Observer

With 180,000 reservations, Slate Auto’s bare-bones EV truck tests demand for ultra-low-cost vehicles built on a new model. Courtesy Slate Auto Last week, Slate Auto, an electric car startup backed by Jeff Bezos and led by a group of former Amazon executives, announced the price tag of the most affordable electric pickup truck in America: $24,950.

The Goodspeed-Sang-Streeter copy is one of only ten surviving Exeter broadsides and one of just 120 surviving contemporary printings of the Declaration of Independence. Courtesy Goldin Auctions On the night of July 4, 1776, a Philadelphia printer named John Dunlap was handed a draft of what is arguably the most consequential document in American history and told to get it into print.

Jasper John, Three Flags, 1958. Jordan Riefe (Editor’s note: This article was originally published on February 21, 2018.) Defined by motifs that occur throughout his body of work, including targets and numbers, Jasper Johns’s career began with Flag, which sparked a revolution when it appeared in 1958. The art world was nearly a decade deep in Abstract Expressionism when this 3.5-by-5-foot encaustic replica of the Stars and Stripes turned up at the Leo Castelli Gallery.

What began as modest collecting in Pittsburgh became a model of ambition and taste with lasting influence. Sir Gerald Kelly, Portrait of Mr. Frick in the West Gallery, 1925, oil on canvas. 48 x 40 in. © Frick Art & Historical Center, 2009 (Editor’s note: This article was originally published on September 23, 2025.) Art collecting in the modern age has always been both a personal pursuit and a mirror of social ambition—whether in Pittsburgh, Paris or London.

From June 25–28, 2026, NOMAD presented its first U.S. edition at The Watermill Center in Water Mill, New York. Photo by Simon Leung There’s a constant across NOMAD editions: a spatial storytelling that turns curated showcases of art and design into contextualized narratives. From Monaco to St. Moritz, Capri to Abu Dhabi, NOMAD’s nomadic format has transformed unique historical locations into destinations for art, design and singular creation.

After ceding the early spotlight in large language models, Bezos is making a high-stakes play for the next frontier of A.I. Chesnot/Getty Images Jeff Bezos may have missed the first wave of A.I., dominated by large language models. But with his startup Prometheus reaching a $41 billion valuation this month, he is betting on the frontier concept of physical A.I.—by building what he calls an “artificial general engineer” (AGE).

The country is hard to read at a distance right now, politically caricatured from afar by algorithm bubbles. The 250th arrives this summer and the official run-up has been mostly conferences and merchandise. Meanwhile, the people who do the actual work of American history—preservationists, archaeologists, descendants and at least one Pulitzer winner—have spent the last two years substantially rebuilding what the country gets to look at.

A Cox/FDR jugate button, considered a Holy Grail among collectors of American presidential campaign artifacts, achieved $185,850 at Hake’s Auctions in 2022. Courtesy Hake's Auctions In 1920, it seemed clear to most political observers that Ohio Governor James M. Cox was not going to beat Warren G. Harding in the presidential election. People had had enough of Democrats and were going to vote Republican.

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As the U.S. marks its 250th anniversary, global business is adapting to an America that remains indispensable, even as it no longer writes all the rules. Unsplash+ As America marks its 250th anniversary,  commentary predictably divides between decline and renewal. Is the country fading or entering another period of reinvention? From outside the United States, the answer looks different.