While on vacation in Montreal’s Old City last week, I noticed an amazing thing. A young woman, probably around 30, dressed fashionably, held a selfie stick out from herself and checked her background. At the end of the stick was an iPhone, and on top of it a furry boom microphone. She said a few […]

Strange as it is to write, I was there at the start of the movement that created Donald Trump. It was 50 years ago. August 9, 1974. I was an intern at Human Events magazine, then as now one of the leading voices of the “New Right.” A few weeks before, I’d gone up the […]

Howard Schultz has a savior complex. For a quarter century, Schultz has either been running Starbucks or watching a hand-picked successor fail at it. He would set a strategy and, when the strategy failed, come riding to the rescue with a new strategy. You find this savior complex everywhere. You find it in sports, you […]

An e-bike is not a bicycle. This picture tells part of that story. I’m almost 70. I have difficulty bicycling 10 miles, partly due to posture but also due to Atlanta’s hills. Yet I was able to go 31 miles in a little over 2 hours yesterday, in 80 degree heat, riding my Edison, a […]

American urban design changed radically after World War II. Cars like wide roads. They’re noisy, they’re dirty. But we’re locked in our cars and don’t notice. We don’t notice, that is, until we get home. Then we want to be separated from those noises and that dirt. Quiet is a luxury good. Any residential property […]

Moore’s Law accelerates change in every direction. Huang’s Law puts it into overdrive. Artificial Intelligence (AI) software is one result. But the programs are just software. They’re no different than yesterday’s database computing. They’re based on it, true. They run thanks to Nvidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), products of Huang’s Law, that crunch numbers fast. […]

A hallmark of the “golden age of science fiction” is the idea of a strategic metal shortage. That’s why Allen Steele wrote the book Oceanspace, about mining the ocean floor. Asteroid mining is at the center of James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse.  The problem is such shortages don’t exist in the real world. It costs […]

After his 1984 convention, Walter Mondale polled better than Ronald Reagan. Then came the Reagan bandwagon. What I remember was not just “Democrats for Reagan,” but signs for other groups normally assumed to be with Democrats. It didn’t hurt that the economy was finally recovering, after the inflation horrors of the 1970s. We were still […]

This is a year where many of us in the Creative Class, who thought of ourselves as Talent, found they were just Labor. That’s what the sudden move to AI in tech has meant. Programmers without specific AI skills became fungible. Get your ass in the office. Get your ass out the door. While this […]

I had been a professional Internet reporter for a decade before the Web was spun. I was like a TV reviewer in 1947 who had covered Philo Farnsworth and owned a Philco. I’ve been there since before the beginning. By 1996 I had even seen what the Internet could do, in terms of driving the […]