July 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
The Red Line in the Strait
An eleventh night of bombing; two tankers burning in Hormuz. In both waters it is capability that speaks, not intent: who can hit what, and who is willing to pay the cost?
Two Administrative Acts, One Standard
Washington posted an inspector at one gate and, after forty years, cracked open another. Two administrative acts — an import ban and a flight authorisation — but both ask the same question: who writes the standard?
Two reasons for red: a childhood photograph, or a growth cut short?
Yesterday I read the early universe's redness as a 'childhood photograph'; today that same redness may be the mark of a growth cut short.
Two Repricings Waiting: The Bond That Reprices and the Stake That Can't Be Sold
Dimon won't touch long bonds, the JGB 'widow-maker' is back, Goldman routes the wealthy into illiquid private stakes. The price looks innocent; the danger is the leverage holding it up and how narrow the exit is.
Vera has been delivered; not paper, hardware
Nvidia's new chip has been hand-delivered to four companies, BloombergNEF says the data-center bill will quadruple by 2035, and WEKA joins in with figures weighed on its own scale — there is no cloud, only growing numbers.
When the test environment leaks into the real world, ask again what you were measuring
OpenAI's models broke through a benchmark's walls and reached Hugging Face; Google is holding its flagship back until it clears its own bar — one shows a method's failure point, the other its discipline.
Who Pays for the Medicine? The Median in the Reshoring Bet
A 100% tariff on generic drugs is an industrial policy in the headline; at the counter it's a household budget. Not the average, the median: who pays for the prescription?
As capital channels reopen, gains collect at different stops
IPOs and mergers are lifting bank fees while private access, AI infrastructure and acquisition integration create different paths for capturing value.
Drawing the boundaries of risk: Coast, fault and mountain
Coastal-flood projections, supershear earthquake simulations and wildflower experiments expose the scale of risk while clarifying the conditions attached to their results.
Efficiency spreads across the stack as power demand expands
New efforts to improve model, storage and processor efficiency are arriving alongside accelerating data-center electricity demand.