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

According to our favorite literary reviewer, Bethanne Patrick, these are the seven books that “will really matter” in 2026:* Land by Maggie O’Farrell — The Hamnet author returns with a luminous novel set in 1865 Ireland,…

Pay attention to this interview. Because, you see, attention is seriously expensive — the Silicon Valley industry being worth $17 trillion, at least according to the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett, co-editor of a…

New books are like London buses. You wait and wait and then a handful comes at the same time. Take, for example, histories of the New York City vigilante Bernie Goetz. Last week, we featured the CNN legal analyst Elliott…

This is the final conversation from DLD. And the most optimistic - at least from a European perspective. John Thornhill, the FT’s Innovation Editor and founder of Sifted, has a quite different take on Europe’s tech scene…

For media moguls, we are living, to borrow from Dickens, in the best and worst of times. As Nicholas Thompson confessed to me at DLD, The Atlantic CEO is simultaneously “excited” and “terrified” by the power of AI to rev…

One of the most bracing presentations at DLD this year was given by Crunchbase's data queen Gene Teare. Breaking down America's VC dominance, Teare's speech might have been entitled "64% and Counting." As Teare told Keit…

Not everything at DLD this year was on the growing US-European economic and technological divide. There were many speeches on the environment including from heavyweights like Kate Raworth. And I had the opportunity to ca…

Few speakers at DLD this year were more sombre than The Economist's deputy executive editor Kenneth Cukier. “Civilizations aren’t killed,” Cukier says, “they commit suicide.” It's now "three minutes to midnight" in Europ…

Few people experienced the Dot-Com bubble with more vertiginous intensity than Bill Gross, the Pasadena-based founder of Idealab and many many other internet startups over the last 30 years. So when I sat down with Gross…

Yesterday’s show from the DLD conference was about the need for Europe to relearn the language of power. Today, things get even more dire for our European friends. I asked another DLD speaker, Carl Benedikt Frey, a Swedi…

I'm just back from another stimulating Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich where all the talk was about the growing technological and political gap with the United States and China. From Machiavelli and Hobbes…

For a country forever flirting with amnesia about its racial history, America sure struggles to forget. Take, for example, Bernie Goetz, the white subway vigilante, who shot four black teenagers on a NYC subway in Decemb…

In his new co-authored book It’s On You, the English behavioral scientist Nick Chater exposes how the rich and powerful - the THEM - have convinced us that we're to blame for society's deepest problems. Can't lose weight…

According to the New Yorker writer Nicholas Niarchos, Africa is rich in both raw materials and tragic paradox. We know about the continent's wealth in the rare earth minerals that enable our global transition from fossil…

We all have our own favorite Robert Redford movie. But what's Redford’s most prescient film about today’s America? His Seventies trilogy about American politics — The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and All the Presi…