Technology, Politics, Mind. Since 2014.
Est. 2014
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The hidden machinery of money and power — the secret owners, staggering fortunes, and frauds behind the companies and institutions you think you know. 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. Neurologists increasingly point to ultra-processed foods as the single largest modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline — and the mechanism runs through the gut, not the brain
  2. Helsing's $18B valuation is not really about Helsing — private markets are pricing European rearmament as a multi-decade procurement cycle, and the capital is positioning accordingly
  3. The companies building AI — OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic — co-signed a letter on Monday warning that their own technology could trigger an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution, unfolding so fast that existing institutions have no realistic path to keep up without immediate action
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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. Psychology says people who remain kind despite a difficult life aren't weak or in denial — they're often running on a kind of strength that only forms under sustained pressure, the way certain metals do
  2. Thought of the day by Stoic philosopher Epictetus: "Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants"
  3. In a 1978 study of major lottery winners, researchers found that within about a year the winners rated their daily pleasures — a good meal, a morning coffee — measurably lower than people who had never won a cent
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What’s building in

Cities

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Europe

London

Plant-based food sales have flatlined after years of double-digit growth, and grocery data suggests the drop-off is coming from vegans themselves, not skeptics
  1. Roughly 80% of the cheese in the US and other major markets is now made with an enzyme produced by genetically modified microbes, not from calf stomachs — and most shoppers have no idea
  2. Intermittent fasting has become one of the most-studied dietary interventions of the last 20 years — but the research on gut microbiome damage is only now catching up

North America

New York

In 1991, two researchers at Cambridge pointed a grainy camera at the Trojan Room coffee pot and wired it into the building's network, because they were tired of climbing the stairs to find the jug empty — and without meaning to, they built the first webcam
  1. OpenAI spent two years telling courts it couldn’t search its own training data — then a deposition suggested it had already built the tools to do exactly that
  2. A single bolt of lightning that struck across the southern United States in April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres from Texas to Mississippi, a flash so long the World Meteorological Organization had to rewrite its definition of what a lightning strike can be

Asia

Singapore

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. 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
  2. Goldman Sachs paid $3.9 billion to settle with Malaysia over 1MDB — the bond fees that triggered it were just $600 million

Latin America

São Paulo

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
  1. 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
  2. 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

Iran wiped Stryker's devices, ShinyHunters defaced Canvas during finals, and DOGE allegedly uploaded every American's SSN to an unsecured server — and the connective tissue between these stories isn't what most analysts think
  1. 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
  2. Inside the Financial Times investigation that took five years and nearly destroyed the reporter who exposed Wirecard

Deep dive on

AI

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Technology

In 1991, Cambridge computer scientists got so tired of climbing two or three flights for an empty coffee pot that they rigged up a grayscale camera — and two years later, their tiny office fix became the world’s first webcam

In 1991, Cambridge computer scientists Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky pointed a grayscale camera at a coffee pot outside the Trojan Room to spare themselves three flights of stairs — and accidentally built the world's first webcam. Here's how a 128×128 pixel workaround for a mundane annoyance turned into the template for every livestream on the planet.

Editorial columns

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Technology

Canal Letter

The federal regulator just told every robotaxi operator to fix emergency-response failures by month's end — and the quieter rule change happening alongside it reveals who actually wins

The U.S. federal auto safety regulator has issued a formal ultimatum to the autonomous vehicle industry, demanding that developers produce fixes for robotaxis that interfere with first responders — a directive that arrives just as the commercial architecture holding the sector together begins to visibly crack.
  1. Nobody talks about what happens when the agency writing federal cybersecurity standards has no director, no playbook, and a third fewer staff — CISA's May 2026 leak just made it visible
  2. Nearly a million wallets have lost $3.8 billion on Trump's memecoin while the president cleared $636 million — and the SEC has formally declared the whole arrangement outside its jurisdiction
  3. Quantum Systems signed a $1.2 billion round at a valuation of about $8 billion — and one of the investors co-leading it is Airbus, exactly the kind of defense prime the startup's founder says his company could disrupt
All in Canal Letter →

Politics

Cabinet

Agility Robotics is going public at $2.5B while Figure AI sits at $39B on less proven ground — and the gap between those two numbers is the entire humanoid robotics thesis in one line

Agility Robotics is heading to the public markets at a valuation notable less for its size than for its restraint.
  1. Ford rehired the engineers it replaced with AI — and reclaimed its first JD Power top ranking since 2010
  2. 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
  3. 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
All in Cabinet →

Mind

Field Notes

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

A 2014 study tracked years of diet searches, hundreds of thousands of gym visits, and tens of thousands of goal commitments and kept finding the same pattern: the urge to chase a goal spikes right after a clean line on the calendar. Here is what that does — and does not — explain.

 All in Field Notes →

Free field brief

The Empire File

How money, ownership, and power actually move behind the companies you think you know. Built for people who watch our documentaries. Sundays you also get The Undercurrent.

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