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On April 3, 1973, a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper stood on a sidewalk in Manhattan, raised a two-and-a-half-pound prototype to his ear, and placed the world’s first handheld cellular phone call. The man he dialed was his chief rival at Bell Labs. Cooper wanted him to hear the news firsthand: that Motorola
There are things that a free market will never do, and it’s usually for very good reasons. Running fiber-optic cable down a twelve-mile dirt road costs a fortune, and the handful of households scattered along that road will never pay enough in monthly bills to justify the cost of laying the cable. That’s
Late Monday night on a quiet residential street in north Belfast in Northern Ireland, a man pinned his neighbor to the pavement and literally tried to cut off his head with a kitchen knife. Bystanders screamed that he was trying to decapitate the man before someone intervened. The victim survived, though he lost
Every spring, the US government performs one of its rare acts of radical honesty: the Social Security Board of Trustees publishes an annual report stating, in plain language, exactly when the program will run out of money. It arrives without a press conference and with barely any news coverage — just a few
In the year 1863, at the height of the Civil War in the United States that must have seemed at the time like an irrecoverable national death, a former bookkeeper turned entrepreneur built an oil refinery in Cleveland’s up-and-coming industrial area in order to capitalize on the market for kerosene. His name was
On November 6, 1906, an American entrepreneur named Augustus E. Staley incorporated his cornstarch manufacturing business in Decatur, Illinois— the first city that Abraham Lincoln came to when he first moved to Illinois at the young age of 21. Staley’s A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company made cornstarch… which is hardly sexy by modern business
[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Schiff Sovereign’s CEO, Viktorija, who is originally from Lithuania but lives in Mexico.] We were sitting in the eighth row when it happened: the slap heard ‘round the stadium. Tessa Blanchard’s opponent smacked her across the chest so hard that the sound— a sharp crack— carried
Boris Bazhanov was a good Communist. Like many young people in the early 1900s who came from a prominent Russian family (his father was a successful physician), Boris developed a sense of guilt… almost remorse for the ‘privilege’ that he had enjoyed in his youth. He was 16 when the revolution took hold
It was September 2006— roughly two years before the 2008 financial crisis annihilated much of the global economy. But Greece was already in deep trouble. Unemployment was hovering around 9%. Youth unemployment was a staggering 25%. And government finances were in the toilet, with official debt-to-GDP at 100% and annual budget deficits at
Every year around this time, a silent killer sneaks its way onto European shores and slaughters people by the tens of thousands. Last year, it killed more people in just three months than the number of civilians killed in the war in Ukraine all year. It killed three times as many people as
Opening a bank account in the Land of the Free today feels like applying for a top secret security clearance. Banks often require multiple forms of ID, proof of address, proof of employment, plus detailed explanations of where your money came from, what you plan to do with it, and who you plan
This week the British Broadcasting Corporation flew halfway around the world to find a sad story that it could blame on (1) America and (2) climate change. Their drama opens in Afghanistan’s Ghor province, where fathers line up before dawn at a dusty square hoping to find a day’s work. One man weeps
[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Schiff Sovereign’s CEO, Viktorija, who is originally from Lithuania but lives in Mexico.] I’ve landed in a lot of cities. Most of them take a day or two before they show you who they really are. Monterrey, Mexico showed me in about fifteen minutes– on the
America was at the top of the world in 1955. World War II had been over for ten years. Soldiers had come home to GI Bill mortgages in brand-new suburbs. Detroit was building cars faster than anywhere else on the planet. And the economy was booming— in fact that year a milkshake-machine salesman
Almost ten years ago to the day, I woke up in my hotel room in Bangkok and flipped on the TV; it was late, late in the evening in the UK, and the BBC News was broadcasting live coverage of the Brexit vote. As the results slowly trickled in and it became clear
