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View MoreChristopher Altman saw it in the same way that most small business owners do: in the quiet of an inbox that used to fill up on its own, rather than all at once. His Oakland tree-trimming crew scheduled three weeks off for years without his involvement. Then, the reservations simply…
The atmosphere changed somewhere between a half-empty diesel station outside Hamburg and the screens of a London trading floor. Like these things often do, it happened quietly. In January, Brent crude was trading at about sixty dollars. It was close to 120 by the second week of March. Ten weeks.…
Until something goes wrong, most people don’t give their mortgage servicer much thought. The name on the loan statement becomes the most important phone number in the house when a payment doesn’t post correctly, an escrow account appears suspicious, or, in the more stressful version of this story, an unexpected…
It is truly hard to believe that this company has never had a public share price when you watch a Falcon 9 rocket take off from Cape Canaveral in the wee hours of the morning, with the ground trembling a little and the exhaust cloud catching the floodlights. Without ever…
Between fifteen and twenty million Americans do something in secret every April that the rest of the nation hasn’t yet figured out. They submit a request for a tax extension. Not because they’re having problems. Not because they have more debt than they can manage. simply because they require additional…
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View MoreA similar discussion has been taking place in government offices, corporate boardrooms, and economics departments for a number of years: AI is obviously doing something remarkable in the lab, in the demo, and in the meticulously staged product announcement, but where exactly is it in the numbers? The expenditures are…
Millions of people open their Amazon apps every spring for a week in late March in search of a deal on an item they’ve been considering since January. AirPods. a speaker with Bluetooth. a stand for charging. If they’re feeling upbeat about the upcoming season, perhaps a yoga mat. The…
There is a version of this story that resembles a simple David vs. Goliath story, in which tenacious Epic Games charges at the gates of Steam’s massive, decades-old fortress with a lot of guts and a better revenue deal. The reality is much messier, particularly as of early 2026. Fortnite’s…
The planetary science community’s response to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s announcement at an event called “Ignition” in early April 2026 that the agency planned to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars by December 2028 ranged from shock to mild alarm. Planetary scientist Vicky Hamilton of the Southwest Research Institute put…
Bitcoin first surpassed $120,000 in July 2025. The timing wasn’t coincidental. US lawmakers were getting ready to discuss legislation that would establish federal regulations for digital assets for the first time. The market reacted to the regulatory momentum as a sign of legitimacy, which is how cryptocurrency markets typically react…
During a widely publicized interview at a tech conference in the summer of 2023, Linda Yaccarino calmly argued that X was a platform that advertisers could rely on. She had only been working there for a few weeks. According to most accounts, she was a seasoned media executive with real…
The silence in a department store that is closing has a certain quality. The glass cases, the carpeted aisles, and the overhead lighting humming over dwindling inventory are all still in place. Final discounts are marked with encouraging red numbers on signs. A few workers are standing close to registers…
Something changes around the third or fourth time someone opens their banking app and sees a charge they truly can’t place—$14.99 from something called Paramount+, perhaps, or $9.99 for a fitness app they downloaded during a short, hopeful January. For an increasing number of people, the mild annoyance that once…
The wild beehives on the large kapok trees in the northwest Amazon have been declining for years, somewhere along the rivers that cut through Kofan and Waorani territory. If the bees are present at all, the honey harvests that once filled buckets now fill spoons. Recently, two guests showed up…
The ground has been rising for decades in the port town of Pozzuoli, just west of Naples. Not drastically, not in a way that would cause people to flee into the streets on any given Tuesday, but consistently, quantifiably, and with an accumulation that is now hard to ignore. The…
Imagine a woman in Lagos browsing through an Android wallet app while seated in a tiny store selling airtime and phone accessories. In the last year, the value of the local currency has dropped by a third. The price of cooking oil and the cost of late school fees are…
Odin, a small unmanned spacecraft, took off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early on February 27, 2025. NASA was not involved in the mission. There was no live broadcast with a countdown clock on every television network, and there were no throngs of…