Over the last five years, Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, has put thousands of satellites into orbit — with the goal of creating a network of 42,000 — in order to give everyone on Earth high-speed, low-cost internet access. All anyone will need is a Starlink terminal. …

America has failed so completely that Afghans are asking strangers online for help — Shaheeb contacted me two months ago on Twitter. I don’t know Shaheeb, I’ve never met him, and I don’t really know if he is who he says he is. He says he is an Afghan from the Sharana district in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktika province. He said that he worked with…

The science is clear: vaccines work. The sociology is equally clear: vaccine mandates are creating civil unrest. — Whatever your feelings about the danger of covid-19 and the efficacy of the measures developed to combat it, there is one undeniable fact that deserves to be recognized: A very large minority of people in nearly every western country stands in firm opposition to vaccine mandates. Though press coverage has…

Observations from a remote worker — “You came to the murder capital of the world to teach on the internet?” asked an (understandably?) incredulous US Customs and Border Patrol Officer on my first trip back across the border. I had been in Tijuana for a week by this point. I came to Tijuana because I can…

America has failed in Afghanistan. After twenty years, we have been defeated and the country has fallen to the Taliban in a largely bloodless final offensive. Americans deserve a reckoning. Unfortunately, this is impossible. The institutions necessary for taking account of our failure are broken and, in fact, responsible for…

Decades of declining poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and more were all reversed last year. — The natural state of humanity is illiterate poverty and for most of human history, for well over 90% of people, everywhere on the planet, this was the case. Until very, very recently most people around the world went to sleep hungry, most of their children died early, and they had…

China will never agree to an an investigation — which just distracts from our own failures in managing the pandemic — The origin of the COVID-19 virus is an open question again. While many have thought the matter settled, it has found renewed support among the media and politicians on all political sides, all across the world. President Biden asked for an intelligence report on the theory in May and the…

I tried to get to know the people trying to rob me — Lucy called me on Friday to steal my money. That isn’t her real name and, technically, she didn’t call me. The automated system used by her Delhi-based call center did. Lucy was merely the “officer” on duty the system routed me to when I pressed #1 after an automated message: …

America’s “omnibus ballot” is an outlier among democracies and may be driving down voter participation Contrary to what nearly every observer, and participant, of American elections says, America doesn’t really have low voter turnout. It does have relatively low voter registration and low institutional trust at the moment. We may be able to fix that by asking Americans to vote less, not more. Americans are…