Research
Every briefing, dossier, and signal we publish — one archive, primary sources linked, judgments dated so you can hold us to them.
Attention Residue
Sophie Leroy found that part of your attention stays on the last task after you switch away from it. The uncomfortable part: finishing that task is not enough to release it.
Trained Interruptibility
Researchers shadowed information workers for 889 hours and sorted 5,089 task switches by cause. Eighteen percent had no external prompt at all — and being interrupted in one hour predicted interrupting yourself in the next.
Mimetic Desire
René Girard's claim that desire has three points rather than two: you, the object, and a model who wanted it first. Why the nearest rival is the most dangerous, and why rivalry makes two men identical.
Understanding the Systems Shaping the Next Decade
After forty years of financial engineering, the world is rebuilding physical things: power, factories, weapons, housing, compute, medicine. This is the map to how it all connects — and the piece to read first.
The Automation Economy
Reshoring's math doesn't work without automation. Demographics are removing workers faster than factories can hire them, and robots are how the arithmetic closes.
Why Copper Matters
Grids, data centers, EVs, and weapons all run on the same metal. Demand is compounding now; new mines take nearly two decades. That mismatch is the whole story.
The Next Energy Buildout
AI, electrification, and reshored factories are colliding with an aging grid. Demand is growing for the first time in twenty years, and the real bottleneck isn't generation. It's wires.
Space Is Becoming Infrastructure
Launch costs collapsed, and space quietly turned into a utility. Satellites now sit underneath your phone, your weather forecast, your credit card, and the Pentagon's war plans.
Consumer Health Platforms
For the first time, large numbers of Americans are buying healthcare the way they buy everything else. That changes who holds power, and creates a problem nobody has solved.
GLP-1s Are Reshaping Healthcare
A hormone your gut makes after lunch became the largest demand shock American medicine has seen in a generation. The ripples reach far past the pharmacy.
Digital Healthcare Is Just Beginning
Healthcare bought computers fifteen years ago and got almost no productivity out of them. Here's why that's finally starting to change.
The Housing Supply Problem
Everything wrong with American housing traces back to one root: for decades, the country made it slow, expensive, or illegal to build modest homes where people want to live.
Why the Sun Belt Keeps Winning
Texas added nearly half a million residents last year. The Sun Belt's real advantage isn't sunshine — it's the willingness to build. But the model is being stress-tested.
The Mortgage Lock-In Effect
Tens of millions of households hold pandemic-era mortgage rates they can't take with them. Here's the arithmetic of the golden handcuffs — and what FHFA research says it has cost.
Builders Versus Existing Homes
New construction became the only functioning corner of a frozen housing market. The reason is a financing trick existing sellers can't copy.
Housing Isn't Broken — It's Frozen
Home prices never crashed — transactions did. Understanding why America's housing market froze, rather than broke, explains almost everything strange about it.
The New Industrial Base
Castings, energetics, shipbuilding suppliers, and allied co-production: a tour of the hidden supply chains that decide whether the West can actually arm itself.
Software Is Becoming a Weapon
Targeting, electronic warfare, and command-and-control are turning into software problems. Here's why the Pentagon historically bought software badly, and how Palantir and Anduril became the template for what's next.
Defense Manufacturing Returns
Shipyards, munitions plants, and a workforce that barely exists anymore: inside the physical rebuild of American defense manufacturing, and why it keeps running behind schedule.
Why Drone Warfare Changed Forever
Ukraine proved that cheap mass can beat exquisite machines. The cost-exchange math behind that lesson is rewriting how every military on Earth spends money.
The Autonomous Defense Stack
The military is quietly building its own version of the computing stack — sensors, networks, autonomy software, and cheap platforms — and the companies that own each layer are not the ones you'd expect.
The AI Capex Supercycle
Hyperscaler capital spending has reached a scale with only two real precedents: the railroads and the telecom bubble. What the money is buying, how it's financed, and the specific things that would end it.
Enterprise AI Finally Arrived
After two years of demos and disappointment, enterprise AI crossed from pilots into production. Where the ROI actually shows up, what the adoption data says, and why 'arrived' doesn't mean 'everywhere.'
OpenAI's Next Chapter
OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history and committed to compute spending measured in the hundreds of billions. A clear-eyed look at the new structure, the new money, and the gap between the two.
AI Infrastructure Winners
A systems map of who structurally benefits from the AI buildout — utilities, equipment makers, landowners, and lenders — and where competition burns the profits away. Not stock picks. A map.
Why AI Needs More Than GPUs
The AI supply chain is a convoy that moves at the speed of its slowest truck — and the slowest trucks aren't GPUs. A tour of the quiet bottlenecks: HBM, advanced packaging, liquid cooling, and power equipment.
Electricity Is the New AI Bottleneck
Chips are no longer the scarce resource in AI. Electrons are. Inside the nuclear restarts, gas turbine backlogs, and utility forecasts that now decide who gets to train the next model.
The New Investment Cycle
The era of financial engineering is giving way to an era of physical building. What happens to rates, inflation, and market leadership when the world starts pouring concrete again.
Why the Dollar Still Matters
Reserve currency mechanics translated into plain English: why dollar strength tightens the whole world, and what the evidence really says about de-dollarization.
The Return of Industrial America
Factory construction spending tripled after 2021, peaked in 2024, and is now settling at a permanently higher plateau. Who actually benefits when a country starts making things again.
Liquidity Is Quietly Driving Markets Again
The Fed ended QT, the reverse repo facility drained to zero, and Treasury leans on bills. Here's the water system underneath asset prices, and how to read its gauges.
The Jobs Report That Changed Everything
June 2026's payroll report showed 57,000 jobs, downward revisions, and an unemployment rate falling for the wrong reason. Here's how to actually read jobs data, and why this stall matters.
Why Treasury Yields Matter More Than You Think
The 10-year Treasury yield is the price the rest of the financial world keys off. Here's how discounting actually works, and why a move from 4% to 4.7% reaches your street.
The Fiscal Dominance Era
America now spends about as much paying interest on its debt as it does on defense. That quietly changes who really steers the economy, and it isn't only the Fed.
The Arsenal Gap: Rebuilding the Defense Industrial Base
America spent two decades making its weapons factories efficient for peacetime. Now it's learning that rebuilding real capacity takes a lot longer than writing a check.
The Data-Center Land Grab
The AI race won't be won by whoever builds the smartest model. It'll be won by whoever locked up electricity years before they needed it.
The Institutional Bid: Who Actually Owns American Housing
Wall Street owns a small slice of America's houses, so why does it feel like investors are everywhere? Because where they buy matters far more than how much.
The briefing, before it's obvious.
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