The Mirage of Flexibility

How the Gig Economy Turned Job Security Into a Luxury The median gig worker earns $2.17 less per hour than minimum wage law would require of an employer, a gap that comes out to roughly $3,400 a year. Fourteen percent…

How the Gig Economy Turned Job Security Into a Luxury The median gig worker earns $2.17 less per hour than minimum wage law would require of an employer, a gap that comes out to roughly $3,400 a year. Fourteen percent…

Why buying a new car is becoming harder for ordinary people, even as technology keeps getting cheaper. 1. The simple question: where did the cheap new car go? In the early 2010s, an American with about $14,000 could walk into…

Why the internet makes more money when it captures your attention and refuses to let go A thirteen year old shouts “six seven” while lifting one hand and lowering the other, for reasons nobody, including the rapper who wrote the…

The Day You Can No Longer Trust a Phone Call AI can now clone a familiar voice, fake a face and create evidence that never existed. As deepfake technology spreads, the simple act of hearing someone may no longer be…

The era of abundant, affordable food may be giving way to a more expensive and unstable future. For most of human history, a bad harvest meant hunger. Grain reserves were thin, transport was slow, and a single failed season in…
Sleep Used to Be Free. Now There’s an Industry Selling It Back to Us Sleep has never been entirely free of commerce. People have been buying mattresses, sleeping pills and blackout curtains for generations. What is new is not the…

As fertility rates fall, private equity is turning fertility care into a fast growing healthcare roll up. Fertility rates are falling across much of the developed world. Yet one corner of reproductive healthcare is expanding rapidly. Private equity firms have…

From street protests to tourist taxes, the world’s most popular destinations are turning against the visitors who helped make them rich Barcelona spent decades trying to attract tourists. In 2026, the city’s first commissioner for sustainable tourism, José Antonio Donaire,…

The growing dumb phone revival reflects a simple question: has smartphone convenience come at the cost of attention, privacy and time? A modern smartphone can navigate you across a continent, pay your rent, unlock your front door, translate a menu…

The hidden forces pushing up the cost of feeding the world In early August 2026, the Rhine river at Kaub, Germany, fell to 21 centimeters, the lowest level since records at the gauge began in 1880. Barges can no longer…