Technology, Politics, Mind. Since 2014.
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Deeply reported business storytelling — the frauds, empires, collapses, and secrets behind the world's biggest companies. Every film is built on court records, regulator filings, and original investigative reporting.

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Technology

Innovation ecosystems and the people building them. European startup news, global ecosystem coverage, and the engineering inside the companies shaping the technology economy.

  1. In 1816, a 35-year-old French physician named René Laennec rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and pressed it against a young woman's chest because he was too embarrassed to put his ear there, and the sound of her heartbeat through the cylinder became the first stethoscope
  2. A 35-year-old founder's perfect biomarkers missed a fist-sized tumour, and what Claude caught on his final PET scan — just as his oncologist began discussing radiotherapy near his heart — is the real story about AI in medicine
  3. Advanced chips of 7 nanometers and beyond made up 74% of TSMC's wafer revenue in 2025 — the frontier the rest of the world depends on has quietly become the company's entire business
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Politics

The political and policy forces shaping technology. Capital, regulation, geopolitics, surveillance, antitrust, and the politics of innovation.

  1. It is a federal crime in America to sell a kidney to save a dying patient, yet a whole donated body cut into parts and shipped for research sits in a legal gap Congress never thought to close
  2. Wirecard's Singapore whistleblower was its Head of Legal for Asia-Pacific, Pav Gill — and his mother's refusal to stay silent saved the evidence
  3. Trump rebukes Netanyahu at G7 and floats Syria role against Hezbollah
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Mind

The human behaviour behind the work. Decision-making, attention, identity, performance, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work.

  1. There’s a reason “I’ll start Monday” keeps working — researchers found people are measurably more likely to hit the gym, start a diet, or set a new goal right after a fresh week, month, or birthday
  2. People who were always described as "easy to talk to" often reach their fifties realizing that being a good listener quietly excused everyone around them from ever learning to listen back
  3. Google studied 180 of its teams to find what made the best ones click, expecting talent or structure but found the factor that beat everything was psychological safety: safety to admit a mistake
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What’s building in

Cities

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Europe

London

In 1946, a captured Nazi V-2 rocket lifted off from White Sands carrying a 35mm DeVry motion picture camera bolted into its nose, and at 65 miles up it shot the first photographs ever taken of Earth from space — the film canister survived the crash because engineers had wrapped it in steel and buried it in the desert sand
  1. In 1928, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned from holiday to a stack of staphylococcus plates, noticed a blue-green mould had cleared a halo through the bacteria, and gave the leaking compound a name that would change medicine: penicillin
  2. In 1901, sponge divers sheltering from a storm off the Greek island of Antikythera surfaced with a corroded bronze lump that sat in an Athens museum for decades before anyone realised it was a 2,000-year-old geared computer that could predict eclipses and track the Olympic Games

North America

New York

In 1944, an IBM machine called the Harvard Mark I clattered through a calculation for the Manhattan Project at three additions per second, fed by paper tape and operated by a young Navy lieutenant named Grace Hopper who took the graveyard shift more often than anyone and slept beside it on a cot, waking the moment the relays went quiet because a silent machine meant something had gone wrong
  1. In 1844, Samuel Morse tapped out 'What hath God wrought' from the US Capitol to a Baltimore railroad depot, and the four-word message took 38 miles of copper wire and a verse his friend's daughter had chosen from the Book of Numbers
  2. Goldman Sachs paid $3.9 billion to settle with Malaysia over 1MDB — the bond fees that triggered it were just $600 million

Asia

Singapore

Nobody talks about the layer underneath physical AI, and the man whose code runs on 6 billion devices just raised $5M to own it before the robot fleets arrive
  1. The US Justice Department seized 127,271 bitcoin worth $15B — the largest forfeiture in American history traces back to a 2020 mining hack nobody reported
  2. Adyen processes payments for Uber, Spotify, eBay, and Microsoft from an Amsterdam canal house where the engineering team still eats lunch at a single long table, and the company went public worth €7 billion with fewer staff than a midsize hotel

Latin America

São Paulo

A single bolt of lightning that crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres end to end, once the longest single flash ever recorded and roughly the distance from New York City to Columbus
  1. On September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper's team at Harvard pulled a dead moth out of the Mark II computer's relay, taped it into the logbook with the note 'first actual case of bug being found,' and preserved the page that gave software its oldest metaphor

Deep dive on

Regulation

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Technology

ASML in Veldhoven ships each EUV lithography machine in roughly 250 crates aboard multiple Boeing 747s, the mirrors inside are polished so finely that scaled to the size of Germany the largest bump would be under a millimetre tall, and every advanced chip in every iPhone on Earth passes through one of these machines before it reaches a pocket

ASML insists it can account for every one of the 314 EUV lithography machines it has ever shipped — and that none of them, nor any component designed for one, has reached China. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says otherwise. The fight reveals just how concentrated the world's chip supply chain has become.

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Technology

Canal Letter

Stripe's payment infrastructure was built in a Palo Alto apartment by two Irish brothers from Limerick who, before they turned 25, had convinced Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to back them, and the company's annual payment volume now exceeds the entire GDP of Ireland by more than three times

Stripe processed $1.4 trillion in payment volume in 2024 — roughly 2.6 times Ireland's GDP — and the founders built the first version in a Palo Alto apartment before either turned 25.
  1. Mach Industries raised $300M at a $1.8B valuation — and its new in-house rocket-motor arm targets a U.S. supply bottleneck
  2. One of the five brothers who kept Ubisoft independent for 40 years just died in a plane crash, and the real question is whether the family voting bloc can survive its first generational test
  3. A Nobel laureate just walked out of Google DeepMind for Anthropic, and the part nobody is discussing is what Alphabet had reassigned him to do before he left
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Politics

Cabinet

Stockholm's Fika Jobs just raised $4M to kill the resume with AI video interviews — and the part nobody is pricing in is what happens when employers see your face before your skills

Stockholm-based Fika Jobs has raised a $4 million pre-seed round to build what it describes as a video-first hiring platform, where candidates are interviewed by an AI agent rather than screened through resumes, as reported by TechCrunch . The round was led by Luminar Ventures, with participation from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, the duo behind Candy Crush.
  1. Tech layoffs are running 44% ahead of last year while the same companies post record profits and mint new billionaires — and the structural setup is stranger than 2008 because there's no crash to blame
  2. The UK's Online Safety Act gives Ofcom the power to fine platforms 10% of their global revenue, which for Meta alone would be over $16 billion, and the enforcement unit responsible for issuing those fines has fewer than 50 staff
  3. Norway's sovereign wealth fund owns roughly 1.5% of every listed company on Earth, and the team deciding how it votes at 9,000 annual shareholder meetings is smaller than the compliance department of a single mid-sized European bank
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Mind

Field Notes

We tend to think our actions follow from our beliefs — but cognitive dissonance means we often rewrite our beliefs to justify what we've already done, not the reverse

In 1959, Stanford students sat through a deliberately tedious task, then were paid to tell the next participant it had been fun.
  1. People who reach their seventies genuinely content usually didn't get there by forgiving everyone; they got there by quietly releasing the need for certain people to ever understand them
  2. Rethinking remote work: surveys show people will give up 5 to 8% of their pay to work from home, but a 2026 study links remote work to more isolation, anxiety and depression — suggesting they may be underweighting the cost
  3. When DeskTime studied how its users actually worked, the most productive tenth were not the ones who never stopped — rest seemed to be key to output
All in Field Notes →

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Undercurrent

Where three streams meet. Each Sunday, one synthesis of the week’s technology, politics, and mind coverage — plus the wider innovation reading we found worth your time.

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