Silicon Canals

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,

There’s something deeply counterintuitive buried in some recent Gallup figures, and I think it’s worth sitting with for a moment. The generation that has never known a world without smartphones, that came of age inside the algorithmic logic of TikTok and Instagram, that has more native fluency with screens than any cohort in human history, is also the generation pulling back hardest from artificial intelligence. According to a 2026 study from Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation

By the mid-1990s, somewhere between half and two-thirds of American kids in elementary and middle school were spending part of their afternoons unsupervised, depending on which study you trusted and what exactly you counted as supervision. The numbers fluctuated by region and by income bracket, but the general shape of the data was clear: a generation of children was being given an unprecedented amount of unstructured, unwatched time, partly because both parents were now working, partly because

I sat in the rental car for ten minutes at the end of my father’s road last weekend, engine off, hands on the wheel, unable to make myself drive. I was not crying. I was not on the phone. I was doing that specific thing where you have just understood something about a person you love, and the understanding is heavier than you expected it to be, and you need the car to stay parked while it settles. What I had understood, on the short drive from his house to the end of the road, was somethin

It is a Sunday evening in London, and my father is sitting in his usual chair, in his usual living room, with the news on at a volume slightly too loud. The phone rings. It’s me, calling from Bangkok, as I do most Sundays. He picks up on the third ring. We talk about the weather where he is. We talk about the weather where I am. He asks about the dogs. I ask about the garden. Five minutes in, I say the thing I’ve been working up to all week: I’ve been thinking, Dad, why don&#82

“Have it all” is one of the most expensive lies feminism ever sold women. Not because the ambition behind it was wrong, but because the math behind it was never honest. You cannot run a career, a marriage, a household, a body, and a child on the same twenty-four hours other people use for one or two of those things, and pretending otherwise is not empowerment. It is accounting fraud. I say this as someone who believed the slogan completely. I grew up absorbing it from billboards, mag

For the last two years, just about every conversation we’ve had about AI and careers has revolved around the same question. What can it do? Can it write the email? Can it build the deck? Can it code the feature? Can it analyze the data? Can it replace the junior analyst, the copywriter, the paralegal, the finance guy? It’s a reasonable question. But it may be the wrong one to be organizing a career around. The “what can it do” question has an answer that keeps changing. E

Surveys of older adults consistently surface a quiet pattern: people who spent decades building lives around providing, caregiving, and obligation often report difficulty naming what they actually enjoy once those roles loosen. Researchers studying aging and identity describe it as a kind of internal silence, not depression exactly, more like a vocabulary that was never developed. The generation now in their seventies and eighties is arriving at this point in unusually large numbers, and many of

It seems like there’s a story being told in just about every workplace right now. It goes something like this: the future belongs to the fastest AI adopters. The people who pick up the new tools first, build the slickest workflows, automate the most of their job, are the ones who’ll thrive in the next decade. Everyone else will be left behind. Shopify’s Tobi Lutke, perhaps most famously, has called embracing AI a “fundamental expectation” ( as reported by CNBC).&nbs

The image is by now so familiar it feels like fact. A twenty-something in a hoodie, hunched over a laptop in a dorm room or a garage, types out the lines of code that will turn into a billion-dollar company by the time he’s thirty. Zuckerberg at Facebook. Jobs at Apple. Gates at Microsoft. The story has been told so many times, in so many magazine covers and biopics, that we barely notice we’re being told it. Some people in their forties and fifties, understandably, believe their bes

I drove to my parents’ house last summer for a long weekend, and somewhere on the second day I noticed something I’d been not-noticing for about thirty years. It was the Saturday morning, in the kitchen. My mother had asked me how the drive had been. I told her. Then she asked about the dogs. I gave her the dog update. Then she asked about a project at work. I said it was going fine. Then she asked about the weather in Bangkok. I said it had been hot. Then my father came in and asked

I want to tell you about a specific Sunday in 2018, in my parents’ kitchen in London. We’ve been told, more or less constantly for the past decade, that loneliness is what happens when you’re by yourself. The cure is supposed to be other people. Family especially. Get more humans into the room and the ache goes away. I don’t think that’s true, and I think most adults know it isn’t true, and I think the loneliness nobody warned us about is the kind that arrives

When people talk about the gulf between adult children and their boomer parents, they usually frame it as a story about cruelty, or coldness, or some failure of empathy on one side or the other. I don’t think that’s what’s going on, mostly. I think it’s a translation problem that nobody warned either party about, and the reason it doesn’t get solved is that both sides assume they’re speaking the same language when they’re not. I figured this out, eventua

There’s a particular look that passes between people in a café when one person orders a black coffee and the other orders an oat milk vanilla latte. It’s quick, it’s mostly unconscious, and it carries a small judgement that neither person would likely defend if pressed on it. But we all know it. The black coffee drinker is, in the unspoken script, the more serious of the two. The more focused. The one who doesn’t need their mornings sweetened. That script has been running

A 2023 Transamerica survey found that nearly half of retirees said retirement turned out differently than they had pictured, and the gap was rarely about money or time. It was about something they could not quite name. For decades, the standard guidance has run in the other direction: take up a hobby, join a club, volunteer, travel, build a list of projects. The implicit theory is that retirement is a problem of empty hours, and the solution is to fill them. The data, and the people, suggest som