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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.…
There’s a good chance that the voice taking your order at the drive-thru at practically any major fast-food chain in America right now isn’t human. It sounds similar. It reacts fast. When you decide to change your mind about the fries three times, it doesn’t sigh. Most people outside of…
A comet that is only a kilometer wide—roughly three times the height of the Eiffel Tower, give or take—is doing something that, until recently, no one had ever seen a comet do. It is located somewhere beyond Mars. It decelerated. almost came to a halt. Then it started spinning in…
When you’re making an investment, there is a specific type of mistake that doesn’t feel like a mistake. It feels like caution. It feels like pattern recognition and hard-won discipline. And then, about eighteen months later, you’re watching a stock you passed on sitting at three times the price you…
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View MoreA family was having dinner in the San Fernando Valley on an August evening in 2020 when their lights went out. There isn’t a storm outside. The street is free of downed wires. The grid operator in California made the slow, deliberate decision to cut power to over 800,000 homes…
In the spring of 2019, Jeff Bezos made what appeared to be a fairly typical billionaire-in-space announcement while standing in front of a model of a moon lander at a media event in Washington. A lunar lander was being constructed by Blue Origin. It would transport goods. People, eventually. In…
When a homeowner answered the door in a peaceful Scottsdale, Arizona neighborhood early on January 31, she saw two young men in delivery uniforms carrying a package and a dolly. Nothing out of the ordinary. Deliveries arrive on Saturday mornings in the Sweetwater Ranch area, and no one seems to…
Somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, a woman enters a few local currency notes into a slot machine at a phone recharge kiosk and receives airtime. The solar-powered kiosk, which is located on a dusty roadside, is owned by Tether if you follow the ownership chain through a number of subsidiaries and…
You almost instantly notice something when you pull up a chart showing the recent performance of the U.S. stock market. Fifty-five percent of the market’s growth can be attributed to ten companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Broadcom, and six others riding the wave of AI enthusiasm. Not a widespread demonstration.…
Around 2018, Anna Liljedahl was browsing Facebook when she came across something that made her stop. The platform began employing facial recognition software to identify individuals in images; it was able to tag faces in the background of birthday photos and extract names with startling accuracy from crowd shots. When…
A game developer who has spent the last ten years creating worlds for a major studio is starting over somewhere in California right now, maybe in a spare bedroom, maybe at a used desk next to a window that looks out on nothing in particular. The badge has vanished. There…
When you step outside on a clear April night and stare up long enough, something changes. The day’s cacophony, including the news, the screen, and the traffic, disappears, leaving only the sky and the gradual realization that a lot is going on up there this month. By all standards, April…
There’s a particular kind of moment in financial history that only becomes obvious in retrospect — a month, sometimes just a few weeks, where enough things happen close enough together that you look back later and say: that was the turn. There is a good chance that March 2026 will…
There is a specific type of discomfort that results from careful news rather than bad news. It’s easy to ignore screaming headlines about AI replacing human labor. Since at least 2016, they have been coming in waves, and the unemployment rate hasn’t actually dropped. A carefully crafted research paper from…
During a gaming tournament in New York City in the summer of 2019, Kyle Giersdorf, a 16-year-old from Pottsgrove, Pennsylvania, won three million dollars and a new username that became well-known online: Bugha. The Fortnite World Cup was taking place at Arthur Ashe Stadium, which typically hosts professional tennis matches.…
This story can be told in a way that makes it seem like a simple victory. A younger American, perhaps thirty-two, who lives in Austin, Denver, or somewhere in between, has been holding Bitcoin since 2020 and has seen it develop into something that appears on a portfolio screen to…