90% of the World's Data Was Created in the Last Two Years

This story is from the ThinkAbout newsletter โ the context you won't find anywhere else. Free.

This story is from the ThinkAbout newsletter โ the context you won't find anywhere else. Free.
Facts & RevealThe scale of modern chipmaking is almost impossible to picture, so we tried anyway. The comparison only gets stranger the closer you look โ and it explains why a single industry now sits underneath nearly everything else.
Facts & RevealBots now outnumber people online, and the gap is widening every year. We unpack what that means for everything you read, click, and trust โ and why the web you experience is increasingly built for machines, not for you.
Facts & RevealAlmost everything you think of as money is really just numbers in a database. This piece traces how money quietly became pure information โ and what actually happens, for all of us, when that database fails or is frozen.
Facts & RevealThe energy bill behind the magic is enormous, and mostly invisible. We break down why the next AI race is really a race for electricity and for the water used to cool the machines โ and what that means for where these systems get built.
Facts & RevealThat's roughly once every ten waking minutes, a habit most of us would swear we don't have. We look at what that constant checking is quietly doing to attention, memory, and mood โ and why the design behind it is no accident.
ControversiesThe study that launched a thousand self-help books actually said something far narrower, and its author quietly walked the famous version back for years. We trace how a careful finding became a slogan โ and what the research really supports.
Science & DiscoveryLook past the colour and the data underneath is quietly upending a decade of confident assumptions about how galaxies formed. The pretty picture is the hook; the real story is in the numbers most coverage skipped right over.
Deep DivesThe famous pivot has a footnote that flatly contradicts the lesson everyone draws from it. We went back to the primary sources, and the real story is messier, luckier, and far more useful than the legend it became.
Business & PowerThe product was always the points. The flights, the coffee, and the groceries were just customer acquisition for a quietly enormous financial machine โ and once you see it, you can't unsee how many brands really make their money this way.
Culture & SocietyA researcher once put a number on friendship: about 200 hours of voluntary, off-the-clock time to turn a stranger into a close friend. The problem isn't that people stopped wanting friends โ it's that the institutions which used to hand us those hours for free have quietly shut off. Loneliness isn't a feeling problem. It's a logistics failure. And the fix that's starting to spread looks almost too simple to work.
AI & TechnologyThere's a new category of hack that's doesn't have to break into your computer's defense. It borrows you instead - your hands, your trust, your willingness to follow instructions when something feels urgent. The "copy-paste" scam targeting Mac users
ControversiesThe familiar arrows promised a loop that, for most plastics, never actually closed. We trace who designed the myth, who paid to keep it alive for decades, and why the comforting symbol survived long after the truth was known.
Science & DiscoveryThe first complete wiring diagram of an entire brain region is here, and it raises more questions than it answers โ the good kind. We walk through what the map shows, and why it changes how researchers will ask their next questions.
Deep DivesRead in isolation, each leak is a scandal; read together, they tell a quieter story about incentives, not villains. We trace the pattern across ten years of internal documents โ and what it says about how big organisations actually decide.
Business & PowerA weaker rupee is never a single story; it's a dozen at once, and most of them come down to who holds leverage and who holds debt. Trace the money and the supposed villains and victims quietly swap places.
Culture & SocietyStreaming killed the tracklist, and then playlists quietly revived it in a stranger, looser shape. Artists are adapting in real time, and the album that emerges from this is something genuinely new โ not the old thing restored.
AI & TechnologyA small lab shipped open weights that beat the giants on the benchmarks that actually matter, for a fraction of the budget. It turns out the moat was never the model itself โ and the companies that bet billions on secrecy are suddenly exposed.
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