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In Sept 2016, I spent time in Hazleton, Pennsylvania and could sense Trump's victory was likely. on.ft.com/3SO8awv Last week I spent time in Lehigh County and Allentown and got the opposite impression. ft.com/content/fbe1dd… ht Charles McElwee

My latest Financial Times column riffing on Jason Roberts's wonderful book on Linnaeus vs Buffon "Sometimes we think we are inventing the future when we are retrofitting the past," he says on.ft.com/4g6wl3A

Beats the Nasdaq.... h/t the daily newsletter from Sifted Tom Matsuda

News interest in AI looks like it's peaked (unless something crazy happens again at OpenAI) h/t John Authers

Northvolt to cut jobs and sell or seek partners for its energy storage and materials businesses as Europe's great battery hope fights for survival ft.com/content/df16b3…

After Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's detention for failing to cooperate with French authorities, EFF’s Eva joined Financial Times’ John Thornhill on “Tech Tonic” to discuss encryption tech & what sort of messaging data companies share with governments. ft.com/content/7e0351…

Big deal: 51,302 start-ups were founded in China in 2018. That figure had collapsed to 1,202 in 2023 and is on track to be even lower this year. How China has ‘throttled’ its private sector ft.com/content/1e9e75… via @ft

I loved talking to Madhumita Murgia for Lunch with the FT! We spoke on my personal journey through the enchanted forest of 2000s era-tech, why we must connect AI + surveillance, and the nascent rumblings of a better tech future that I see on the horizon. ft.com/content/799b4f…

Big Day: Sifted Summit 🎉 ⁦Sifted⁩

“Make sure your robots are solving a real problem” 💯 Wisdom from the Impact Stage at ⁦Sifted⁩ summit #SiftedSummit

Artist Lawrence Lek is using AI to explore whether robots can suffer via Financial Times on.ft.com/4dzeEXJ

The recent political polarisation of Silicon Valley is really striking. 25 years ago most big tech and VC execs were moderates. Then the whole sector shifted gradually leftwards up until 2020, and now suddenly we have a sharp divide into Democrat-backers and Trump backers.

“The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake. It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love,” write 16 ⁦The Washington Post⁩ columnists

Martin Wolf’s take on the UK budget: it only works if the economy becomes more dynamic

The 14 best environment, science and technology books of 2024, according to Pilita Clark Clark, Clive Cookson and John Thornhill: on.ft.com/3OgqN9O

Slush is very on brand this year

There are a lot of people attributing crazy beliefs to Elon lately, but to me the clearest sign that he's not entirely rational is the continued deprioritization of tweets with links in them. Everyone can see that this makes Twitter worse.

🎧 Listen to Financial Times’s new season of the Tech Tonic podcast. Future weapons: Ukraine’s army of drones w/ John Thornhill Edwin Lane Persis Love Manuela Saragosa🌍 also on bluesky and threads Kateryna Malofieieva on.ft.com/4lGitj3

1/ In less than 2 years since it was founded, Proxima Fusion has raised a $150M Series A - the largest private investment into fusion that Europe has ever seen. For first time founders to pull this off so quickly is unusual, so here's how they did it:

‘As Abraham Lincoln noted about problem-solving, if he had 8 hours to chop down a tree he would spend 6 sharpening his axe. AI’s ‘axe’ lies in the precision of the prompt’ Letter: The story of Lincoln and his axe and why it has lessons for AI ft.com/content/ed8730… via @ft