a certain atmosphere that is unique to the financial industry. Because traders are too seasoned for that, it isn’t quite a celebration. It resembles…

If you spend an afternoon at a diner in a mid-sized Midwestern city, where the lunch special is still written on a chalkboard and the coffee comes in a thick ceramic mug, you will learn something from the conversations at nearby tables that no survey can fully capture. People experience…

A picture of an Amazon Web Services data center in Manassas, Virginia, taken from above, with its rows of identical gray buildings sitting on flat land like a small city that exists only to think, has been making the rounds in financial and tech circles lately. The incredibly long, delicate,…

There’s a certain kind of helplessness that comes over you when you stand at any gas station in America right now and watch the numbers on the pump tick upward. It’s not quite panic, but it’s more subdued and persistent. Midway through March, the price of regular gasoline surpassed $3.96…

The classroom, if you could call it that, doesn’t make an announcement. It is located somewhere in Nairobi’s Westlands neighborhood, which smells like rain on hot pavement in the afternoons and hums with the unique energy of a city that knows it’s becoming something. It is tucked between a juice…

When the fear gauge begins to rise, a specific type of anxiety descends upon a trading floor or, more frequently these days, over a home office with an excessive number of open browser tabs. The S&P 500 fell 1.33% in a single week late in March, partly due to BlackRock…

If you’ve ever had the good fortune to snorkel over a reef, picture it from memory rather than from a nature documentary. The first thing is the color. Fish threading between coral heads with a kind of lazy confidence that comes from living inside a functioning system, impossible blues, yellows,…

There is a forest in northern Myanmar’s Hukawng Valley that is still alive in the only way a forest that old can be. It did not endure through seeds, roots, or other biological means. It survived in resin, a thick, slow-moving sap that dripped from towering araucarian conifers in the…

In Bellevue, Washington, there is a building that functions very differently from any other business of its size. There is no organizational chart on the walls. There are no synergy vice presidents. There won’t be any quarterly all-hands where a blazer-clad person tells staff members what matters this fiscal year.…