A letter from Tangier — My dear, First, I have a choice to make: am I writing this for you or for us? And is this “us” the world, or is it…us? Am I writing this just so that I can feel close to you? Am I writing because I believe, presumptuously, that you want…

Oppenheimer, Altman, and the order of the universe — Already got your eyeballs scanned by Worldcoin so you can prove your humanhood? What sounds like a line from Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report refers in fact to Open AI Sam Altman’s new digital identification system and cryptocurrency. Touted by its founders as the savior of democracy, Worldcoin appears to…

TED 2023: An Ode to Joy, Grief, and the Future — The dream: AI will exponentially enhance our productivity and creativity. It will optimize everything that can be optimized, freeing us humans up to do work that truly matters. It will lead to new breakthroughs in science, scale up mental health services, detect and cure cancer, and more. …

The AI chatbot’s limitations allow us to appreciate our own. — Jeannette Neustadt, a director at the Goethe Institute, the German cultural embassy, gave some opening remarks for an AI conference she hosted last week. As an experienced public speaker, a welcome speech was a common task for her. But this one was different. Instead of presenting the text herself, she…

Argentina won the World Cup, the first time since 1986. Their captain, Lionel Messi, finally earned his crown as the greatest footballer of all time (as well as — more controversially — an Arabic bisht). I would have cried regardless of whether Messi’s team won or lost, simply due to…

Take a hard stance on Russia, but accompany it with a softening of your culture. — by Tim Leberecht and Monika Jiang The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a watershed moment not only for the geopolitical order but also for business. …

A conversation with Simon Kuper, author of “Barça: The Rise and Fall of the Club That Built Modern Football” — One of the most prolific writers on football (soccer), Simon Kuper is the author of several books including Football Against the Enemy; Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football in Europe During the Second World War; Soccernomics (with Stefan Szymanski); and most recently, Barça: The Rise and Fall of the Club…

The rush into the virtual world must be accompanied by a return to the natural, physical, and spiritual. — by Monika Jiang and Tim Leberecht Our world is undergoing profound changes: global warming and loss of species, growing social division and far-right populism, toxic tech culture and looming cyberwars, the pandemic, a crisis of loneliness, The Great Resignation. And business is changing fast, too.

At the workplace and beyond, humiliation presents an opportunity to learn and grow. — In an in-depth main-stage conversation at Concrete Love, this year’s festival of the House of Beautiful Business that I co-curated, philosophers Bayo Akomolafe and Charles Eisenstein spoke about humiliation as a prerequisite of humility, and called for “technologies of humiliation.” I was struck by this coinage. In 2020, I published…