SEARCH
In December 1916, with German and Austro-Hungarian armies closing in on Bucharest, the Romanian government made a decision that must have felt entirely sensible at the time. Romania had gambled its way into the Great War a few months earlier, sending its army across the Carpathian Mountains to grab Austro-Hungarian Transylvania, believing that
There’s a reason why your next iPhone is about to get a lot more expensive: the northern long-eared bat. This species of bat is federally recognized as endangered, and it nests in a stretch of forest in upstate New York. And it’s the reason why tech companies can’t build a $100 billion memory
[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Schiff Sovereign’s CEO, Viktorija, who is originally from Lithuania but splits her time between Mexico and Panama.] The first time I came to Panama was about 16 years ago, and I felt like someone was always yelling… either yelling at me, towards me, through me, about
20 years ago, if you recognized how deep America’s problems were, it was easy to feel like you were the crazy one. Banks were handing out mortgages to people who plainly couldn’t afford them. Wall Street bundled those mortgages by the millions and sold them on as some of the safest investments around.
Every morning until eight, you can walk straight down the middle of this palm-lined beach avenue, and feel like the whole coast was built for people, because there isn’t a single car in sight. That’s because this city clears its main beach road of traffic every morning from 5 to 8am, and it
On April 3, 1973, a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper stood on a sidewalk in Manhattan, raised a two-and-a-half-pound prototype to his ear, and placed the world’s first handheld cellular phone call. The man he dialed was his chief rival at Bell Labs. Cooper wanted him to hear the news firsthand: that Motorola
There are things that a free market will never do, and it’s usually for very good reasons. Running fiber-optic cable down a twelve-mile dirt road costs a fortune, and the handful of households scattered along that road will never pay enough in monthly bills to justify the cost of laying the cable. That’s
Late Monday night on a quiet residential street in north Belfast in Northern Ireland, a man pinned his neighbor to the pavement and literally tried to cut off his head with a kitchen knife. Bystanders screamed that he was trying to decapitate the man before someone intervened. The victim survived, though he lost
Every spring, the US government performs one of its rare acts of radical honesty: the Social Security Board of Trustees publishes an annual report stating, in plain language, exactly when the program will run out of money. It arrives without a press conference and with barely any news coverage — just a few
In the year 1863, at the height of the Civil War in the United States that must have seemed at the time like an irrecoverable national death, a former bookkeeper turned entrepreneur built an oil refinery in Cleveland’s up-and-coming industrial area in order to capitalize on the market for kerosene. His name was
On November 6, 1906, an American entrepreneur named Augustus E. Staley incorporated his cornstarch manufacturing business in Decatur, Illinois— the first city that Abraham Lincoln came to when he first moved to Illinois at the young age of 21. Staley’s A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company made cornstarch… which is hardly sexy by modern business
[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Schiff Sovereign’s CEO, Viktorija, who is originally from Lithuania but lives in Mexico.] We were sitting in the eighth row when it happened: the slap heard ‘round the stadium. Tessa Blanchard’s opponent smacked her across the chest so hard that the sound— a sharp crack— carried
Boris Bazhanov was a good Communist. Like many young people in the early 1900s who came from a prominent Russian family (his father was a successful physician), Boris developed a sense of guilt… almost remorse for the ‘privilege’ that he had enjoyed in his youth. He was 16 when the revolution took hold
It was September 2006— roughly two years before the 2008 financial crisis annihilated much of the global economy. But Greece was already in deep trouble. Unemployment was hovering around 9%. Youth unemployment was a staggering 25%. And government finances were in the toilet, with official debt-to-GDP at 100% and annual budget deficits at
Every year around this time, a silent killer sneaks its way onto European shores and slaughters people by the tens of thousands. Last year, it killed more people in just three months than the number of civilians killed in the war in Ukraine all year. It killed three times as many people as