Tom White

Due to the seemingly inevitable march of globalization, our world is more interconnected today than it ever was before. Ironically, despite this growing overlap, inter-regional correlation rarely follows. That is, startup and venture capital conditions in one market seldom (if ever) correlate directly to the conditions in another. A wide variety of... See more

CIA analyst, Martin Guri described the vast amount of information that has engulfed us with this dumbfounding statistic:More information was generated in 2001 than in all the previous existence of our species on earth. In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total. And 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001, adding around 23 “exabytes” of new... See more

When I have given oral presentations, I reach my people more directly than if I’d written everything down for them to read. When people can see your face and hear the melody of your voice, your point gets across more vividly. Language evolved, after all, for face-to-face contact, not rendered as glyphs on paper.Imagine a square divided into four... See more

This allows us to pop the algorithmic bubbles—the weapons of math destruction—used by the Twitters, Facebooks, Googles of the world to lull us to sleep. It shuts off the intermittent dopamine drip to which we have become tethered and addicted.Though I do not lead a life so interesting to write about each and every day (partly why this newsletter... See more

Diplomacy, in Cooper’s view, is high-stakes drama. An admirer of Shakespeare, he approaches it as a playwright would. Or a screenwriter. For example, here’s how he sets the scene for Kennan’s epoch-making Long Telegram, the embryo of the U.S. policy on containment: “February, 1946. Moscow. George Kennan is sick in bed . . . His ambassador is away... See more

The world is being forcibly reconfigured by at least three concurrent revolutions: a geopolitical revolution driven by the rise of China; an ideological revolution consuming the Western world; and a technological revolution exacerbating both of the former.Geopolitically, a decent understanding of what is happening, if not of its full extent, has... See more

No matter where we live in the world, then, it would be wise for us all to think carefully about the global chaos that is only beginning to consume us all. What is happening? Why is it happening? Where are we headed? What, if anything, can and should we do, individually and collectively?