Washington, DC — and pieces with no single place

34.6% of US Counties Are Now Maternity Care Deserts. In 60% of Recent Closures, It Was the Only Birthing Facility the County Had.

Youth Sports Is Now a $40 Billion Industry — Nearly Double the NFL's Own Revenue. A Hockey Dad in the US Senate Is Trying to Kick Private Equity Out of It.

High School Graduates Peak This Year, Then Decline for Sixteen Straight Years. Palantir Pays Teenagers $5,400 a Month to Skip College Entirely. Neither Trend Needs the Other to Be Real.

GXO Put an Autonomous Forklift on a Live Warehouse Floor With Real Inventory and Active Workers. Three Companies Built Three Layers to Make That Possible — and One of Them Built Two of the Layers.

EssilorLuxottica Controls 80% of Luxury Eyewear Manufacturing and Owns the Stores That Sell It. A $10 Frame Retails for $231. The Operator of This Site Tried to Fix Part of That Problem in 2000 — Seventeen Years Before the Technology to Do It Actually Existed.

The US Government's Most Sensitive Chip Supply Chain Changed Hands in a Single Corporate Transaction in 2015. Nobody Voted on It.

51% of US Senators Are Lawyers. The Current Head of HHS Has No Medical Degree. China Ran Twenty Years With Engineers in All Three of Its Top Posts.

In 1895, the Same Law Failed Against a 98% Monopoly and Succeeded Against a Union Leader -- in the Same Year, at the Same Court.

Theodore Roosevelt Called Suppressing Criticism of a Wartime President "Morally Treasonable." Nine Days Later, Congress Made It a Federal Crime.

George Dantzig Solved Two "Unsolvable" Statistics Problems as Homework in 1939 -- Because Nobody Told Him They Were Impossible. It Has Kept Happening Since.

Juicero Cost $400 and Lost to a Human Hand. WeWork's Founder Walked Away With $1.7 Billion Anyway -- and Got Funded Again.

Breaking the Encryption on a DVD You Own Has No Legal Defense, Regardless of Intent. Anthropic Downloaded Half a Million Pirated Books and Got a Real Day in Court.

"29ers": For Over a Decade, Employers Have Scheduled Workers One Hour Under a Federal Health-Coverage Threshold. A State Government Did It to Its Own Employees First.

A Streaming Platform Can Sell You a Movie, Then Take It Back When Its Own License With the Studio Expires. Only One State Requires It to Say So Before You Click "Buy."

IBM Just Showed Off a Chip That Runs Two Instruction Sets at Once. The Company Is 115 Years Old. Most Companies That Old Are Dead.

Whoever's Inside Draws the Line

Job-Switching Isn't a Red Flag. It's How You Find Out Whether You Have the "Unbureaucratic Personality."

How Place Shapes You

Women-Founded Companies Return 78 Cents Per Dollar Invested. Male-Founded Companies Return 31 Cents. Women Get 1-2% of the Money.

State Courts Handled 67.6 Million Cases in 2023. Federal Courts Handled 921,000. The Supreme Court Heard 73.