Jill Lepore’s artificial state thesis has a publication date now: 25 August 2026, when Liveright/Norton releases The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State in the United States, with Kirkus Reviews listing the 320-page volume under ISBN 9781324098423. The UK edition, published by Allen Lane under Penguin UK, runs 336 pages and is priced at £25.00.Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the US Constitution, spent the book arguing that private corporations have quietly swallowed the functions of democratic government, arriving at what she calls ‘a return to…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
The Amazon Texas gas plant known as GW Ranch, planned for Pecos County, has been permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, a figure that would make it the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States by a wide margin. The plant is being developed by Pacifico Energy with Amazon financing. According to reporting by Distilled Earth, it would deploy 35 turbines to generate 7.65 gigawatts of power, operating entirely off-grid, at least in its initial phase. To appreciate the scale: the current dirtiest power station in America is the James H. Miller…
X’s Original Content Rewards programme marks the platform’s most significant overhaul of creator pay since it launched revenue sharing, replacing a system its own team acknowledged had buckled under misaligned incentives. The change was announced by X’s Allegra Jacchia, who wrote that the existing Revenue Sharing programme ‘had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned.’ The platform will stop accepting new participants into the old scheme immediately; those already enrolled can continue earning until 7 September, after which they may apply for the replacement starting 8 September. The core shift is in what gets rewarded. Where the old programme…
The Google hacker naming system has just been rebuilt from scratch, replacing a patchwork of numerical codes and competing internal schemes with a single, two-word cryptonym structure designed to survive the scale of modern cyber-threat tracking. The change, announced by Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), retires designations such as APT1, APT41, and every other APT-plus-number variant that Mandiant, now part of Google, had used since it pioneered the practice of publicly naming state-backed hacking groups. Under the new scheme, each group receives a first word, either a retained public alias or a randomly generated name chosen to avoid analyst bias,…
The OpenAI Astra critical cybersecurity threshold has been reached, the company disclosed on Friday, prompting it to pause certain development activities on the model and enact stricter internal security controls. It is the first time OpenAI has said it cannot rule out that one of its models has crossed into what its own safety framework designates as the Critical capability tier.The announcement is striking for its candour. Companies routinely shelve products over safety concerns; they rarely publicise those decisions before a product has launched, let alone frame them as a potential failure of containment.What the OpenAI Astra Critical Cybersecurity Threshold…
The Cloudflare Kitesurf browser, launched this week, is not trying to replace Chrome on anyone’s laptop. It is trying to replace Chromium as the invisible engine running inside AI agents, and its pitch is efficiency: according to Cloudflare’s official Browser Run changelog, Kitesurf uses 3 to 7 times less CPU and memory than Chromium for common agentic tasks such as screenshots and HTML extraction. That gap matters because AI agents are becoming expensive to run at scale. Every time a software agent needs to visit a page, fill out a form, or extract structured data, spinning up a full Chromium…
The bill for Trump’s offshore wind cancellations has reached $3.93 billion, after the administration struck its latest deal last week: a $1.22 billion settlement with German utility RWE that erases roughly seven gigawatts of potential US clean energy capacity and sends the proceeds into fossil fuel infrastructure instead. RWE, one of Europe’s largest energy companies, will relinquish three offshore wind leases covering waters off California, Louisiana, and New York. AP News reports the surrendered leases represented enough generating capacity to power more than 5 million homes. The company will have no remaining US offshore wind leases once the deal is…
The OpenAI smart speaker price is expected to land somewhere between $300 and $400, according to a Bloomberg report published on 6 August 2026, marking the clearest picture yet of a device OpenAI hopes will weave ChatGPT into the fabric of everyday domestic life. The product is donut-shaped, roughly the size of a hockey puck, and built from high-quality metal with what Bloomberg describes as a premium finish. The form factor is designed for portability within the home: users would carry it from room to room, setting it down on a bedside table, a kitchen counter, or wherever they happen…
The Ford Fathom EV pickup will start at $29,945 including destination charges, Ford confirmed, setting up what the company hopes is a pivotal moment in its long struggle to crack the electric vehicle market. The price breaks down as a base of $28,350 with a $1,595 destination and delivery fee, landing well below the $56,000 average for new EVs and the $50,000 average for new vehicles broadly. On paper, the value proposition is hard to argue with. The Fathom undercuts the so-called Keating Line, the average listing price of the largest price segment available at dealers, by around $5,000. It…
The Terafab chip factory in Texas has a home: Grimes County, outside Houston, where SpaceX and Tesla confirmed on Thursday they will break ground on what Elon Musk, chief executive of both companies, called ‘the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.’ The initial investment stands at $16.8 billion, though the project’s own paperwork hints at a figure that could eventually reach $119 billion. The scale is hard to anchor to anything familiar. SpaceX says the facility will eventually span more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space, roughly ten times the footprint of Tesla’s main Gigafactory…
