Author: Megan Burrows

At eleven o’clock at night, you’ll see the same scene in any university library: students bent over laptops and textbooks, many of them with phones lit next to them, notifications coming in in tiny, persistent pulses. Technically, they are studying. Additionally, likely, they’re not getting enough sleep. Not nearly enough. This isn’t a tale of sporadic late nights before tests. It tells the tale of a long-term, widespread disruption to a basic human need like food or water, as well as a gadget that has subtly emerged as the main cause of this disruption. The data, which has been gathered…

People are sitting quietly with their phones in their pockets in major cities’ waiting rooms, coffee shops, and train carriages. This is an odd phenomenon. Not most of them, and not all of them. However, much more than before. the individual perusing a real paperback. The couple is having dinner without looking at any notifications. The adolescent at the bus stop carrying a flip phone was a conscious decision rather than an ironic prop. These are not singular incidents. These are indicators of what academics and marketers are starting to characterize as one of the more important cultural changes of…

Between the grocery bill and the rent payment on the typical American’s bank statement, there is typically a collection of tiny, recurring charges that most people are unable to fully account for. This is eight dollars. There are twelve. a fifteen-dollar monthly fee for a product that was downloaded during a free trial eighteen months ago but was never properly cancelled. Each of the fees is small enough that none of them draws the kind of attention that a big, one-time expense would. However, CNET’s 2024 data shows that the average American adult spends about $91 a month on subscriptions.…

In the early hours of February 28, while flying from New York to Oslo, the chairman of oil producer DNO gave the order to shut down the wells. Israel and the United States had just attacked Iran. The pumps in Iraqi Kurdistan had stopped working by the time the aircraft touched down in Norway. In hindsight, it was one of the first minor indicators of something much bigger—a worldwide energy disruption so severe that those tasked with monitoring it are running out of relevant historical comparisons. Currently, 20% of the world’s oil is practically inaccessible. Approximately 20 million barrels of…

You can sense something in the price board at any gas station in Europe or Asia right now that numbers alone can’t fully convey: a sense of economic vertigo, as if a decision made in a palace in Riyadh has trickled down to this specific forecourt, this particular morning. Crude is not an abstraction when it is hovering around $119 per barrel. Freight costs, grocery prices, and the silent, uncomfortable math that regular people do in their heads before each fill-up are all examples of how it manifests. Since early 2025, Saudi Arabia has been drastically reducing its oil production,…

Brent crude reached $117 per barrel in the early hours of March 9, 2026, before most of Europe had awakened. Before the official start of the London trading day, it withdrew. However, the figure had been published, and anyone keeping an eye on the oil markets knew what it meant: a conflict that, only days before, financial analysts had referred to as a “tail risk” had taken center stage in the world economy. From $71 at the beginning of the conflict to $117 in just eight days. The biggest weekly increase in US crude prices since records started in 1983.…

Most American streets have a gas station on the corner. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you wonder why the number keeps rising as you pull in and swipe your card. However, the real answer to that question isn’t on Wall Street or in Washington; rather, it’s a small area of water between Iran and Oman that most people wouldn’t be able to locate on a map. Over the past few weeks, the Strait of Hormuz—which is only 33 kilometers wide at its narrowest—has caused more harm to household budgets worldwide than any recent increase in tariffs or interest…

On a Monday morning in early March, a trader at a desk in London watched the opening price of U.S. crude flash across her screen and felt the kind of still that happens before someone says something out loud that everyone already knows. WTI hit $120 per barrel at the open. It didn’t stay there — it retreated to around $107 over the course of the morning — but the number had been printed. The threshold had been crossed, briefly and violently, and the market had its answer to a question that had been building for weeks: this wasn’t going…

There’s a good chance that someone in America has a two-pound bag of Lundberg jasmine white rice somewhere in the back of a pantry shelf—behind the pasta, next to the lentils, or perhaps next to a partially used bag of quinoa. They probably assume it’s okay. It is certified organic. It originated from a company with decades of reputation and a farming philosophy centered on trust and sustainability. Wegmans, Walmart, Target, Giant, and Hy-Vee all carried it. It has also been recalled. On April 1, Lundberg Family Farms voluntarily removed about 4,500 cases of its Regenerative Organic Certified White Jasmine…

In late 2024, a group of pension trustees in a meeting room somewhere in Britain—the fund’s name has never been made public—made a decision that was unprecedented in the pension sector. They committed to investing three percent of their fund’s assets in Bitcoin. Not via an ETF. Not by using an index product that keeps an impartial eye on cryptocurrency prices. directly. For security, private keys are distributed among five separate institutions. It was a remarkable move by the standards of UK pension culture, and it discreetly rose to the highest percentage of Bitcoin allocated by any pension fund globally.…