Sidhartha Jha

And the other thing I would say is there's something I call thinkism, which is this idea that we can solve things by thinking about them or that we can even understand things by thinking about them, that what the world needs is more intelligence. We're not going to solve or even identify the right problems by thinking about them. We only figure it... See more

The reason it feels nearly impossible to quit Twitter is because of the almost complete and total absence of intellectual life in the offline world.

There is nowhere for a Thinking Man to "land" anymore. Even the cities are largely voids of anything resembling satisfying discourse -- largely because in those cities, rents are so high people now have... See more

In public debate, the country is often cast in contradictory terms. On one hand, it is as a menacing juggernaut—a ruthless, calculating power whose state, so capable that it threatens to overwhelm the West. On the other hand, it is dismissed as a “paper dragon”, crippled by incompetence and corruption. These two narratives coexist comfortably... See more

In the media, China is repeatedly condemned for its undemocratic government and vilified whenever it takes any action on the world stage that could be construed as assertive. On social media, it’s filtered through memes about collapsing buildings or doctored videos of empty cities. And in online intellectual circles—especially on the dissident... See more

When I got to my hotel, I logged on and saw I had E-mail from Bill. It had been written about two hours after I left his office. There was no reference to our having just met. He was responding to mail I had sent him several days earlier, asking what he thought of Henry Ford:

Ford is not that admirable—he did great things but he was very very narrow

... See more

Two books about the fall of I.B.M. and Gates’ role in it have recently appeared—“Big Blues,” by Paul Carroll, and “Computer Wars,” by Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris—and an occasional chill runs up the spine of anyone reading them at the ease with which Gates eviscerated men much older and more experienced than he was. “I kept wanting to... See more

There is substantial political pressure not to prosecute Microsoft. Microsoft is the principal reason that the United States is by far the world leader in software production, an industry that has an unimaginable potential for growth. Also, the government’s huge antitrust case against I.B.M., which was filed in 1969 and ended with the government’s... See more

If every city has a culinary punch line, it’s easy to identify Los Angeles’s: Erewhon, the cultish chain of grocery stores, where a half gallon of “hyper oxygenated” water will run you an unconscionable $25.99