I’ve always wondered if this story about you is true, that the reason we have NASA’s picture of the whole Earth came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day. Yeah, I was in San Francisco and bored. And one of the things you did with boredom at that time was drop some acid…
new video loaded: The Prophet of Silicon Valley transcript Back transcript The Prophet of Silicon Valley Stewart Brand, an author and visionary, deeply influenced the internet era from the 1960s onward. Yet the systems he inspired have become fundamentally unintelligible to their creators. The Opinion columnist Ezra Klein explores the tension between Brand’s “how to”…
The American trucking industry, which moves nearly three-quarters of the nation’s goods, has devolved into a dangerous, dysfunctional system that threatens every driver on the road, whether you’re in an 18-wheeler or the family S.U.V. Consider a tragedy that took place on the Florida Turnpike last August. An inexperienced semi truck operator was accused of…
It’s no accident that the figure emerging as the global challenger to the might of Donald Trump is a priest in white, known as Pope Leo XIV. In recent weeks, the pope has issued a string of barely coded denunciations of the US president, unfazed by the insults that have come his way in return….
When Donald Trump hosted Sanae Takaichi, the Japanese prime minister, last month, he could not resist a gratuitous reference to Pearl Harbor. The US president is impelled to trash longstanding alliances. He has done more than anyone to demolish the postwar global order. This week alone, the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, questioned whether the US…
Don’t just be a businessperson – be a creative visionary Roger Bolton Former BBC editor and presenter Director general, we need you to give us a dream. At the moment we only seem to have business plans, which is not surprising since your board is stuffed with businesspeople. Not many creative dreamers there. Your predecessor needed…
This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts. If you were looking for the most influential philosopher of the internet, the person who laid down the way Silicon Valley thought in its more idealistic era, the person you’d find is Stewart Brand….
A good leader never asks their people to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. Hold others to the highest standards, by all means, but only if you have equally high expectations of yourself: otherwise you may command obedience in politics but never respect, and over time even that grudging compliance may come laced with contempt….
To say that President Trump is corrupt is to somehow understate the size, scope and magnitude of his corruption. It is as if you were to describe a modern thermonuclear device as a “bomb.” That is true enough, but it is not quite the truth. It does not capture the nature of the thing in…
Anthropic announced its latest AI model, Claude Mythos, this month but said it would not be released publicly, because it turns computers into crime scenes. The company claimed that it could find previously unknown “zero-day” flaws, exploit them and, in principle, link these weaknesses in order to take over major operating systems and web browsers….
