Former New York Times reporter John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for almost a half century. In December 1993 the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wrote one of the earliest articles about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the Information Age." So where are we now in the history of tech, I asked Markoff. Is the AI boom just one more Silicon Valley cycle of irrational exuberance? And how do contemporary tech titans like Sam Altman and Elon Musk compare with Steve Jobs, who Markoff covered for many years. John Markoff is a Pulitzer Prize-win ..read more

Few Americans have been as consistently critical of Donald Trump’s morality than the New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner. How to prevent the worst happening, Wehner thus wrote, in his final Atlantic column before the election. So now that the worst has actually happened, how exactly is Wehner - who worked in several Republican administrations - feeling about the future of the American Republic? More optimist than one might. American self-renewal is a wonder of the world, Wehner explained to me, which is why, he believes, we should still be remain cheerful about American democrac ..read more

It’s hard to know if F.H. Buckley is keen on Donald Trump. On the one hand, Buckley and his wife wrote a number of speeches for Trump in his 2016 campaign; on the other, Buckley publicly wrote Donald Trump off in 2022, arguing in the Wall Street Journal that Trump “can’t win another presidential election”. What Buckley was explicitly calling for was Trumpism without Trump. So what, exactly, is “Trumpism”. In his new book, The Roots of Liberalism, Buckley lays out a kind of aristocratic version of liberalism based upon chivalry and kindness. It’s Lord of the Rings meets Dickens and Hans Christi ..read more

So how can The Dude and The Boss save America? According to the cultural critic, David Masciotra, Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, represent the antithesis of Donald Trumps’s illiberal authoritarianism. Masciotra’s thesis of Lebowski and Springsteen as twin paragons of American liberalism is compelling. Both men have a childish faith in the goodness of others. Both offer liberal solace in an America which, I fear, is about to become as darkly surreal as The Big Lebowski. David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. He is the author of I Am Somebody: Why ..read more

So was November 5 a moral catastrophe signaling the death knell of American liberalism or just another election in the turbulent history of American democracy. According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch, the Trump-Harris election was both. On the one hand, Rauch argues, wearing his unashamedly liberal cap, November 5 was a moral catastrophe for the future of American democracy. But, on the other, slapping on his Brookings analyst’s cap, Rauch celebrates November 5 as an ordinary election. I suspect the double capped Rauch is onto a singular thing here. There is a feeling of catastrophic ..read more

“There is one winner regarding the most significant story this week,” Keith Teare writes in his That Was The Week technology newsletter. But, as he explains, there are, in fact, two winners: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneurs trusted by Trump to reform and shrink the federal government. So how seriously might we take Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)? Should we welcome this attempt to reform (ie: cut) the Federal government. And is Musk’s SpaceX really a positive model for streamlining the state bureaucracy. Keith, as always, is hopeful; Andrew, as alway ..read more

In association with our friends at Digital-Life-Design (DLD), Europe’s iconic annual tech conference which next January celebrates its twentieth anniversary, we are starting a series of conversations with DLD speakers looking back over the last twenty years. First up is Silicon Valley entrepreneur, speaker and author John Hagel, who talked, quite openly, about his lifelong fear of fear and how he’s cured himself of this affliction over the last two decades. John Hagel III has more than 40 years’ experience as a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur. After recently retiring as ..read more

As the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle was one of first people to recognize the collapse of neoliberalism. But today, the real question is not about the death of neoliberalism, but what comes after it. And, of course, when I sat down with Gerstle, I began by asking him what the Trump victory tells us about what comes after neoliberalism. Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Gerstle received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard Universit ..read more

Gary Shapiro is my Pivot Guy. As the longtime president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, the organization that puts on Las Vegas’ annual Consumer Electronics Show, Gary knows a thing or two about pivoting. And now he’s put his pivoting wisdom into a pivotal new book, Pivot or Die: How Leaders Thrive When Everything Changes, a guide about how to pivot successfully. As Gary explained to me, he breaks pivoting down into four kinds of pivots: the startup pivot, the forced pivot, the failure pivot and the success pivot. A pivotal conversation about a pivotally important subject. Gary ..read more

It’s the race that will change the world. In Supremacy, one of the FT’s six short-listed best business book of the year, Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson tells the story of what she sees as the key battle of our digital age between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind. Altman and Hassabis, Olson argues, are fighting to dominate our new AI world and this war, she suggests, is as much one of personal style as of corporate power. It’s a refreshingly original take on an AI story which tends to be reported with either annoyingly utopian glee or equally childish dystopian fear. And Olson ..read more