Archive
2026
The Price of Not Looking at China Properly
Two large-scale studies show Western scientists barely cite Chinese papers — and Korea has the same blind spot in batteries and chips.
SocietyChina Bets on Efficiency, Japan on Command, Korea: ₩800T
Seoul's new megaprojects buy AI's body—chips, robots, data centers—while the intelligence meant to run it is left unclaimed.
BusinessSelling Fear to Job Seekers
How one careful Stanford paper about a single hiring tool got stripped of context, step by step, and repackaged as AI panic.
AI & TechThe Houseplant That Talked to Me
The moment we can speak to something, we start a relationship with it.
SocietyThe Coupang Leak Meant Spam. This One Meant Lives
A hack of the UN World Food Programme exposed the names and home locations of 600,000 Gaza households living in a war zone.
BusinessAmazon's Math: Cut 30,000, Hire 11,000
Employees gaming an AI-usage leaderboard exposed the crack in the demand story behind Big Tech's $700B capex
BusinessSilicon Valley Lines Up for Picks and Shovels
The hottest YC startups aren't building AI agents — they're building the testing, security, and audit layers underneath them.
AI & TechVenezuela's Quake Alert Came From Phones, Not Seismometers
How Google turned billions of smartphone accelerometers into the world's largest earthquake early warning network.
AI & TechEmpty Strollers and ₩380 Trillion
The country with the OECD's cheapest child care has the world's lowest birth rate — cost was never the real bottleneck.
BusinessSalesforce's $3.6B Fin Deal Wasn't About Technology
The real prize: 30,000 SMB customers and a GTM engine that works the moment you switch it on
BusinessOne Researcher Left With $650M; 138 Stayed in Tokyo
Sakana AI bets kaizen-style efficiency, not massive compute, can win the race to self-improving AI.
SocietyFortune-Telling Chatbots and Korea's Claim to AI's Top 3
The world's most AI-enthusiastic public still faces a 40% model gap — and enthusiasm alone won't close it.
Business10,000 Signups a Day, But Revenue Won't Budge
The problem wasn't the email copy — it was who Railway was sending it to, and the fix was surprisingly simple.
AI & TechThree of the Big Four Caught Citing Fake Sources
Only 5 of 45 footnotes in KPMG's agentic AI report were real — and the root cause is organizational, not technological.
BusinessWhy Apple Pays Google $1 Billion a Year
Distilling Gemini instead of building it: the strategy of betting on 2 billion pockets over benchmark crowns.
SocietyThe World's Strongest AI Went Dark 3 Days After Launch
In 1999 the US called a computer a weapon; in 2026 it pulled the plug on an AI model — and sovereignty went from slogan to survival.
AI & TechKilling the World's Deadliest Animal With Code
Why Google is breeding 32 million mosquitoes to release in the US
AI & TechSpaceX at $135: Dream Price or Bubble Price?
Institutions bid 4x the offering while Morningstar says $63 — the gap is a bet on data centers that don't exist yet.
AI & TechCan a 3-Minute Video Hold a Scientific Paper?
Why a 157-year-old science journal joined TikTok — and what gets left out when research is squeezed into short-form.
SocietyHistory Repeats? The 📠 Office Automation Era of 1979
Workers feel 3x faster while executives measure 1.8% — the exact gap that opened when word processors first hit the office.
Business230,000 Births: The Number the UN Got Wrong
Fertility's turning point in country after country lines up not with economic crises, but with the year smartphones arrived
SocietyKorea Walks the Path Apple and the EU Abandoned
From July 1, every image uploaded to Korean communities gets AI-scanned — at operators' full expense, with no government subsidy.
BusinessWhy Starbucks Pulled Its AI Out of 11,000 Stores
The vendor promised 99% accuracy. The field chose human hands instead.
AI & TechWhat Is an AI Harness? The Secret Behind 100x Productivity
The Claude Code leak settled it: the gap between AI users comes not from intelligence, but from the shell wrapped around the model.