Skip to main content

Explore Discussions

Join conversations that matter to you

Start a Discussion
Economy

‘This Is Something That Traditional Economics Isn’t Prepared to Deal With’

This is the strangest economy I’ve seen in my lifetime. If you just looked at the macro data — the jobs numbers, G.D.P., the stock market — things look pretty normal. But they clearly aren’t normal. The Trump administration spent the year upending the global trade system while tech companies spent hundreds of billions of dollars on A.I., a technology that could potentially displace many of our jobs. And people don’t feel normal, either. Survey data shows that the vibecession rages on. Tracy A...

United States
Culture

This Question Can Change Your Life

I like to start the year with a few episodes on things I’m personally working on. Not resolutions, exactly. More like intentions. Or, even better, practices. One of those practices, strange as it sounds, is repeatedly asking the question: “What is this?” It’s a question I got from a book of the same name, by Stephen and Martine Batchelor. In that book, they are describing an approach to Buddhist meditation built on the cultivation of doubt and wonder. You can see that as a spiritual practice,...

United States
Geopolitics

What Trump Wants in Venezuela

What is America doing in Venezuela? On Jan. 3, the Trump administration launched an operation that ended with the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, who is now in New York City on narcoterrorism and weapons charges. “We’re going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place,” Trump said. Mr. Trump’s policy here is strange for a number of reasons: The U.S. is suffering from a fentanyl crisis, but Venezuela is not known as a fentanyl producer. Venezuela’s oil r...

Venezuela
Technology

Data centers are amazing. Everyone hates them.

Behold, the hyperscale data center! Massive structures, with thousands of specialized computer chips running in parallel to perform the complex calculations required by advanced AI models. A single facility can cover millions of square feet, built with millions of pounds of steel, aluminum, and concrete; feature hundreds of miles of wiring, connecting some hundreds of…

United States
Technology

The Download: spying on the spies, and promising climate tech

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Meet the man hunting the spies in your smartphone In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all electronic devices at home in Toronto and boarded a plane. When he landed in Illinois, he bought…

Global