by Isaac Cubillos | Apr 21, 2025
In the 1970s, I was in my 20s and locked in a long-running play-by-mail war game with a group of friends. It was one of those sprawling, imagination-fueled strategy games—light on rules, heavy on consequences. My fictitious country wasn’t the biggest or the boldest,...
by Isaac Cubillos | Apr 21, 2025
Back in the 1950s, Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine with a team of fewer than a hundred researchers and about as much computing power as a toaster. No cloud servers, no AI, no billion-dollar grants—just lab coats, microscopes, and enough coffee to keep...
by Isaac Cubillos | Apr 18, 2025
There he was—a preteen kid, hunched over a laptop in the middle of a family lunch, hammering away at a low-rent Mario knockoff like his life depended on it. He didn’t touch his food. Didn’t speak. Didn’t look up. When the battery finally gave out, his mother passed...
by Isaac Cubillos | Apr 17, 2025
There’s a dangerous echo rolling through the immigration debate again—and this time it’s dressed up like progress. President Donald Trump has floated a proposal that sounds suspiciously familiar: Allow undocumented immigrants to return to work only after they leave...
by Isaac Cubillos | Apr 16, 2025
You know your empire is in trouble when your former warzone is offering to build your warships. At the 2025 Sea Air Space conference, South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries offered to help the U.S. Navy catch up to China—by building Aegis-equipped destroyers for us....
