Top stories
The Mines Are Cleared. The Mines Were Never the Constraint.
Riyadh Bought Its Pipes at Home for Policy Reasons and Got Insurance Instead
Apple's New Chief Gets the Products. The Outgoing One Keeps the Governments
The Container Line and the Listening Post Turn Out to Be the Same Ship
The Cheapest Thing in This Conflict Is Now the Footage
Somebody Finally Paid for the Years Nothing Is Needed
The Pay Freeze Exempts the Jobs Government Cannot Afford to Lose
The Credit Expires in December. The Tariff Has No Published Scope
The Big Read
The Long ViewThe Navy Can Escort the Ship. It Cannot Underwrite It.
A convoy changes how often a ship is hit. An underwriter is pricing what happens when one is.
A US destroyer transits the Strait of Hormuz. File photograph, December 2025.
World
The Strait of Hormuz Has No Cape of Good Hope
A chokepoint with an alternative is expensive.
National News
You Cannot Ban the Equipment You Cannot Find
The purchase order is the fast half.
Got a tip for us?
Editors read every submission. Here is how to send documents, on background or on the record.
How to submit
The Long View
Every Long Bond Sold Off at Once. That Rules Out Most of the Explanations.
When the price of lending long rises in every currency at once, the thing being repriced is not any one economy.
Health Costs Are Rising 11 Percent. Employers Will Report 8.2.
The headline number is already net of a transfer.
Three Different Problems Are Being Called a Budget Gap
One ended on schedule, one is structural, one was a decision by voters.
A Number for 2050 From an Industry That Cannot Price 2027
A twenty-four-year forecast is not a prediction.
The Picture
The Trillion Dollars Was the Easy Part. The Bill Arrives on a Schedule
Explainer
California Will Pay Per Journalist, Because That Is the Only Part It Can Count
Business
The Data Centre's Next Constraint Is the Box the Power Arrives In
Explainer
Google Keeps the Auction and Gets a Referee Instead
Money
Groceries Go on the Card. The Card Payment Comes Out of Groceries.
Latest News
Everything we have published, newest firstOverdose Deaths Are Falling Fast and Nobody Can Prove Why
New York's overdose deaths are down about 45 percent from 2022. Nationally the figure fell more than 12 percent in a year. It is the largest public health improvement in a decade, and the mechanism behind it is contested — which makes it far easier to lose.
Indiana Takes Away the Emergency Department's Release Valve
Hospitals across the state have agreed to stop turning ambulances away when the emergency department fills up. Diversion was never extra capacity. It was a way of moving a full department's problem onto the ambulance and the patient inside it.
National News
The Pay Freeze Exempts the Jobs Government Cannot Afford to Lose
Most federal civilian pay is frozen at 2026 levels next year. Law enforcement gets 3.8 percent and the military gets five to seven. The exceptions are an admission that pay decides who shows up.
The Answer Engine Starts Selling Advertising Against the Answer
The click was the thing publishers lost. The replacement is now carrying advertising of its own.
Two Grants Out of a Hundred and Eighty, and a Criterion That Changed Its Name
When a funding criterion cannot be written down, it gets rewritten as artistic merit.
National News
More States Are Allowing ADUs Few Are Making Them Easy to Build
At least eighteen states have stripped local governments of the power to ban second units, and eleven of those laws passed in the last four years. What decides whether the units get built has moved to water, wastewater and the cost of a kitchen.
Nobody Gets a Bill for the Interest, So Nobody Votes on It
Debt-to-GDP is higher than it was at the end of the Second World War and two percent of Americans call it the country's biggest problem. Sixteen years ago, at a third the size, it was a mass movement. Salience is not a function of size.
The headline reading is the midpoint of a split, and nothing is actually at the midpoint.
Health
The Permission to Make the Drug Expires the Moment It Works
A would-be maker of a scarce cancer drug may produce it only while the drug is officially in shortage. Succeed at ending the shortage and the permission ends with it, which is a rule that guarantees nobody builds durable capacity.
What We’re Following
View all
Two Risks in One Letter, and Only One of Them Is About AI
The chair of the Financial Stability Board has written to the G20 about artificial intelligence. Half the letter describes a familiar credit event wearing new clothes. The other half describes something the system has not priced at all.
As U.S. Debt Passes $40 Trillion, Manuj Mittal Warns of a Narrowing Talent Pipeline
The government is borrowing at a record pace while policies threaten to narrow the workforce supporting future growth and the federal tax base.
Opinion Voices
Argument and analysis from our columnists
Featured Voices
The reporters and editors behind the coverage
Cory Chamberlain
Senior Writer
Alison Acosta
Technology Correspondent
Daniel Okafor
Markets Editor
Margaret Holloway
Editor-at-Large
The Story So Far
The AI Buildout9 stories
- 2 Sept The Data Centre's Next Constraint Is the Box the Power Arrives In
- 2 Sept A Number for 2050 From an Industry That Cannot Price 2027
- 19 Aug Everyone Diversified Their Model Suppliers. Almost Nobody Diversified the Layer Underneath
- 19 Aug Companies Are Paying More to Watch Their Software Than to Run It
- 13 Aug Inference Costs Move From Footnote to Line Item
- 12 Aug AI Agents Take Over the Back Office, Quietly
Most Read
-
The Ports Fixed Themselves. The Roads Behind Them Did Not
National News
-
Everyone Diversified Their Model Suppliers. Almost Nobody Diversified the Layer Underneath
AI
-
Agencies Cannot Hire Fast Enough to Spend What Congress Appropriated
National News
-
The Equipment Lease Was the Last Easy Credit. It Is Not Any More
Business
-
The Delivery Room Is the First Thing a Rural Hospital Closes
Health
-
The Quiet Revenue Line in Your Index Fund
Markets
-
School Districts Are Budgeting for Students Who Never Arrived
National News
The Cranberry Brief