by Isaac Cubillos | Apr 29, 2025 | Journal
You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to see what’s happening. Just look at the maps. Ports that should be jammed like a rush-hour freeway — Long Beach, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, Charleston — are standing there like ghost towns, cranes hanging limp,...
by Isaac Cubillos | Apr 28, 2025 | Journal
I spent a few days in New York City this past week — and what hit me wasn’t what I saw.It was what I didn’t. The corner newsstands were shuttered and silent. I didn’t lay hands on a single print newspaper until my last day, when I stumbled across a few battered copies...
by Isaac Cubillos | Apr 21, 2025 | Journal
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 | Journal
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 | Journal
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...
