Derek Thompson

Boston Molasses Flood, January 1919 In January 1919, more than 2 million gallons of molasses exploded from inside a pressurized holding tank in Boston. A tsunami of syrup, which some reports said reached 40 feet tall, surged through the city’s North End, covering the waterfront, destroying buildings, and drowning dozens of residents.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Let me make an odd confession to begin a detailed article about cybersecurity: On any given day, I would rather think about pretty much anything other than cybersecurity. It belongs to that realm of issues that I understand to be significant but would prefer to keep locked in the basement beneath my consciousness, like the improperly sealing flapper valve on my downstairs toilet.

Photo by Kyle Richards on Unsplash This week, the businessman Mark Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers to venture capitalist Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger. Walter had agreed to buy a majority stake in the Lakers just last summer, in a deal that valued the team at $10 billion. The latest deal values the iconic franchise at $12.5 billion, a 25 percent premium for roughly a year of Walter doing pretty much nothing, other than getting himself investigated for potential fraud.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash Very often, the most important thing you can do as a writer trying to see the world clearly is to “stack facts.” That is, don’t worry too much about conjuring grand theories or lurid forecasts. Just write down the things that you know are true. Put them next to each other, like dominoes in a line. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to do anything special. Pay attention. Look for breaks in the chain of logic.

Photo by Toru Wa on Unsplash Well, for starters: dissatisfaction with establishment Democrats’ inability to keep Trump from power, cost-of-living struggles, economic disappointment, and antipathy toward corporations and capitalism in an age of rising wealth inequality. In July, Nate Silver published an analysis of the demographic “sweet spot” of the democratic socialist movement. His diagnosis: downwardly mobile (i.e., middle- to low-income) and highly educated.

Horse names, from left to right: Death (of hyperscaler free cash flow), Conquest (of recursive self-improvement), War (between open-weight and closed frontier models), and Famine (with anti-AI populism or regulation starving America’s AI firms of data centers and other resources) AI is doing so many things at once that it’s hard to follow the plot.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash In 1991, Pfizer tested a new compound called sildenafil as a treatment for heart disease. The drug failed. But the men in the trial reported a weird side effect: erections. Pfizer got the message. Years later, sildenafil was approved as Viagra. Decades later, a diabetes drug called semaglutide showed another curious side effect: patients lost a ton of weight. When molecule became better known as Ozempic or Wegovy, an entire industry was born.

The Odyssey is everywhere right now. Christopher Nolan’s film is conquering the box office, spawning online memes, and dominating online discourse. If you rip your eyes away from your feeds, and turn your attention to another book or film, you might find Homer’s epic dwelling there, too.

Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world: Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time? Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention? Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others? And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days? A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related.

Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash Is this the end of booze? The share of people who drink hit an all-time low last year, according to Gallup, whose data goes back to 1939.