Khalil Gibran was born in 1883 in Bsharri, a town in present-day northern Lebanon, and emigrated as a child to Boston. He wrote in both Arabic and English and belonged to the mahjar, the diaspora generation of Arab writers who reshaped modern Arabic literature from outside the Arab world. This dual position produced a divided reception that persists to this day. In English, Gibran is read as a writer of popular devotional verse held at arm’s length by serious critics; in Arabic, he is treated as an innovator who helped move the tradition toward a freer, more romantic idiom.

The Prophet is a collection of twenty-six prose poems held within a minimal narrative frame. Almustafa, a man who has lived twelve years in the city of Orphalese, prepares to board the ship that will return him home. Before he departs, people ask him to speak on the subjects that compose a life, and he addresses each in turn.

A woman with a baby at her breast asks Almustafa to speak about children. Gibran says that children arrive through the parent but do not originate in the parent. They belong to a future the parent will never enter. The parent may provide love and care but under no circumstances should try to control how the child thinks. The parent is a bow, the child a living arrow, and God the archer who bends the bow and sends the arrow forward. Independence of thought is a key construct of Gibran’s framing of the parent-child relationship. You will find that successful parents in the 21st century do this rather well.

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Anyone who has been in love will find both comfort and shock with Gibran’s framing.

Love has no other desire but to fulfil

itself.

But if you love and must needs have

desires, let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook

that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own under-

standing of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

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Bulgakov trained as a physician in Kyiv, then abandoned medicine for literature during the Russian Civil War. Through the 1920s he wrote plays and stories that Soviet critics savaged for their irreverence toward the new order. The state banned his work from the stage, blocked his exit from the country, and reduced him to poverty. In 1930, desperate, he wrote directly to Stalin asking either to be allowed to work or to be allowed to leave. Stalin telephoned him personally and arranged him a job at the Moscow Art Theatre, which kept him alive while keeping him leashed. Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita in these conditions, a man composing his masterpiece in secret while the government that controlled his livelihood watched him closely. He poured his whole predicament into the manuscript, and every joke in it carries the pressure of that captivity.

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Himanshu Gulati entered Norwegian politics at 17, left medical school after a single semester and, by 25, was serving in government.

His family had imagined a different career. The son of Indian immigrants and a member of a family of doctors, Gulati had grown up with medicine as the familiar professional path. Politics offered uncertainty, public scrutiny and a far less conventional future.

Norway’s political system gave him an early point of entry. The country’s major parties operate youth organisations that allow teenagers and young adults to develop political arguments, build networks and assume genuine organisational responsibility.

For Gulati, that structure became a route from youthful conviction to national office. After leading his party’s youth wing, he joined the government formed following Norway’s 2013 election. He served first as a deputy minister of justice and later in the prime minister’s office, attending cabinet meetings for three years. At 29, he was elected to Parliament.

In this episode of the Network Capital podcast, Gulati reflects on that accelerated political education and on the demands facing a small but strategically important European country. The discussion moves from the mechanics of parliamentary life to immigration, war, energy and the changing balance of power among Europe, the United States, China and India.

Politics Beyond a Predetermined Path

Gulati’s rise followed an unusual sequence. Many politicians establish themselves as legislators before moving into executive government. He began near the centre of executive power and later entered Parliament.

That reversal shaped his understanding of ambition. His years observing cabinet government gave him an early view of senior political authority. Today, he places greater emphasis on using his position effectively than on pursuing a grander title.

Parliament offers a different form of influence. A legislator can pursue individual cases, meet businesses and constituents, propose legislation, question ministers and participate in public debate. For a politician interested in foreign affairs, the role also brings sustained contact with diplomats, allies and international institutions.

The working day is correspondingly varied. It may begin with a party meeting, continue in the parliamentary chamber and then move through meetings with delegations, constituents or industry representatives. The evening may end in a television studio.

“You really don’t have one job,” Gulati said. “You have five different jobs.”

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Immigration, Opportunity and Integration

Gulati describes his own experience as evidence of what he calls the “Norwegian dream”: the proposition that effort and determination can carry greater weight than family origin.

He sees his Indian heritage as a political advantage, offering additional networks and a wider field of reference. His career, he suggested, demonstrates the openness of Norwegian institutions to people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds.

His account also turns towards the practical demands of integration.

Norway, like several other European countries, has faced unemployment, welfare dependency, parallel communities and the overrepresentation of some immigrant groups in crime statistics, he said. He divides integration into two broad tests: economic participation and commitment to the civic values of the wider society.

The first concerns whether newcomers are able and encouraged to work, earn a living and contribute as taxpayers. The second concerns principles including gender equality, democratic participation and resistance to political extremism.

Gulati argues that generous welfare systems can weaken incentives to enter employment when long-term benefits become a viable substitute for work. His view belongs to a wider European debate about the design of social support and its influence on participation in the labour market.

His preferred immigration system would draw a clearer distinction between humanitarian assistance and labour migration. Europe, he said, has often treated immigration primarily as a means of helping people in danger. He favours providing more support to refugees closer to their home regions while making migration into Europe more responsive to labour shortages and skills.

The argument leads to difficult practical and moral questions. Governments must decide how to measure successful integration, how much time displaced people require to acquire skills and what obligations wealthy states owe to those who need sustained support.

The conversation presents immigration as a debate about welfare, national identity, civic values and political trust.

Foreign Policy After Predictability

Gulati serves as deputy chairman of the Norwegian Parliament’s committee on foreign affairs and defence. His portfolio places him at the intersection of several crises that have transformed Europe’s strategic assumptions.

He describes the current period as one in which longstanding alliances remain essential while foreign policy becomes more explicitly interest-driven. Countries that once organised partnerships mainly around shared values may increasingly cooperate with governments whose immediate strategic interests align with their own.

For Norway, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation remains the foundation of national security. The United States remains indispensable to that alliance, even as changes in political rhetoric and policy require careful European navigation.

Gulati argues that European governments should preserve their relationship with Washington while expressing their differences clearly. In his view, the partnership rests on decades of shared security interests and continues to hold central importance.

The war in Ukraine has reinforced the importance of collective defence. Gulati characterises Russia’s invasion as unprovoked and argues that supporting Ukraine represents both a moral obligation and a matter of European security. A Russian victory, he warned, could encourage further conflict.

He also expresses hope for a negotiated end to the war, an outcome that would require compromise and sustained diplomatic pressure. He expects that military and economic pressure may eventually bring Russia towards talks.

Energy as Security

Few countries embody the overlap among economics, energy and geopolitics as clearly as Norway.

As a major supplier of natural gas to Europe, Norway has acquired greater strategic importance since the disruption of Russian energy supplies. Gulati argues that energy policy now belongs at the centre of national strategy. It affects household costs, industrial competitiveness, political stability and security.

Governments that struggle to provide reliable and affordable energy can face protests and deep political instability. Energy, in his formulation, is also foreign policy and security policy.

The same convergence appears in defence. Norway is committing substantial resources to military spending, research and modernisation, according to Gulati. The war in Ukraine has exposed the importance of drones and other relatively inexpensive technologies capable of transforming the battlefield. Military planners must invest in new weapons as well as protection against them.

Modern warfare also changes the experience of individual soldiers, who may now be observed and targeted by small unmanned systems at close range.

India’s Expanding Role

He presents India as both an economic opportunity and an increasingly confident geopolitical actor. For European countries facing slower growth, India offers a vast market, a growing economy and potential partnerships in fields including green technology, seafood and industrial development.

He also draws a contrast between Western attitudes towards India and China. European and American cooperation with China has often been accompanied by concerns about intellectual property, security and intelligence gathering. Partnerships with India, he argues, tend to inspire greater strategic confidence.

That confidence, in his view, rests on more than commerce. India’s democratic system and its relationships with Western countries make collaboration appear politically durable, even when negotiations prove difficult or interests diverge.

Norway’s population of roughly 5.5 million gives the relationship a distinctive scale. The country possesses specialised expertise, capital and technology that could support India’s development while opening new markets for Norwegian businesses.

Gulati points to green technology, energy, seafood and industrial partnerships as areas of particular promise.

Office and Leadership

Near the end of the conversation, Gulati is asked whether he imagines becoming prime minister.

He redirects the discussion from office to leadership. The more consequential distinction, he suggests, lies between holding a position and creating meaningful change.

Political systems are designed to produce stability, compromise and continuity. Those qualities protect democracies from impulsive decisions. They can also make ambitious reform painstakingly slow. Politicians may enter government promising transformation and then discover that institutions define the pace and scope of action.

Gulati’s stated aspiration centres on retaining the ability to challenge those institutional boundaries.

The tension is an old one. Democracies need leaders capable of changing systems and institutions capable of preserving stability. Gulati’s career, from a youth party to the prime minister’s office and then Parliament, has given him an unusually close view of both forces.

In an age of war, migration disputes and unstable alliances, that tension may define his political future and Europe’s wider direction.

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Before you read, make sure to check out his masterclass on inflection points in careers.

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In late 2016, Byju Raveendran appeared to be on top of the world. His edtech startup had just raised a reported $50 million from Facebook’s founder and top-tier venture capital firms, even though the app had only 250,000 subscribers at the time. In an interview that year, Raveendran made his vision clear: learning in India was “driven by fear of exams,” a one-size-fits-all system that smartphones would help him “disrupt.” He returned to the word again and again over the years- Byju’s had “positively disrupted our own segment,” it would “disrupt university degree courses through online.”

The diagnosis was not wrong. Enrolment in Indian schools has risen steadily since independence, but less than 45% of fifth-graders in public schools can read a text meant for second-graders. Towns like Kota have become factory floors for entrance-exam preparation, with over a hundred thousand students a year joining full-time coaching institutes. Nearly a third of all Indian students use private tutoring of some kind. As the head of the Prime Minister’s Scientific Advisory Council once put it, India has “an examination system but not an education system.”

For a while, Byju’s seemed to be winning by the startup world’s preferred metric. By the end of 2021, it had raised more than $5 billion, was valued at over $20 billion, and had become one of the world’s most valuable startups, with over 100 million registered users. Its logo was on the Indian cricket team’s shirts. Shah Rukh Khan fronted its advertisements.

But look at what the company actually became. In April 2021, Byju’s spent nearly a billion dollars acquiring Aakash, a 33-year-old chain of brick-and-mortar IIT and medical coaching centres- the very heart of the exam-prep culture Raveendran had set out to disrupt. The following year, Byju’s announced 500 physical tuition centres of its own, aiming to enrol a million students. Meanwhile, investigations into its sales practices found marketing agents signing lower-income parents up for loans they did not understand- an analysis of 110 consumer complaints found nearly half were unaware they had taken on debt- and sales associates reporting that they were coached to suggest to parents that their children were falling behind. In six years, a startup that promised to end fear-driven, exam-obsessed education had become a multibillion-dollar empire of test prep and after-school tuition, powered by the same anxieties it claimed to cure.

During my doctoral research on India’s startup ecosystem- through interviews with venture capitalists and founders, and close reading of the industry’s advertisements, websites and public statements- I came to see Byju’s not as an aberration but as an illustration. The interesting question about disruption is rarely whether a company is innovative. It is: disrupting what, exactly? And who benefits from the claim?

The word has a respectable intellectual lineage. The economist Joseph Schumpeter described capitalism as a process of “creative destruction,” in which innovative newcomers destroy complacent incumbents. Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” gave the idea its modern business-school gloss. But as the literary scholar Adrian Daub has observed, disruption in the startup sense has drifted a long way from these roots. Schumpeter imagined large companies being destroyed. Today’s startups claim to be disrupting entire industries, human habits, even sectors- like small local businesses or public education- that have far less money and power than the startups themselves. The rhetoric creates a strange inversion: heavily capitalised, elite-networked companies get to play David, while fragmented, often precarious industries are cast as Goliath.

Consider how Indian venture capital presents itself. Sequoia Capital’s “Ethos” page celebrates “the underdogs… the outsiders… the defiant.” The Indian Venture Capital Association’s advocacy literature announces the end of the era when success required “generational wealth” or “a privileged network,” hailing the rise of “Meritocratic Capital for the New India.” This is a moral claim, not just a commercial one: startups and their funders present themselves as correcting an unfair economy, replacing privilege with merit and stagnation with competition.

The reality sits awkwardly beside the rhetoric. Ola Cabs launched to acclaim as the solution to India’s “notorious” autorickshaw drivers. But surveys at the time found the average Mumbai autorickshaw driver earned about 9,295 rupees a month- roughly $120- before paying for fuel and permits. Ola, meanwhile, had raised over $600 million and was valued at $7 billion. Which of these is the entrenched incumbent, and which the scrappy underdog?

And the destination of the journey is rarely more competition. The economics of venture capital demand that a few investments produce enormous returns to pay for the many that fail, which pushes funds towards “winner take all” markets- platforms where scale begets scale and the leader becomes nearly impossible to dislodge. Peter Thiel says openly that he looks for future monopolies. Founders are coached to build “moats” against rivals. One VC I interviewed spoke admiringly of markets where a company must “pour money into marketing and user acquisition before somebody else captures the turf.” When American lawmakers investigated Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook in 2020, their report reached for a telling comparison: these former underdog startups had become “the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” The disruptors, given time and enough capital, become precisely the thing they promised to disrupt.

There is a second, subtler gap between rhetoric and practice. Startups routinely claim to be disrupting human bias and inefficiency itself- replacing gut feel with data, instinct with algorithms, the fallible body with the quantified self. Yet the institution that selects and funds these startups runs almost entirely on gut. In my interviews, VCs described their process not in the language of data science but of intuition and romance. One explained that he looked for “the kind of guy who would crawl through broken glass to deliver,” a judgment based on a “rough sense” that “this guy is good, this space is interesting.” Another compared the whole process to dating: “You don’t really know how good or bad the person is going to be unless you spend some time with them. On the first date, you are both the best people around.” The industry that promises to algorithmize the world allocates billions through chemistry, charisma and hunch- the most human process imaginable.

None of this means the status quo deserves defending. Indian education genuinely fails millions of children; plenty of industries genuinely serve customers badly. Some things should be disrupted. But that is exactly why the rhetoric deserves scrutiny rather than applause. “Disruption” is not a neutral description of what a company does; it is a story that does work. It casts the startup as a moral actor before it has done anything, makes its growth seem like a public service, recruits employees and investors into a mission rather than a business, and renders the costs- indebted parents, displaced workers, consolidated markets- as the regrettable but inevitable price of progress.

The language has already escaped the startup world. Politicians style themselves as disruptors of old party machines. NGOs promise to disrupt development. Self-help books urge you to disrupt yourself. The more universal the word becomes, the more useful the question underneath it: what precisely is being disrupted, is it really as powerful as the story suggests, and who ends up holding the power when the disruption is done? In the case of Byju’s, the answer is uncomfortably clear. The fear of exams was never disrupted. It was acquired, rebranded, and sold back to us- this time with a Bollywood star in the advertisements.

P.S. You will enjoy this debate between Dhruva and Utkarsh.

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In 2014, The New York Times published a cartoon after India’s Mars mission showing an Indian farmer with a cow at the door of an “Elite Space Club”.

Yesterday, India became the third country to achieve orbital launch capability through private enterprise.

Learn more about the commercial space industry in our masterclass by Harvard Business School Professor Matthew Weinzierl.

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Homer, the Iliad, and Why the Greeks Still Set the Terms of Our Speech

The Iliad is a war poem. It covers a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy and takes as its subject the rage of Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors, and what that rage costs everyone around him. The Odyssey is a homecoming poem. It follows Odysseus, the cleverest of the Greeks, through ten years of wandering after the war as he tries to return to Ithaca, his wife Penelope, and his son Telemachus.

We covered the Odyssey in summary in an earlier newsletter. You can review it.

The Odyssey on Screen, and the Noise Around It

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey opened worldwide on 17 July 2026. Universal produced it on a budget of roughly 250 million dollars, and it is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX cameras. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, Tom Holland plays Telemachus, Robert Pattinson plays the suitor Antinous, Zendaya plays Athena, Charlize Theron plays Calypso, and Lupita Nyong’o takes a dual role as Helen of Troy and her half-sister Clytemnestra.

Critics have given Nolan the best reviews of his career, with an approval rating around 95 to 96 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, ahead of The Dark Knight and Memento. Audiences awarded it an A CinemaScore, and the opening weekend reached roughly 120 million dollars in North America and about 257 million worldwide, the strongest global debut of Nolan’s career.

The controversy preceded the acclaim by months. The loudest strand concerned casting. Nyong’o’s Helen drew sustained criticism from commentators, who argued that Homer’s descriptions of Helen made the choice a betrayal of the source. False claims circulated that Elliot Page had been cast as Achilles, which fed a parallel outrage cycle of its own. The casting of the rapper Travis Scott as a bard puzzled many, though Nolan defended it as a nod to the poem’s origins in oral performance, which he compared to rap. Beyond casting, viewers objected to the modern dialogue and American accents in the trailers, and to costume design that made Agamemnon’s armour resemble Batman’s. The final trailer accumulated over half a million dislikes, and the film’s official account on X restricted replies. A separate and more serious dispute arose over filming in Dakhla in Western Sahara, where the Sahrawi government condemned the production for shooting in what it regards as territory under illegal Moroccan occupation, without consultation.

Two observations are worth making. First, the outrage economy and the box office proved entirely compatible, and publicists predicted as much before release. Second, the fiercest arguments concerned fidelity to a poem that was itself never fixed, that varied with every singer who performed it, and that describes Helen only sparingly. The controversy tells us more about 2026 than anything else.

Greek Thought in Daily Conversation

When you call a hidden weakness an Achilles heel, you invoke the legend that the sea nymph Thetis dipped her infant son in the river Styx to make him invulnerable, holding him by the heel she thereby left exposed. This detail emerged centuries later in the works of Roman poet Statius, but the Iliad put forward the character whose pride and vulnerability made the image stick. The word odyssey itself now names any long, difficult journey. Ulysses, the Latin form of Odysseus, gave James Joyce the title for a novel that compresses the ten-year voyage into a single Dublin day, and gave Tennyson the ageing king who yearns to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The list runs deeper. A mentor takes his name from Mentor, the old friend of Odysseus in whose form Athena guides young Telemachus. A siren call is a temptation that lures you to destruction, after the singers whose voices drew sailors onto the rocks. To be caught between Scylla and Charybdis, the six-headed monster and the whirlpool flanking a narrow strait, is the original version of a rock and a hard place. A Trojan horse, whether in geopolitics or in malware, recalls the wooden horse by which the Greeks finally entered Troy, a story told in the Odyssey. To hector someone is to bully them, a curious afterlife for Hector, who in the poem is the most decent man on either side. And the working vocabulary of criticism, from epic to nemesis to hubris, is Greek to its roots. We speak Homer daily without knowing it.

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The title comes from the Katha Upanishad, one of the ancient Sanskrit scriptures, which Maugham quotes as his epigraph. The verse says that the path to salvation is as hard to walk as the sharp edge of a razor.

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The Traveling Anatomist tells the story of Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century Danish scientist whose work reshaped anatomy and laid the foundations of modern geology. Steno is far less famous than Galileo or Newton, but Castel-Branco argues that his career offers one of the clearest windows into how modern science was actually made.

Dr Nuno Castel-Branco is a Research Fellow at All Souls College. All Souls admits its Examination Fellows through what has been called the hardest exam in the world, two days of papers featuring questions like “Why are some jokes funnier than others?” and “Is boredom unfairly maligned?” If you fancy challenging yourself this weekend, the past papers are here.

Nuno’s career has followed a path his subject would recognise. He trained as a physicist in Lisbon, published on the accelerated expansion of the universe, and then walked away. The frontier of cosmology, he told me, had narrowed to a choice between programming models and presenting research that only five people in the world could follow. History of science offered the same rigour with a wider door. A PhD at Johns Hopkins followed, then a fellowship at Harvard’s Renaissance villa in Florence, then All Souls. He is in Chicago on July 7, launching the book. If you happen to be there, go say hello.

You should listen to his Network Capital podcast and check out his Substack.

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The Traveling Anatomist

Steno was born in Copenhagen in 1638 and trained as a physician at Leiden. His real passion, however, was mathematics, and his mentors had steered him towards medicine because it promised a steadier career. Instead of abandoning mathematics, Steno brought it into anatomy. He described the glands as filters of the blood and used simple arithmetic about blood flow to explain how the body produces tears, correcting older ideas that imagined the brain as a reservoir of water. He also developed a new mechanical model of how muscles move. In each case, he was applying quantitative, mechanical reasoning to the human body at a time when this was highly unusual.

His career took a turn in Florence, where he worked at the Medici court after turning down a position at the newly founded Paris Academy of Sciences. Asked to dissect a large shark caught in the Mediterranean, Steno noticed that its teeth closely resembled the strange stones people kept finding on mountain tops, far inland from any sea. Others had observed the likeness and dismissed it. Steno set out to prove that these stones really were the teeth of ancient sharks. To explain how such objects could come to rest inside solid rock high above the ocean, he worked out how layers of sediment are deposited over time, one upon another, and how the history of the earth can be read from its strata. These conclusions became the principles of stratigraphy still taught in geology courses today.

Later in life, Steno underwent a religious conversion, became a Catholic priest, and eventually a bishop in northern Germany, shifting his career from anatomy to geology and finally to theology.

Castel-Branco uses this remarkable life to advance several larger arguments, and each one pushes against a familiar assumption about how science works.

The first concerns method. Castel-Branco describes Steno’s genius as focused interdisciplinarity, and he is careful to distinguish this from the loose modern celebration of people who do many things. The seventeenth century is often called the golden age of the polymath, and the temptation is to place Steno in that gallery beside Newton and Leibniz and leave it there. Castel-Branco resists this. Newton, he points out, wrote more on theology than on physics, and worked on mathematics, chemistry and scripture across a long life, but these pursuits largely ran in parallel channels that did not feed one another. His chemistry was not driving his mathematics, and his theology was not shaping his optics. Leibniz represents a different ambition again, a genuine desire to bring all knowledge together into a single universal science. Steno did neither of these things. He held a broad training in mathematics, mechanics, chemistry and theology, all of it standard for a well-schooled physician in Lutheran Denmark, and then he collapsed the whole of it onto one narrow problem after another. First the glands, then the heart, then the muscles, then the ovaries, then the earth. The breadth was the inheritance of his education. The discipline lay in refusing to let that breadth scatter him. For Castel-Branco this is the more useful model for anyone with many interests, because it treats breadth as a resource to be aimed rather than a temptation to be indulged. Steno himself felt the strain of it, describing his later research as a hydra whose heads multiplied faster than he could cut them, and his answer was simply to choose one problem, follow it, and choose again.

The second argument concerns friendship. The standard history of early modern science is written as a contest, Newton against Leibniz over the calculus, priority disputes conducted in bitter pamphlets, men who despised one another racing to publish first. Castel-Branco tells the story that rarely gets told, a history of friendship, collaboration and co-authorship. Steno is an ideal witness for it. Everywhere he settled, in Leiden, London, Paris and Florence, he sought out the leading mathematicians, because mathematics was his first love, and he made friends of them and worked alongside them. Castel-Branco shows that Steno influenced these men and was influenced by them in turn. Friendship also changed the character of competition itself. When you discover that a friend is working on the same question, the dispute over who arrived first loses its sharpness and becomes something more horizontal, a matter of courtesy rather than combat, an acknowledgement that had you known, you would have credited one another. Ideas then multiply and travel across Europe through these networks of affection. Underpinning all of it is travel. Steno’s contemporaries typically journeyed abroad and then returned home to write, but Steno produced his work on the move, and Castel-Branco argues this is precisely why his disciplines cross-pollinated so freely. The library you sit in and the people beside you shape the questions you think to ask.

The third argument concerns the people history forgets, and it emerges from the book’s final chapter. Steno converted to Catholicism in Florence, and Castel-Branco set out to understand why. The trail led to a devout noblewoman who had a real influence on him, whom Steno met through a physician friend. That struck Castel-Branco as a puzzle worth pursuing. How does a noblewoman in Florence come to shape the course of a visiting intellectual of Steno’s stature? Reading the correspondence more closely, he began to find other women, in Paris, in Leiden, in Copenhagen, moving through the same scientific circles, corresponding and persuading and shaping, and almost wholly absent from the historical record. This became a wider preoccupation. Castel-Branco points out that the first woman to hold a university professorship taught in eighteenth-century Bologna under the sponsorship of Pope Benedict XIV, who also supported a professor of mathematics and a professor of anatomical design at the same university, and that almost no one has heard the story. The southern European world in particular, he argues, holds a rich and largely untold history of women in science and education.

The Traveling Anatomist rewards anyone drawn to the history of science, but its real reach is broader. Anyone who juggles too many interests, or wonders whether their scattered curiosity is a flaw, will find in Steno both a warning and a permission.

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Stories of Science

Reading reality through the eyes of history. Weekly essays by Nuno Castel-Branco, MSc, PhD (featured in Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Scientific American)

By Nuno Castel-Branco

The Player of Games

There is a quote that follows Iain M. Banks around now, more than a decade after his death. Asked at an AI summit what a good future with artificial intelligence might look like, Elon Musk said the Culture novels were the best version anyone had written, and that everything else fell some way behind. SpaceX names its drone ships after Banks’s starships. So the books have acquired a second life as a sort of founding text for a certain kind of technological optimism, and The Player of Games, the second Culture novel and the easiest to recommend to a newcomer, is usually where people are told to begin.

It earns the recommendation, though the Musk association points slightly away from the real reason. The book follows a man who is very good at games and bored by the fact, and Banks does something stranger and sharper with that premise than its reputation as comfortable utopian science fiction suggests.

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Charles Dickens published Bleak House in twenty monthly instalments between March 1852 and September 1853. He wrote it in the middle of his career, after David Copperfield and before Little Dorrit, at the point where his comic energy and his anger at social institutions came under his fullest control. It is the most tightly constructed of his novels, and the one most often named as his best.

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As a founder and PhD scholar researching the outer space economy, I find it foolish to think I can even come close to knowing everything. There was this glorious period in my early twenties when I felt that I knew who I was, had a clear sense of where I wanted to be, and had figured out how to get there. Life turned out differently. In many ways, I exceeded the wildest expectations of my younger self. In others, I disappointed myself. Being comfortable, or at least knowing that such contradictions are a normal part of becoming not-so-young, is growth. That’s what I tell myself.

Since I am not young, am I middle-aged? To suspect everything is to have been wrong enough times that you start reading the fine print on your own enthusiasms. The middle-aged have learned that the calling can become a cage, that the person you swore you’d never become is often just the person you become slowly, one reasonable compromise at a time. It is the scar tissue of disappointed expectation. I have some of it, but not enough to surrender at its altar. I think the best - for my loved ones and me, and for the world at large - is yet to come. All factors considered, I am energized by the future. I don’t think anyone who knows me would call me a skeptic. Clearly, I am not middle-aged. Maybe I am old? Do I believe in everything? Becoming not-so-young exposed me to enough ideas and ideals that belief without consideration seems far-fetched. So, not old. Not really.

So, where does that leave the other somewhat young people and me? The unshakable belief of the early twenties is gone, the settled wariness of the middle-aged has not crept in, and the naiveté and wisdom of old age seem far away. I don’t have big plans for the birthday. For a change, it will pass without fanfare. I will go to my college lake in Oxford, dip my toes, and watch the sunrise, with a glass of Dom Pérignon.

I think age is less about certainty than Wilde would have us believe. As a somewhat young person, I think maturity or lack thereof comes down to what we pay attention to and how much time we think we have. I have loved being around people all my life. It has energized me thus far, and I doubt it will be any different in the future.

Just when I started working at Microsoft, I stumbled upon Blaise Pascal’s quote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Since then, I have consistently carved out time for myself to think, reflect, and enjoy solitude. However, even in those moments of quiet, I have been in a hurry to get to the next big thing on my calendar. This birthday, I thought I’d try something different, so I cleared out my calendar. There is nothing for me to do except to be grateful for what I have, be hopeful for what I want, and accept that fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or like the young say, FUD, is part of the adventure.

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Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind have each built internal capacity for normative reasoning, often quietly. At Anthropic, Amanda Askell leads the effort to shape Claude, the company’s language model, through a written constitution: a document articulating the principles by which the model should respond when requests pull in different directions. OpenAI is less explicit in its philosophical titles but is engaged with closely related questions; its public work on alignment and model behavior involves frameworks for how systems should respond in situations that no one can fully anticipate. Iason Gabriel, a political philosopher at DeepMind whom I once heard lecture as a student at Oxford, has spent years on the value alignment of AI systems.

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Allegedly short for“Facebook Transformation Week”. All meetings were canceled so that people could learn the newest ways to build things with AI. Thousands of employees set up “second brains” using Claude. They unleashed agents with cute names like “Pikachu”. Security was relaxed, and even PMs and designers were allowed to ship code to production. It felt like Meta was back at the cutting edge, like the frontier AI labs - Anthropic and OpenAI.

Then, executives pushed employees to start creating “Skills” and teaching AI how they work. A dashboard was built to track how AI-native an employee was. Meta employees can’t resist the numbers on a dashboard - Uploading AI skills and releasing AI tutorials earned more points, so it naturally became competitive. Now there are 10,000+ skills & Plugins, hundreds of MCP servers, Hooks, and at least 5 different flavors of Open Claw in the company.

A flashy new team called Applied AI (AAI) was launched with the promise of low bureaucracy, fast decisions, and a new AI-native operating model: managers will not bother employees with regular 1:1 meetings, comms will be async, each Manager will manage up to 50 employees, and employees can create ad hoc meetings when they want to talk. Eerily reminiscent of call center operations, I thought.

Then, the CTO announced that Meta will now start recording the screens of employees so that AI could be trained on how to use a computer. Someone asked if Privacy approved this - the CTO’s answer was tone-deaf “we went through some sort of privacy process, don’t know which one, the usual one?”

Then, a plan to lay off 8000 people was leaked to the news. Meta’s HR team got bombarded with questions. Showing some grace, HR wrote a post to offer clarity:
“we’re going to lay off 8,000 people, and cancel hiring plans for 6,000 roles. We will flatten some management layers. And there will be a draft. We will draft employees from every domain of the company to AAI to create training data for Meta’s AI models.”

On the positive side: “Meta will pay 4+ months salary as severance, and pay for 1.5 years of family insurance.” This emergency fund and 1.5 years of insurance helps in a scary job market. Most employees appreciated the generosity. But then the questions began.

People asked if they can opt-out of their laptop recordings when they’re looking at sensitive stuff. No. “You cannot opt-out of tracking on a company issued laptop” said the CTO.

People asked if they can volunteer to be laid off; No. The company will decide whom to retain.

People asked if they can opt-out of moving to AAI; No. The company decides who works on what.

In a way - I understand the need to prune a company with 80,000 people.

Meta has a unique culture. Every six months, teams commit to certain goals and do everything in their power to meet those goals. Usually it involves changing the products to move some metric: ex: getting more click-through on e-commerce ads. Everything is measured. People are graded based on how their work moved the metrics they set goals for. Every six months, everyone writes an 800-word essay laying out their ‘impact’. High impact leads to a good grade and bonuses.

Competent Managers grow their ‘impact’ by finding more problems to solve and moving the right metrics. Their grade (rating) is driven by impact. BUT manager promotions are driven by how many people they manage. To rise up the corporate ladder, managers pitch projects and hire more people. Incentives drive behavior. Inevitably, people build empires.

This leads to people fighting for work to do. People “grab scope” by copying or even stealing ideas and urgently shipping the code. Imagine that a Facebook team figures out that people click on ads more if they add clickable stickers on ads. IG engineers will spot the experiment results and immediately get to work on trying to ship a similar change. This creates a flywheel of urgency - if you spot something that could improve a metric like ads click-through, you have to start socializing the idea to get all the permissions and you also have to rapidly build and test it before another team steals the idea, rebrands it with another name and ships it.

source: macrotrends.net

But announcing that you’re mandating employees to teach their Skills to AI, recording their screens, and then planning a layoff in a month… is tricky business.

After the announcement, a chill set into the company. Managers held meetings trying to bring back morale. The most common phrase I heard was “focus on controlling what’s in your control.” Many managers admitted they had no idea who would get laid off, and described how they are preparing to be laid off themselves.

One VP described to me how he had mentally prepared himself for how he was going to restructure his team and how he was not majorly affected by the emotional side of it, because he had been making such decisions for 4 years now.

At 4 AM, on Wednesday, May 20, people across the company got emails about whether they were: 1) laid off (effective immediately), 2) reassigned to Applied AI, or 3) flattened (managers who lost their team and now had the option to become an individual contributor).

A program manager on maternity leave was laid off, she said “My entire team got cut” - she worked on data security and privacy. A Product Manager who just built a team of 5 lost his entire team and was offered the chance to take an IC role to keep working on his mandate. Many, many engineers found themselves assigned to Applied AI with no idea who their manager was, and a dreadful sense that they’re well-paid data-labelers now.

That evening, the efficient VP who was “mentally prepared to restructure his team” got a call from his best friend at work. Someone he had worked with for 10 years said that they had been “impacted” by the layoff. That phone call hit him like a gut punch. He was horrified at the idea that it could happen to someone so close (closer than the people who work for him).

The day after the layoff, folks returned to the office with many feelings - some felt survivor’s guilt, some felt a renewed sense of imposter syndrome, some felt relief.

There was plenty of performative empathy on display. Managers held meetings to discuss “how we can all support each other during this tough time.”

7 days have passed now.

The dust is swirling in the air… it hasn’t quite settled yet.

All teams were reminded that they cannot miss the goals they set at the beginning of the year even if their team was cut in half … “use AI”. Missing goals would lead to a bad rating for this half.

There will also be no need to write your “impact essay” yourself or give peer feedback anymore. An AI tool called Checkpoint will now assign employees into buckets and assign their grades, and managers can choose to override the AI’s decisions if they are prepared to defend it.

Multiple employees from ICs to VPs who were hoping to get laid off have announced their resignations. Many of them already had other jobs lined up and were just waiting to see if they could collect the severance.

Morale might be down. But App engagement is up, revenue is up, profits are up, and most importantly, the stock is up 4% today.

FTW.

Darth Vader’s stormtroopers live to fight another day.

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Durant introduces us to several philosophers in the book, and they mark their entry much like actors on a stage. That’s potentially why reading the book can feel like watching an intellectually stimulating play addressing pertinent questions about the nature and meaning of life. The Story of Philosophy is Durant’s story; hence, it doesn’t promise to be objective. If it did, the book would be outrageously dull, much like this chart below.

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Plot

The novel opens in Marseille in February 1815, with nineteen-year-old Edmond Dantès, second mate of the merchant ship Pharaon, bringing the vessel into harbour after the sudden death of its captain. His safe return seems to secure everything before him. He is on the verge of being made captain, marrying the Catalan girl Mercédès, and settling into the steady life of a respected sailor.

Three men cannot bear this. Danglars, the ship’s accountant, wants the captaincy for himself. Fernand Mondego, Mercédès’s cousin, wants Mercédès. Caderousse, the tailor next door, wants only what such men always want, which is to be in the company of his betters when they fall. Together they compose an anonymous denunciation accusing Edmond of secretly carrying letters for Napoleon Bonaparte and place it in the hands of the local prosecutor.

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Harvard Business School Professor Matthew Weinzierl joined us on Network Capital to talk about why the space economy is much more woven into daily life than people realise. GPS, weather forecasting, satellite comms, disaster response, precision farming, and the timestamps that keep card payments and stock trades honest.

The focus of our conversation was his new book, Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier. He argues that space is a place. A real economic environment, with geography and scarce real estate, where one operator’s mistake quickly becomes everyone else’s problem.

Once you accept that framing, the questions change. Here is a glimpse of what we discussed:

• Why did US manned spaceflight stagnate for decades after Apollo, and what does that tell us about central planning?

• What changed when NASA’s COTS programme shifted from cost-plus contracts to fixed-price ones in the early 2000s?

• How did the Space Shuttle end up costing roughly $1.5 billion per flight when it was sold as a reusable workhorse?

• Can a government act as a smart anchor customer without crowding out the private innovation it’s trying to seed?

• How do you price a slot in low Earth orbit when supply is finite, and the externalities are shared by everyone?

• Is orbital debris a textbook tragedy of the commons, and if so, who realistically pays to clean it up?

• Should governments tax debris-generating activity the way they tax pollution on Earth?

• When are subsidies for positive spillovers in space justified, and when do they just pick winners?

• Why do commercial space stations keep stalling on a chicken-and-egg problem, and what would actually break it?

• How should property rights work for resources no one can physically guard?

• How is geopolitical competition reshaping the rules of orbit?

• How do you ensure the gains from the space economy are broadly shared rather than captured by a handful of incumbents?

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The plot, despite the book’s reputation for difficulty, is straightforward. Hans Castorp, a calm and well-mannered young engineer from Hamburg, travels to the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, a soldier recovering at the Berghof, an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium high above the town of Davos. Hans plans to stay three weeks. He stays for seven years.

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What professionals are experiencing today seems different. The anxiety is harder to name and harder to resolve, because it is no longer enough to work harder or perform better. Many people doing everything right are still finding themselves laid off, passed over, or suddenly redundant in ways they did not see coming and could not have prevented. The rules that were supposed to govern how effort translates into security have shifted, and most of us are still operating as though they haven’t.

That is worth sitting with. Because if the old strategies are no longer sufficient, and the old sources of reassurance are no longer reliable, then the question is not how to try harder within a system that is working. It is how to think differently about your professional life within one that has changed

Over the past three years, more than 500,000 technology workers alone have been laid off across hundreds of companies. The pattern is striking not only in scale but in its apparent arbitrariness. At Meta, a memo from Mark Zuckerberg in January 2025 announced that the company would move low performers out faster, in preparation for what he described as an intense year. Thousands of people lost their jobs, many of them employees who had received strong reviews the previous cycle.

What makes the current environment genuinely different from earlier periods of economic disruption is that layoffs no longer correlate neatly with company‑level distress. In previous recessions, workers at struggling firms lost jobs, while workers at profitable ones largely did not. That correlation has broken down. Companies are now cutting headcount as a first‑order strategic tool, used to fund AI investments, satisfy investor pressure for efficiency, or reshape organizational structure, regardless of how individual employees are performing.

When Klarna announced in 2024 that its AI assistant was performing the work of hundreds of customer service agents, it was making a public bet on a strategy that dozens of companies were quietly running in parallel. That bet turned out to be premature. By spring 2025, Klarna was rehiring human workers after customer satisfaction fell and service quality became inconsistent. Its leadership later admitted that cost had been too predominant an evaluation factor. Yet the correction did not undo the disruption to the people who had been displaced in the interim, and it did not slow the broader industry appetite for automation. If anything, it refined it.

The professionals living most anxiously through this period are often those in roles that feel adjacent to what AI can do. Close enough to feel the heat, but far enough that the exact line between “automatable” and “human‑dependent” is unclear. That ambiguity is a core driver of the free floating dread the essay describes.

Understanding these causes does not dissolve the anxiety, but it reframes it usefully. If the instability is structural, then the response needs to be structural too. Not a doubling down on individual performance optimization, but a deliberate effort to make your career a shared project with people you trust. Three things, in particular, are worth building now.

First, reframe your relationship to tenure. Most professionals still carry a mental model in which a stable job is the norm and job searching is the exception, the emergency mode you enter when something goes wrong. That model needs to be inverted. Keeping your CV current, maintaining a loose familiarity with the market, and reserving regular time for reflection and skill development should not be activities you do only in crisis. They should be standing practice, the professional equivalent of physical maintenance. Upskilling should be part of that frame specifically. The roles that will be most resilient in the next several years are the ones whose skills are hardest to replicate cheaply and at scale. Staying close to where your field is moving, and building capabilities that sit at the intersection of technical literacy and human judgment, is one of the most durable investments you can make right now.

Second, invest in peer networks, and do so before you need them. Networks activated in the aftermath of a layoff tend to be thin because they are being built under time pressure and emotional strain. The relationships that actually move the needle on what comes next are usually ones that predate the disruption by months or years. This means staying genuinely connected to former colleagues, being generous with introductions and information when there is nothing immediate in it for you, and contributing to communities of peers who share knowledge honestly about what the market looks like. The value is not just practical, though it is that too. A trusted peer who worked at a company six months ago can tell you things about its culture that no job description will. A well‑placed referral still accounts for a disproportionate share of successful hires at most firms, not because the labor market is fair, but because trust travels through relationships. The second value is psychological. Navigating genuine professional uncertainty alone is much harder than navigating it with a community of people who are facing similar pressures and willing to say so honestly.

Third, begin the gradual construction of income streams that do not depend on any single employer. This idea tends to provoke resistance, partly from exhaustion and partly from the reasonable sense that not everyone has the bandwidth or capital to build a side business. The point is not to build a side business. The point is to begin, incrementally, to reduce the concentration of your financial life in a single source. The creator economy, now estimated at well over 250 billion dollars globally, is increasingly made up of professionals who have converted specific expertise into something that earns independently, such as paid newsletters, courses, template libraries, or consulting arrangements maintained alongside full time employment. None of these is built quickly. Most require one to three years of consistent effort before they generate meaningful income. That timeline is precisely why starting during stability matters. The professionals who enter a period of disruption with even a modest secondary income stream are in a categorically different position from those who are starting from zero when the disruption arrives.

Career anxiety, honestly confronted, is a rational response to a genuinely unstable environment. The goal is not to eliminate it through positive thinking or relentless productivity. It is to reduce the underlying vulnerability that makes the instability so threatening. That means building, steadily and before you need it, the kind of professional life that can absorb a shock without collapsing under it, whether that shock comes from a layoff at a profitable firm, a pivot toward AI‑driven workflows, or a broader market shift.

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Today, we are going to dive into Nikolai Gogol's masterpiece Dead Souls. Readers of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake will recognise the author's name. The novel's protagonist, Gogol Ganguli, is named after him because his father had been reading a Gogol story on the night he survived a train accident. The name stays with him into adulthood, where it sits awkwardly between its literary weight and its oddness as an everyday first name, sometimes mistaken now for something closer to Google.

Gogol wrote Dead Souls in the early 1840s, a period when Russia still lived under serfdom but had begun to organise itself through paperwork, censuses, and official records. The country’s wealth and social order rested on the ownership of serfs, who were counted every few years in a government audit known as the revision. Between revisions, the registered count remained fixed, even as people were born, married, moved, or died. Land, labour, and status were rooted in an older, feudal order, yet increasingly defined on paper by the state. Gogol recognised what this produced: a setting in which documents could carry more weight than lived experience, and in which conduct was shaped as much by appearances and advantage as by any deeper sense of responsibility.

The novel follows Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a minor official who arrives in a provincial town with polite manners and an air of purpose. He calls on the governor, dines with the police chief, charms the postmaster, and within a few days has been received as a man of consequence, though no one can quite say where his consequence comes from. His project is at once ingenious and absurd. He seeks to purchase from landowners the legal rights to serfs who have died since the last census but who remain registered as living. These so-called souls still exist on paper, and the landowners must continue paying tax on them until the next revision corrects the record. To be relieved of that burden, even at a small price, is for many of them a quiet relief. For Chichikov, the same names carry a different value. Registered serfs could be used as collateral against state-backed loans, and a man who appeared to own several hundred of them could borrow against that paper wealth, settle himself on a distant estate, and pass into the gentry without ever having farmed an acre. The premise carries the faint logic of a financial instrument, yet it rests entirely on the gap between fact and record.

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In August 1602, a maid named Neeltgen Cornelis invested 100 guilders, saved on wages of 50 cents a day, in the Dutch East India Company, a venture that sent ships across the Indian Ocean to trade in nutmeg, mace and cloves. She was among 1,143 people to participate in what historians recognize as the world’s first initial public offering. The company’s charter had declared that any resident of the Dutch lands could buy shares, with no minimum or maximum investment. That principle, of universalized access to ownership in a productive enterprise, is what every IPO since has inherited, and what India, four centuries later, has taken further than any country on earth.

In 2025, India produced 367 new listings, accounting for 28.4% of all IPO activity globally, more than the United States, China, and Hong Kong by deal count. India’s arrival at this position required decades of institutional building. In 1991, facing a balance of payments crisis, the government dismantled the License Raj and opened the economy to market forces. Capital markets were reformed, SEBI was formally empowered as a market regulator, the National Stock Exchange was established, and foreign institutional investors were allowed to participate in Indian equity markets.

What the 1991 reforms also did, unintentionally, was create a new dependency. India’s capital markets became driven by foreign institutional investors who would pile in and drive share prices up, resulting in multiple IPOs taking place. When that foreign liquidity was inevitably withdrawn and deployed elsewhere, IPO activity would cease. In their 2002 paper “IPO Market Cycles: Booms and Busts in New Issues Activity,” economists Michelle Lowry and G. William Schwert showed that IPO waves sustain themselves through the information each successful listing generates for the next company in line. India ran this cycle repeatedly through the 1990s and 2000s, each boom imported on foreign capital, each correction arriving when that capital left.

The structural shift of the past decade has changed the source of the fuel. The share of domestic investments in Indian listings reached nearly 75% in 2025, the highest for any year in which proceeds exceeded one trillion rupees. India’s GDP has grown at one of the fastest rates of any large economy. Its manufacturing base is expanding as global companies diversify supply chains away from China. A middle class that did not meaningfully exist in 1991 now drives consumption and savings in equal measure. Global companies are rushing to list their local business units in India, lured by a valuation premium.

Of the 367 listings in 2025, 270 came from small and medium enterprises, a category of companies that has almost no equivalent IPO pathway in comparable markets. IPO fundraising accounts for 49% of all private capital exits in India, against 9% in the United States and 13% in Europe. The public market is load-bearing in India’s economy in a way it has never been required to be in countries with deep private equity and venture capital ecosystems.

Sometime in the coming months, Reliance Industries is expected to file paperwork to bring Reliance Jio public. Investment bankers have estimated Jio’s valuation between $130 billion and $170 billion. The offering would be the largest in Indian history. It would be absorbed almost entirely by a domestic investor base that in 1991 was largely locked out of the markets it is now expected to anchor. Analysts have been cautious about predicting the listing’s reception, but broadly agree that the pipeline it represents reflects a market built on stronger foundations than any previous cycle.

Neeltgen Cornelis, the maid who invested her savings in a company headed to the Indian Ocean, could not have imagined that the country at the end of that voyage would one day lead the world in the financial instrument she helped inaugurate. The Dutch East India Company’s voyages to the Indian Ocean were about extracting value from the subcontinent. India’s IPO market, four centuries later, is about distributing it.

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