Recently, I’ve been going down a rabbit hole studying contemporary China, its industrial modernization, and the Mandarin language. As part of that, I recently read a popular new book on the Middle Kingdom, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang. The book is a breezy personal reflection, and advances a now-familiar thesis: American elites are disproportionately trained as lawyers, Chinese elites are mostly engineers, and that background shapes the way that they respond to ...

Digital media has spent the last two decades trying to reinvent the economics of writing, and yet the industry remains stuck in a strange paradox: more people read news than ever before, but fewer are willing or able to pay for it. Out of this dilemma has emerged a new idea known as “writer coins.” The concept borrows from cryptocurrency logic and turns readership interest into a tradeable token that can support journalists directly. I recently experimented with this by launching a MAZ coin f...

It has been said that the scale of the internet revolution is so massive that it is impossible for human society to fully tabulate whethe...

On an balmy afternoon in early July, while sitting in traffic on a long drive home, my mind was working overtime gaming out my next inves...