Silicon Canals

Job interviews are supposed to measure competence. A 2020 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests they often measure something else: how comfortable a person is with sounding certain. Peter Belmi, Margaret A. Neale, David Reiff and Rosemary Ulfe studied the relationship between social class and overconfidence, and argued that class-based inequality can be reproduced through a deceptively simple mechanism. Higher-class people may be more likely to overestimate their own

There is a familiar workplace story that runs quietly underneath a lot of ambition: first you succeed, then you get to be happy. The promotion comes first. The money comes first. The stable relationship, the recognition, the healthier routine, the sense of arrival. Happiness is treated as the receipt, not the engine. It is what people imagine they will feel once the right external conditions have finally been assembled. A landmark 2005 review in Psychological Bulletin complicated that sequence.

Picture a narrow hallway in a small apartment. A single phone is bolted to the wall, and a teenager twists the cord around her finger while her whole family pretends not to listen. If the call went quiet, she had nowhere to hide. She stood there, in full view of everyone, and waited for the conversation to find its rhythm again. I grew up close enough to that world to remember the edges of it. In my family there was one phone for the whole household, and the idea of slipping away into a private

The youthful founder story has always had a strong visual grammar: the dorm room, the hoodie, the early all-night build, the person barely out of university who sees what older people have missed. It is a compelling story, and it has real examples behind it. But it is also a selective story. A large study of founder age and company growth gives a more sober picture. In Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship, Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda used administrative d

There is a version of the “Artificial” story that is an ordinary Hollywood development story. A production got made, got tested, and found itself without a distribution home for reasons that, while connected to a specific business relationship, are not uncommon in an industry where dozens of completed films each year fail to reach audiences for reasons that have little to do with their quality. There is another version of the story that is about something larger: what happens to edit

The default workplace view of mind-wandering is simple: a drifting employee is a leaking one. Attention spent off-task is productivity lost. Managers, productivity software, and most self-help advice all rest on that assumption. A Georgia Tech-led brain imaging study suggests the assumption may be backwards, at least for some people. Participants who reported more frequent mind-wandering in daily life also tended to score higher on measures of fluid intelligence and creativity — not lower. The f

McKinsey’s 4-to-13 per cent comparison is a small statistic with a larger organisational message: some executives are measuring workplace AI from above, while employees are already folding it into the work from below. In the survey finding, C-suite executives estimated that only 4 per cent of staff were using AI for at least 30 per cent of their daily work. Employees put the figure at 13 per cent. That does not mean AI has transformed every role, or that every use is productive. It does su

Ask who owns IKEA and the honest answer is that almost nobody does, by design. The Swedish furniture retailer, founded by Ingvar Kamprad in 1943, is not listed on any stock exchange, is not controlled by the Kamprad family in any straightforward sense, and has no shareholders who could sell it. Most of it belongs to a Dutch foundation that, in legal terms, owns itself. The rest of the structure is built around the same idea. It is one of the more deliberate pieces of corporate engineering in Eur

Mach Industries, a Huntington Beach defense manufacturer that builds unmanned systems, said on June 2 that it had raised $300 million in a Series C round that values the company at $1.8 billion. The round was led by Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital, with existing backers Bedrock Capital, Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures joining again. The number is large for a company founded in 2023. The more telling detail sits two weeks earlier. On May 19, Mach announced it had acquired Exquadrum, a Cal

Claude Guillemot, a co-founder of French video game publisher Ubisoft, died Friday evening when a twin-engine Cessna 421 he was aboard crashed near La Baule-Escoublac airport on France’s Atlantic coast. Ubisoft confirmed his death in a statement Saturday, saying it was “deeply saddened” by the loss. He was 69. Photo by Paul Lichtblau on Pexels What happened The Cessna 421 went down in a field on approach to La Baule-Escoublac Airport, according to Mayor Franck Louvrier. Two peo

In a Bristol courtroom this month, a judge reached for a sentencing tool that had never before been applied to protest-related criminal damage in British legal history. Four Palestine Action activists, already convicted only of damaging Israeli-made military drones at an Elbit Systems factory, stood as the judge attached a “terrorist connection” to their offences. They had not been tried for terrorism. No jury had been asked whether they acted with terrorist intent. They were sentenc

A quick note: I am not an economist, a psychologist, or an organizational scientist. This is me reading Gallup’s data and thinking out loud about it. The figures here are estimates and population-level patterns, not a diagnosis of your job or your team, and Gallup’s own causal claims are its framing of correlational findings, not settled fact. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace is the closest thing we have to a global thermometer for how people feel about work, drawn from i

Fusion startup Xcimer Energy has activated Phoenix, a krypton-fluoride excimer laser system the company describes as the largest privately owned laser in the world. The system is a deliberate step toward a commercial laser-fusion power plant the company hopes to bring online in the mid-2030s. Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels What turned on Phoenix generates over 1 kilojoule of energy at full strength, with a laser core measuring 38 metres long. The system is an electron-beam-pumped excimer laser

An unofficial website calling itself UK Visa Portal has exposed the passports and selfie photos of visa applicants, and the security flaw remains unpatched, according to TechCrunch, which reported the breach on 26 May. Photo by Kampus Production on Pexels What the breach exposes The site, which is not affiliated with the U.K. government, collects identity documents from applicants seeking a U.K. electronic travel authorization (ETA). TechCrunch reported that documents — including high-resolution

A new study from Lund University, tracking roughly 880 twins from the German TwinLife project, reports that between 69 and 98 percent of the link between IQ at 23 and socioeconomic status at 27 can be attributed to genetic factors. IQ itself came in at around 75 percent heritable. These are not modest numbers, and they are not easy ones to sit with. I read the paper the week after submitting my latest doctoral chapter. The timing was awkward. I had spent years inside an institution that rewards

Imagine this. You’re forty minutes into a piece of work. The thinking is finally clicking, the sentences are starting to land in roughly the right order, and you can feel the shape of what you’re trying to say. Your laptop pings. A Slack message. You glance at it. It can wait. You turn back to the document. The cursor blinks at you. The sentence you were halfway through is gone, and so is the feeling that was about to put it on the page. There is a name for what just happened to you.

The gavel fell on 255. Against 26, with 9 abstentions, the Philippine House of Representatives voted Monday to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte — a margin that cleared the one-third constitutional threshold with room to spare and sent her to a Senate trial that could end her political career. It is the second time in as many years the lower chamber has indicted her. The first attempt, in 2025, was voided by the Supreme Court on procedural grounds. This one transmits to the Senate intact, wher

The phrase Jon Gray uses for the deal that nearly ended him at Blackstone is not "risky" or "contrarian" or any of the other words private equity people reach for when they want to make a story sound braver in retrospect than it felt at the time. He calls it career shortening. That is the language of someone who, mid-deal, looked up from the spreadsheet and understood that if this bet went the wrong way, he would not be running Blackstone one day. He would be the answer to a

Last year, I was catching up with an old friend over a round of golf. We were swapping life updates, and at some point he laughed and said something like, “I genuinely don’t know what to call you anymore. Are you still in finance? Teaching? Running the school? Writing? Pick a lane, mate.” I laughed too, but his comment stuck with me. For most of my adult life, I’ve worn what I used to think of as a slightly embarrassing label: jack of all trades, master of none. Finance,

People entering the workforce today are on track to hold roughly twice as many jobs over their careers as people did 15 years ago. By 2030, around 70% of the skills used in most jobs could look completely different. And employers already expect 39% of workers’ core skills to be transformed or outdated within just five years. Those aren’t projections from a futurist’s blog. They come from corporate planning surveys, the kind that quietly shape hiring decisions, training budgets,