Featured News
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.…
Back in February, job seekers filed past rows of recruiters at a career fair at a community center in North Seattle with cautious, practiced optimism. With their resumes in hand, they were dressed for uninvited interviews. Everything was in order. courteous. And, in a way that’s hard to put into…
With the steam rising from the thermal basins, the frost still clinging to lodgepole pines, and the ground appearing perfectly normal underfoot, Yellowstone experiences a unique kind of quiet in the early spring. It is nearly unbelievable to stand close to the Norris Geyser Basin and realize that one of…
There’s a certain blankness when you walk past a closed Starbucks in downtown Toronto; the windows are dark, the green signage is gone, and there’s a paper notice taped to the door. It doesn’t seem like a business choice. Something seems to have been left behind. In just four years,…
Latest News
View MoreIf 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.…
On a Friday morning when the jobs report is released, you can read the room before you see the numbers if you walk past any coffee shop close to a financial district. With their mouths already forming sentences about “temporary factors” and “weather distortions,” suits are leaning into phones and…
It was meant to be a typical dinner. Mike Fincke and his crewmates settled in aboard the International Space Station, floating somewhere over the Pacific, 250 miles above anyone who could assist them, after a long day of preparing equipment for a spacewalk that was scheduled for the following morning.…
Developers are sitting in front of design documents for games that will never be produced somewhere—in a Santa Monica office park, a Stockholm studio campus, or a converted warehouse in Austin that was once referred to as a creative hub. Before they were made public, the projects were canceled. After…
There is a location in the Pacific Ocean where the water temperature is slightly above freezing and the seafloor is located about four kilometers below the surface, roughly halfway between Hawaii and the western coast of Mexico. It is not exposed to sunlight. No moonlight. Not a single star. Most…
Imagine a midsize office in Columbus, Austin, or Charlotte. It would have an open floor plan, a snack wall, and a #random Slack channel that no one uses anymore. The desks are occupied. The meetings are taking place. We are scheduling the quarterly reviews. Everything appears to be more or…
Every winter, people would travel for hours to see something that used to happen in a forest in the Michoacán mountains of Mexico. The oyamel fir trees’ branches would buckle under the combined weight of tens of millions of monarch butterflies, which weigh less than a dime after traveling up…
Tim Sweeney operates Epic Games from a campus that once seemed to be the future of interactive entertainment, somewhere in Cary, North Carolina, a sleepy suburb that doesn’t look much like the hub of a billion-dollar gaming empire. Fortnite was making a lot of money. Everyone had a license for…
In desperate situations, a certain kind of hope emerges—not the cautious, well-reasoned kind, but the urgent kind, which arises when all other options have been exhausted. This urgency has found a new home in the West Bank, where the unemployment rate is approximately 18% and the Palestinian economy has been…
There was a certain silence on Wall Street when Nvidia momentarily surpassed a $5 trillion market valuation in October 2025, becoming the first company in history to do so. It felt more like people doing math than awe. $5 trillion. more valuable than Japan’s total GDP. The graphics processing units…