I think we owe Trump a thank you. No, really. Stay with me. Not for the policies. Not for the lies, the tariffs, the daily circus of a man who has somehow convinced half the world that chaos is a leadership style. Not for any of that. For the crash. For accelerating what was already […]
Armona is a small island off the Algarve coast. No cars. Maybe 50 all year round residents. Pine trees, dunes, the Atlantic doing what it always does. I have been here before. During Covid — five, six months — when the world closed down and this place became the kind of stillness that was hard […]
My father is ninety-one. He is in a care home. He is weak. He does not want to live any more. And he has become, in his own particular way, quite rude about it. I notice that I am not devastated by this. That observation itself used to require explanation. Now it simply is what […]
On April 28, 2026, King Charles III stood before a joint meeting of the United States Congress and delivered one of the most quietly devastating performances in recent diplomatic history. He didn’t shout. He didn’t threaten. He didn’t claim credit for things he hadn’t done or attack people who weren’t in the room. He didn’t […]
And She Hadn’t Even Seen the Internet. My latest field note about conditioning sparked more conversation than I expected. One thread kept coming back to the same place: Hannah Arendt, and her lifelong question of why ordinary people stop thinking. Hannah Arendt spent her life trying to understand how ordinary people become capable of extraordinary […]
I grew up in Germany in the 1960s and 70s. The rubble was still recent enough that my parents and grandparents remembered it. And yet what I experienced as a child was something that was almost miraculous: things getting better. Visibly, measurably, undeniably better. A childhood among kids freely roaming around in the green. Rights […]
… And Nobody Asks the Question The West won the Cold War. Communism was defeated. Capitalism prevailed. That was the story we told ourselves in 1989 — and for a while, it felt true. Open markets, free trade, democracy and prosperity spreading hand in hand. Francis Fukuyama even declared it the end of history – […]
The Nomad is a growing collection of stories, fascinations, encounters, observations, lived moments — and the quiet (and not-so-quiet) joy hidden inside them.They’re all rooted in my life, wandering freely between places, people, questions, and unexpected turns. Many of these stories eventually find their way into my book The Nomad — others insist on staying […]
— Why Citizens Can No Longer Wait — Four years ago I interviewed Audrey Tang — Taiwan’s first Digital Minister and one of the most original thinkers on democracy alive today. We talked about radical transparency, citizen participation, and what it actually takes to build trust between people and their institutions. This conversation stayed with […]
Based on various interviews Professor Robert Pape, University of Chicago, and Ian Bremmer have given in the last 10 days. Pape founded the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, and Bremmer is the founder of of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading political risk consultancy. The question sounds provocative. But follow the logic and it becomes […]