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

"How can you not be a populist in this day and age?" — Hélène LandemoreIn February 2020, The New Yorker profiled a Yale professor making the case for citizen rule. Six years later, that political scientist, Hélène Landem…

"I will say that QAnon was right and I was wrong." — Pepper CulpepperFrom Bannon and Trump to Summers, Gates, Blavatnik and Chomsky, the Epstein scandal has revealed elites of all ideological stripes behaving shamefully…

"You either need to call it fascism or you need to invent a new word with more or less the same meaning." — Jonathan RauchJonathan Rauch's viral Atlantic essay has reignited the debate over what to call the Trump adminis…

"The black market exists only because we decided that this form of trade should be illegal." — Scott EdenIn October 2019, tech executive Tushar Atre was abducted from his oceanfront home in Santa Cruz and found murdered…

"We all love Thomas Paine. We just wish we liked him." — Jonathan TurleyJonathan Turley's new book asks a deceptively simple question: why did the American Revolution become the longest-running successful democracy while…

"It may not be Mister Right YouTube, but it is Mister Right Now." — Erika DildayOn Super Bowl Sunday — with America celebrating its 250th anniversary — Erika Dilday joins to discuss the power of documentary film to cut t…

"I didn't use my own software this week because the OpenAI agents were better. And that's me retiring my own software." — Keith TeareSomething broke this week. Both Anthropic and OpenAI launched multi-agent systems—"agen…

What kind of leadership can hold a fractured democracy together?About the GuestStephen Schlesinger is an American historian, author, and foreign policy analyst. The son of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—Pulitzer Prize–winning hi…

A man was convicted by his own heartbeat — and that's just the beginning of our digital dystopia.About the GuestAndrew Guthrie Ferguson is Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School and a national expert…

An anti-fascist spy handed American officials evidence of murderous intent from a Nazi planning server — and they declined to act.About the GuestChristopher Mathias is a journalist covering the far right, formerly a seni…

Can meat save the planet? That’s the paradoxical promise of the longtime vegan activist Bruce Friedrich, founder of the Good Food Institute. In his new book, Meat, Friedrich argues that plant-based and cultivated meat ca…

There’s something absurdly Strangelovian about the American quest for a perfect weapon. As Jeffrey Stern warns in The Warhead, his new history of The Paveway, the first “smart” bomb, weapons are always, like their human…

Why did Nixon trigger a remarkable cultural American renaissance while Trump has generated an avalanche of social media bluster, but few great movies, songs or novels? For Silicon Valley critic Jon Taplin, the problem is…

Is AI going through an adolescent crisis, even it’s still just a toddler? There certainly seems to be a lot of adolescent angst amongst our new AI overlords like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In his latest essay, appropria…

When asked what his parents did, Atlantic CEO and competitive marathoner Nicholas Thompson had a stock response. "My mother's an art historian at Babson," he would answer, "my father runs a male brothel in Bali." Thompso…