That Was the Week in Tech: Why Substack Is a Bust, How Apple Can't Do AI, and Why China Is Thrashing the U.S. in Clean Tech Innovation

Why are the Democrats losing the American working class? According to Joan Williams, it’s because they are failing to prioritize economic concerns of working-class Americans. In her new book Outclassed: How the Left Lost…

In Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us, best selling writer Anna Malaika Tubbs reveals the secret history of American patriarchal values. Tubbs argues this patriarchy is the central narrative thread of Am…

History, Marshall Poe wrote in December 2023, shows that Israel will never win a “war of occupation”. Eighteen months later, with Israel on the brink of a full scale occupation of Gaza, Poe’s argument is even more releva…

So why did Harris lose in 2024? For one very big reason, according to the progressive essayist Bill Deresiewicz: “because she represented the exhausted Democratic establishment”. This rotting establishment, Deresiewicz b…

“That he not busy being born is busy dying”, Dylan noted in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, his grim 1965 masterpiece about reinvention. Sixty years later, at a time when “everything is technology”, these words h…

Is spying an un-American activity? Not according to Jeffrey Rogg, whose new book, The Spy and the State, tells the story of American intelligence from the Revolutionary War to the present day. Rogg explores America's amb…

Walmart just announced it would be raising prices because of tariffs. So is that a good argument against Trump’s autarkic trade policies? Perhaps. But, as the Professor of Innovation at the University of Cambridge, Tim M…

Something doesn’t smell right about generative AI. Earlier this week, we had a featuring a former Google researcher who described large language models (LLMs) as a “con”. Then, of course, there’s OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wh…

It’s probably not news that today’s Supreme Court runs on crazy conservative grudges and even crazier patrimonial fringe theories. But according to Leah Litman, Crooked Media podcaster and author of Lawless, the Supreme…

Rather than apple pie, addiction might be defining quality of 21st century American life. That, at least, is the view of Mattea Kramer, author of Untended, a contemporary novel about addiction in small town America. She…

Is AI a big scam? In their co-authored new book, The AI Con, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna take aim at what they call big tech “hype”. They argue that large language models from OpenAI or Anthropic are merely what Bender d…

The traditional notion of western civilization is premised on the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Other less Eurocentric historians, like the Silk Road author Peter Frankopan, point to the role of China in shaping cla…

“Who’s Cheating?” asks Keith Teare in his weekly summary of tech news. Keith is defending a Columbia University student who was punished for openly used AI in his classes. As Arthur C. Clark famously noted, advanced tech…

Not everyone will like this argument. Jason Riley, the Wall Street Journal columnist and author of The Affirmative Action Myth, argues that affirmative action policies have been counterproductive for Black Americans. He…

As a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin, the Chapman University economist Mark Skousen might be a bit biased. That said, Skousen makes an entertaining case in his new book, The Greatest American, for Franklin as bein…