Something has begun to move in the same direction across places that have nothing to do with one another. A company that started by encrypting email now builds an entire parallel infrastructure — calls, files, calendars, even an assistant — on the single premise that none of it should be read, stored, or learned from. A writer leaves the platform that had grown his audience and moves his work to one running on solar-powered servers at the far end of another continent, where t

On 19 May 2026, from the I/O stage in Mountain View, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, declared that the company he leads had entered its “agentic Gemini era.” The announcement was accompanied by a slate of products — Gemini Omni and Gemini 3.5, new agentic experiences in Search, an agent-first development platform called Antigravity, and Gemini Spark, a 24/7 AI agent that runs in the background on Google Cloud and continues working when the user closes their laptop. The Gemi

The milieu our heroine grew up in — whether Baby Boomer self-made HNWI or quietly Old Money — gave her something that no school curriculum formally taught and no professional qualification could fully replicate: the density of a certain formation. How to read a room before she had crossed it. How to speak to anyone without losing herself in the adjustment. How to hold complexity — social, cultural, intellectual — without anxiety. She was educated seriously, at institutions th

The Pluto in Scorpio Generation, the Lunar North Node, and the Case for Depth with Discretion Once you have succeeded at disruption, there is a certain irony that creeps in quietly. You set out to dismantle what was broken — the opaque system, the gatekept institution, the inherited structure that served the few at the expense of the many. You built something better in its place. And then, you realise that you are now the one with something to protect. This is the defining

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

Three pillars of a certain world are being dismantled by AI. What remains is more durable than anything that is being lost — but only for those who recognise it in time. Something is being dismantled. Not quickly, not dramatically, but with the quiet thoroughness of a tide going out — and those who have always lived near the water are beginning to notice. For generations, a certain kind of life was organised around three invisible pillars. The first was exclusive education —