Thoughts
On tech, AI, business, and what actually works.
June 24, 2026
The only force that ever durably crushed the world's largest heroin supply is the same movement that grew rich taxing it — and the Taliban have now done it twice. A four-decade history of Afghan opium, from the Soviet-era jihad to the 2022 ban and its fragile aftermath.
June 22, 2026
The protein-structure revolution that won AlphaFold a Nobel Prize has quietly split into three races — prediction, design, and medicine. A field guide to the top contenders (AlphaFold 3, Boltz, Chai, RFdiffusion, ESM3, Isomorphic Labs) and the one tension none of them has resolved: the benchmarks have never looked better, and not a single AI-designed drug has yet been approved.
June 20, 2026
In one week of June 2026, Anthropic quietly throttled its record-breaking Claude Fable 5 for AI researchers, then the U.S. Commerce Department forced Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline worldwide via an export-control letter. The episode proved a frontier AI model is a strategic asset that can be pulled away overnight — by its maker or by the state.
June 20, 2026
Vercel deleted roughly 80% of its internal AI agent's tools and it got faster, cheaper, and more accurate. The counterintuitive result explains why most business AI fails — and hands small and medium businesses a concrete playbook for landing in the 5% that actually works.
June 19, 2026
Small businesses now adopt AI faster than big firms — yet roughly 95% of AI projects move no profit at all. Here's what the AI-native small business actually looks like by 2030, and the six-step roadmap that turns cheap intelligence into software-grade margins.
June 19, 2026
America fought two wars with Iran eleven months apart — the June 2025 Twelve-Day War and the February 2026 campaign that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei. In both, the victory announced on day one and the reality that emerged weeks later were different conflicts. A reconstruction of what was claimed, and what actually held up.
June 19, 2026
The $1.7 billion the Obama administration sent Iran in 2016 was a debt thirty-seven years in the making — money Iran paid the United States before the 1979 revolution. How it was paid, in untraceable cash and only after four Americans were freed, turned a defensible legal settlement into a decade-long argument over whether it was a ransom.
June 16, 2026
A trillion-dollar pay package revived the internet's oldest fantasy — that one rich man could end world hunger with a single signature. It's wrong about wealth, wrong about hunger, and wrong about history: a defense of the much-maligned billionaire.
June 16, 2026
Five months into Zohran Mamdani's mayoralty, a clear pattern has emerged: concrete early wins on child care, the budget, and crime — while his most symbolic promises on rent, buses, and groceries remain pending, deferred, or scaled down by the limits of the office itself.