The AI compute buildout has triggered a data center construction boom with few historical parallels. The scale is significant enough to reshape regional economies, power grids, and real estate markets — and the race to secure the necessary land, power, and water is already producing visible winners and losers. The binding constraints are not compute or capital. Both are … [Read more...] about The Data Center Land Rush and Who Wins It
Why Longevity Science Keeps Failing to Deliver
Longevity science has attracted more venture capital, more celebrity endorsement, and more credentialed scientific attention in the past decade than in all previous decades combined. The results have been, with a small number of genuine exceptions, a sustained disappointment relative to the hype. The core problem is biological complexity. Aging is not a single mechanism with a … [Read more...] about Why Longevity Science Keeps Failing to Deliver
The College Degree Is Not Dead — It Is Just Repricing
The death of the college degree has been announced regularly for about fifteen years. The degree has not died. What is actually happening is a repricing — a differentiation between credentials that carry labor market value and credentials that do not — and the process is messy, slow, and producing real harm in the middle. At the top of the distribution, elite university … [Read more...] about The College Degree Is Not Dead — It Is Just Repricing
What Happens to Social Media When the Algorithms Change
Every major social media platform periodically changes its algorithm. Every time, the same thing happens: creators and publishers who built their strategy around the old signals lose reach overnight, and the platforms maintain that the change serves users better. Sometimes that is even true. The more interesting question is structural: what does it mean to build any kind of … [Read more...] about What Happens to Social Media When the Algorithms Change
The Real Reason Boeing Can’t Recover
Boeing's problems are routinely described as a manufacturing crisis, a safety crisis, or a management crisis. All three are accurate. None of them is the root cause. The root cause is a cultural transformation that happened twenty-five years ago and is extraordinarily difficult to reverse. The proximate turning point was the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. The outcome of … [Read more...] about The Real Reason Boeing Can’t Recover
Why Water Is the Next Resource War
Oil shaped the geopolitics of the twentieth century. Water is positioned to do the same for the twenty-first, and the transition is already underway in ways that are poorly covered relative to their strategic importance. The basic arithmetic is unfavorable. Global freshwater demand has grown at roughly twice the rate of population growth over the past century, driven by … [Read more...] about Why Water Is the Next Resource War
The Obesity Drug Market Is Bigger Than Anyone Planned For
The GLP-1 drug category — Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and the compounds behind them — has produced one of the fastest market expansions in pharmaceutical history. The forecasts keep being revised upward because the forecasts keep underestimating demand. Part of what makes this unusual is that the demand is coming from multiple directions simultaneously. There is the core … [Read more...] about The Obesity Drug Market Is Bigger Than Anyone Planned For
What the TikTok Saga Actually Proved About Platform Power
Whatever the final resolution of TikTok's legal and regulatory status turns out to be, the saga has already demonstrated something important that has nothing to do with ByteDance or China. It proved that a single platform can become so embedded in the attention economy that removing it — even for national security reasons backed by bipartisan legislation — becomes politically … [Read more...] about What the TikTok Saga Actually Proved About Platform Power
The AI Hiring Freeze No One Is Talking About
The AI jobs narrative runs in one direction: the technology will displace workers. The less-covered story is what is happening to hiring right now, in the companies building the technology. Across the tech sector, headcount growth has slowed sharply relative to the pre-2022 era — and not primarily because of the interest rate cycle. A significant portion of the slowdown … [Read more...] about The AI Hiring Freeze No One Is Talking About
Tariffs Are the Wrong Tool for the Right Problem
The political appeal of tariffs is easy to understand. The actual mechanics of what they do — and don't do — are considerably less flattering than the rhetoric suggests. The underlying problem tariffs are deployed to address is real: the hollowing out of domestic manufacturing, strategic dependency on adversarial supply chains, and wage compression in trade-exposed industries. … [Read more...] about Tariffs Are the Wrong Tool for the Right Problem