Articles
To The Barricades
We inhabit an age of walls, the journalist Tim Marshall observes in Divided. Half of all border barriers erected around the world since 1945 have appeared in this century.
America’s Sharpest Voice
Around half past nine on a Thursday evening, at the Comedy Cellar in New York, Hasan Minhaj is an hour away from taking the stage. By all reckoning, this should be a fine journalistic moment, a moment when the writer is let into the thin, charged space between Minhaj’s private existence and his public one.
The Ganges’ Muddy Waters
Why has a river so vital to a country—so central to its largest faith, so indispensable to its farms—been pushed into its present state of peril, its waters low, filthy and neglected?
How To Sell A Country
When money, influence and people could flow anywhere, countries aspiring to be a destination for these energies had to sell themselves hard.
Indian Tech Warily Eyes AI
Bots, machine learning, and algorithms are rendering old skills redundant, recasting the idea of work and making a smaller labor force seem likely.
The Spooky Quantum Universe
Brooks is drawn to Cardano the man: the superstitious gambler, the chaser of fame, the astrologer who dared to cast the horoscope of Christ. He’s also drawn to Cardano the thinker. “We are both rational, both seeking to understand the universe, both convinced that nobody has a good grasp of it yet.”
The Fearsome Eurocrat
Vestager’s entire tenure has been laced with an instinctive mistrust of big corporations. She’s driven investigations of Amazon.com, Fiat, Gazprom, Google, McDonald’s, and Starbucks—and she still has two and a half years remaining in her term.”What really matters is: If you want to do business in Europe, you play by the European rule book.”
The Thirst of Bangalore
That term, water mafia, conjures an image straight out of Mad Max—gangs of small-time Immortan Joes running squadrons of belching tankers, turning a city’s water on and off at will. When I first started to hear about Bangalore’s crisis, that lurid image was hard to square with the cosmopolitan city I knew from a lifetime of frequent visits.
The Island That Grows
The Jurong Rock Caverns in Singapore are just one answer to a pair of intriguing questions: What does a tremendously rich and ambitious country do when it is running out of land? And what can the rest of the world learn from these experiments?