On the Intended and Unintended Consequences of the Opium Wars — and What They Ask of Anyone Watching a Chokepoint Close • • • Twenty million people would die because of what happened in those trenches. But in June 1839, standing on the shore at Humen, the man who ordered the trenches dug could
Bengal, 1943, and the Architecture of Starvation
How the 1953 removal of Mosaddegh set a structural precedent for everything that followed — from the Islamic Revolution to the ghost fleets drifting dark in the Gulf today.
How an Actuarial Calculation Closed the Strait of Hormuz
Read slowly. The building has no windows on the side that faces the river. I don’t know why I noticed that first — maybe because the man walking into it had spent three years building something whose entire promise was transparency. Dario Amodei walked into the Pentagon one day in
The Moment Morality Reclaimed the Stage at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 Reports say the chair sat empty. That was the thing people noticed first — before the speeches, before the pledges, before the Delhi Declaration. An empty seat in the front row of the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi,
The AI race is not a software competition. It is a geology competition. The future is not being built in the cloud. It is being pulled from the earth, carried by the wire, and cooled by the water.
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A letter to those who hold the future in trust — from one who has watched these civilizations from within.
In 1995, I was in Tokyo, sitting across from executives that Wall Street had already buried.
History is patient. We are not.