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...
by Isaac Cubillos | Apr 16, 2025 | Journal
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....
by Isaac Cubillos | Apr 15, 2025 | Journal
I remember school lunches the way you remember your first heartbreak—with equal parts nostalgia and indigestion. Back in the day, our cafeteria cooks had access to five-pound blocks of government cheese that came in plain brown cartons—USDA surplus with a side of...
