Felix Salmon

The big and powerful are getting bigger and more powerful — and the clear and dominant winners are big cities. With wealth, jobs, and power increasingly concentrated in a few large cities, we are witnessing a growing economic and political divide between urban and rural America. As we've previously written, it's part of a larger dynamic favoring "superstar" countries and companies, too — behemoths that appear positioned to dominate the future global economy. This fuels us-versus-them. New cool technologies hit cities first, be it 5G, autonomous transportation or drone delivery.

It’s the biggest assignment in journalism: Take a set-in-its-ways 167-year-old news organization and reconfigure it radically so that it can compete on the global stage against countless young digital upstarts. If it’s done right, billions of people could end up with trusted, independent, impartial news they would never otherwise have had access to. On the other hand, if it’s done wrong — or if it’s not assigned at all — then one of the world’s most storied newswires might be entering its final years.

[Commentary] Our thoughts are still being documented more than ever. In a world where we’re increasingly communicating through our phones rather than in person, app developers are making it easier than ever to communicate exactly what we want to exactly who we want. The most successful apps, moreover, are the ones which most effectively reward the greatest quantity of communication: we’ve been trained by highly sophisticated Silicon Valley behaviorists to tweet or Snap or otherwise communicate almost every thing—really, everything—we think or feel or see.