Most AI is built for everyone. That is its strength, and also its limitation. A tool built for everyone cannot be built for anyone in particular. It answers the question you ask in the form most likely to satisfy the broadest user. It has no memory of who you are. No understanding of what you are actually wrestling with. No loyalty, because loyalty requires knowing the person it is given to. There is another kind of AI emerging quietly, for a different purpose. Built not for

On the ninth of April 2026, in honour of the United States’ semiquincentennial — the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — Forbes published its ranking of the 250 greatest living self-made Americans. The list was assembled in stages. The magazine first mined its own 109-year archive for what it described as classic tales of entrepreneurial capitalism. Its current beat reporters were asked to suggest candidates. The two together — the institutional record and

The individual whose thinking carries consequence has long worked through questions of consequence in the company of some form of interlocutor. The form has varied across time and place — a counsel, a physician, a confessor, a trusted friend of considered judgement, an advisor whose long familiarity allowed shorthand rather than explanation. What has remained steady is the underlying principle. Thinking of a certain weight is not best conducted alone, and the formation of the

A recent article in Town & Country by Norman Vanamee, the magazine’s Articles Director, prompted a thought worth examining. The piece described an information session at Alpha School’s New York City outpost — a K–12 private school in the Financial District that charges $65,000 a year and has built its proposition around something it calls two-hour learning: two hours of AI-led academic instruction per day, followed by the remainder of the school day devoted to workshops, entr

There is a widely held assumption that it is rarely examined: that privacy and openness are opposites. It is believed that to be private is to be closed, and to be open is to be exposed. That the two exist on a single axis, and any movement toward one is a movement away from the other. This assumption is wrong. More than that: acting on it in the AI era has become dangerous. The old architecture For centuries, privacy was understood not as concealment but as architecture. Cer

The global art market has been changing for a decade, and it is not what the headlines say it is. The headlines say the market is contracting. Global auction turnover fell to $9.9 billion in 2024, down 33.5% from the previous year — a significant number, and one that generated the expected commentary about cooling demand and cautious collectors. What the headlines rarely mention is that 2024 was simultaneously the most active year in the history of the global art market. More

She knows, in a general way, who she is descended from. She grew up hearing the names, visiting the churchyard, being told at dinner tables that this great-aunt had married beneath herself and that one must never discuss what happened to the Harrington branch in the 1890s. There is a portrait above the fireplace of a woman she has been told is her great-great-grandmother, though no one has ever thought to write this down formally. In a writing desk in the study, there are let

For decades, institutional power rested on a single advantage: controlling what individuals could access, know, and do. AI is removing that advantage. What comes next is not a better institution. It is the empowered individual. The most powerful thing about artificial intelligence is not what it can do. It is what it makes unnecessary. Specifically: the gatekeeper. The person, the institution, the platform that sits between you and what you need, and extracts value from that