Mind
The widow who keeps cooking for two
The widow who keeps cooking for two isn't in denial — she's running a routine her body wrote down over decades of marriage, and that routine may be doing the actual work of grief.
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Silicon Canals on YouTube
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.
Technology
Innovation ecosystems and the people building them. European startup news, global ecosystem coverage, and the engineering inside the companies shaping the technology economy.
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
Nobel laureate John Jumper is leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic after nearly nine years at the Alphabet-owned lab.
- 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
- BlackRock and Wellington just backed a 1977 Japanese taxi operator's robotaxi pivot — and the demographic math behind the deal explains why Waymo needs Go more than Go needs Waymo
- McKinsey's 2025 global AI survey: 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one function, up from 78% — but most are still stuck in pilot mode, and only a minority can point to any real impact on profit
Politics
The political and policy forces shaping technology. Capital, regulation, geopolitics, surveillance, antitrust, and the politics of innovation.
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
The 1984 National Organ Transplant Act made it a federal felony to pay a donor family for a transplantable kidney. The same law left a parallel industry — whole bodies donated to non-transplant brokers and resold in pieces for thousands of dollars — entirely untouched.
- Wirecard's Singapore whistleblower was a junior lawyer named Pav Gill — and his mother's intervention saved the evidence Munich tried to bury
- Trump rebukes Netanyahu at G7 and floats Syria role against Hezbollah
- Elon Musk's $288M political spend in 2024 was the largest individual donation in American electoral history
Mind
The human behaviour behind the work. Decision-making, attention, identity, performance, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work.
People who scroll through social media for hours but never post aren’t necessarily antisocial or disengaged — many are quietly studying the room, learning its norms, or deciding whether to speak
In 2006, the usability researcher Jakob Nielsen put a number on something most people online had felt without naming.
- Psychology suggests that people who build success quietly may not be secretive or antisocial — they may simply understand that announcing a goal can create a premature sense of progress, making the work itself feel less urgent.
- We tend to assume that classy people come from money or privilege, but psychology points to something quieter: households where manners were taught not as performance, but as genuine regard for other people.
- The oldest known written customer complaint is a 3,750-year-old clay tablet from ancient Ur, where a furious customer named Nanni accused the merchant Ea-nasir of delivering sub-standard copper — proof that bad reviews are almost as old as writing itself
What’s building in
Cities
All cities →Europe
London
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
North America
New York
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
Asia
Singapore
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
- In 1991, researchers at Cambridge's Computer Lab pointed a grey-scale camera at the department coffee pot and streamed the image to their desktops, because they were tired of walking three floors only to find the jug empty — and accidentally invented the webcam
- 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
Latin America
São Paulo
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
Middle East
Tel Aviv
OpenAI just hired a Transformer co-author and a former Trump AI official in the same quarter — and the pairing is really an IPO prospectus written in personnel form
Global
All cities
Browse every city Silicon Canals covers — from Amsterdam to Tokyo to São Paulo.
Explore all cities →Deep dive on
Regulation
All Regulation →
A Colorado funeral home returned fake ashes to grieving families while selling their loved ones by the body part
Megan Hess ran a funeral home and a body-parts brokerage out of the same Colorado building. Federal prosecutors found she sold more than 500 donated and non-donated bodies while returning concrete dust and strangers' remains to grieving families.
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BusinessBooking.com runs well over a thousand simultaneous A/B tests at any moment from its Amsterdam headquarters, on an experimentation platform engineers built in the mid-2000s and have patched continuously without ever fully replacing, and a single button colour test passed into company folklore as the change that reportedly earned more than its first three years of trading combined
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BusinessNorway's sovereign wealth fund owns roughly 1.5% of every listed company on Earth, and the team that decides how it votes on 9,000 annual shareholder resolutions is smaller than the staff of a single Oslo restaurant
Editorial columns
Our three columns
About the columns →Technology
Canal Letter
Bezos, Altman and Milner have poured billions into cell reprogramming as the new anti-aging frontier — and Life Biosciences just dosed the first human, but the field’s older bets left few clinical wins and brutal trial misses
Cell reprogramming — the technique of returning adult cells to a more youthful state using four genetic factors identified in Nobel Prize-winning research — has become the buzziest approach in longevity science, displacing earlier obsessions with telomere lengthening and senolytic drugs.
- Xcimer just turned on the largest privately owned laser in the world — and the real story isn't the kilojoules, it's who gets to own the supply curve for fusion energy
- Oxford Quantum Circuits just raised Europe's largest-ever quantum round at £260M — and the customer list reveals who is really underwriting the entire sector
- Nobody talks about why supply-chain attackers started hiding command servers inside Google Calendar events and Solana memo fields — and the Glassworm takedown finally explains it
Politics
Cabinet
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
Tech companies are firing workers at the fastest pace in two years, blaming artificial intelligence — and simultaneously posting record profits while a small cohort of AI insiders accumulates generational wealth.
- 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
- A one-person startup just raised $30M at a $250M valuation, and it explains ClickUp's 22% layoff
Mind
Field Notes
I asked ChatGPT why reaching every goal still leaves me flat. The answer wasn't the one I was expecting.
I typed it out plainly: "Based on everything you know about me, why does reaching my goals still leave me feeling flat?
- I let my phone die for one entire weekend without telling anyone — and the strange thing wasn't who didn't notice, it was realizing how many of my closest relationships had been running on something closer to maintenance than to actual presence
- Psychology says people who forget names almost immediately after meeting someone may not be rude, scattered, or bad with people — their brain may simply never have encoded the name before the conversation moved on
- Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.""
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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.