Tim Andrews was the first patient to receive a genetically modified pig kidney as a “bridge” to a human organ transplant.

Finance, simulation, and a massive multiplayer moon colony

It’s extraordinarily pleasing to read field reporting from deeply embedded foreign correspondents, a vocation that is shamefully underfunded today given the myriad of crises engulfing the world. Even more scintillating is when those same correspondents transform their routine work into a synthesized volume, offering us both a panoramic view

The AI backlash, like a highly evolved virus, is now endemic.

Technology is creating new forms of asymmetric warfare

Annie Jacobsen’s newly-released Biological War: A Scenario juxtaposes two hells

It’s a holiday, so I’ll keep this brief before fireworks coruscate the night sky: America was and is the greatest living experiment in cultivating human ingenuity in furtherance of individual and collective progress.

North Korea’s opacity is all but impregnable. Its neighbors, Russia and China, are dictatorships that work ever more diligently to control the speech of their citizens, but the two have got nothing on the Hermit Kingdom’s totalitarianism. Even the most rudimentary facts about what’s happening in the

How North Korea used crypto and defense tech to build its influence

A review of four new books on China, the U.S. and tech

In late May 2026, South Korean Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back unveiled a roadmap to achieving one of Seoul’s top military acquisition goals:

I tend to read older cultural criticism with one of two minds. One is the delectable schadenfreude of witnessing previous moral panics that ultimately turn out to be hysterical outpourings of stupidity (I’m thinking of Dungeons and Dragons and how it will cause children to become Satan-worshippers). That haughty

The ecstasy and decline of getting high (margins)

The ecstasy and decline of getting high (margins)

I have to admit: I’ve had a really bad run of nonfiction books lately. All of them have been positively reviewed, some in terms that are magnificently glowing. Many of them have even won prestigious global awards. Time after time after all of the hubbub, I finally get around

A decade ago in graduate school, I was part of a reading circle on the sociology of quantification. It’s a small lacuna of an academic field with a massive scope: the incredible quantification of society and the politics behind how people and institutions construct those numbers. It encompasses everything

AI-driven insights to support your clinic.

Observable Space raised $90 million in its debut funding round as the company seeks to use lasers to help satellites and potentially orbiting data centers move information to and from Earth.