In December 2015 I slipped off a stage onto my forehead, causing a concussion that kept me on medical leave for a year (and wrote about it here). Also in December 2015, Conor McGregor threw a counter left cross to knock out José Aldo in 13
Africa is the literal center of the world’s map and increasingly the center of gravity for ISIS, the manpower source for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the contested geopolitical ground where China builds bases and drops off free weapons. Our
Habemus the Pope’s AI takes! To dive in, ChinaTalk’s chips analyst and resident Catholic explains what is going on below. In the second half of the newsletter, you can find the transcript of the podcast (that you should really just listen t
Can AI replace policy work today? I picked a few ChinaTalk-adjacent questions around immigration, biotech, and Chinese EV imports, and put the models to work, identifying policy levers and building microsites to advocate for ideas.This stup
How did Arizona lock in billion-dollar investments from TSMC, Intel, and LG Energy?Ian O’Grady, Senior Policy Advisor to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, joins ChinaTalk to share war stories from the state that’s successfully reshoring semicon
ChinaTalk analyst yearns for the mines. He’s on a mission to visit rare earths and other critical minerals mining sites, refineries, and permanent magnet facilities around the world. If you or anyone you know can help him fulfill this missi
dials in from Kyiv for a long-form WarTalk on what the front line actually looks like in year four. Infantry sit underground for six months without seeing the sun, 2% of casualties come from small arms, and where the “forward line of troops
F. Ichiro Gifford is an energy analyst and a former civil servant, having worked in electric utilities as a planning-economist integrated resource planner. He is going through a very Soviet period in his life and recently read To the Succes
Zilan Qian is a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab and holds a Master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford.This article was originally published in Asterisk Magazine.Americans — left, right
Want to do big things? Today we’re providing a guide of sorts. Joining me is Remco Zwetsloot of the Horizon Institute for Public Service and Kumar Garg of Renaissance Philanthropy.We discuss:Why achieving goals in policy is more possible th
Lucas Fluegel and Nick Corvino team up to tackle Chinese biotech. Lucas is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he explores biotech and biosecurity policy. He did his Ph.D. research in biochemistry and
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With pretty much no news out of this Xi-Trump trip, how about checking out another economic security contest winner? This one comes from Guy Ward-Jackson, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Tony Blair Institute. You can reach him at Guy.Ward-Ja
ChinaTalk is in SF! RSVP for an impomptu meetup tonight.Today, the second half of our conversation previewing the summit that just kicked off. With Mythos scrambling everyone’s priors on frontier capabilities, AI safety is suddenly back on
Julian Gewirtz, former Biden administration China official, now at Columbia, joins me to chat about the Xi-Trump visit and all things US-China. Matt Sheehan, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, drops by to give
The “love tap” White House readout. A failed convoy operation. KSA pulling overflight rights. Iran with 70% of its missile force still intact. And one F-15E shoot-down from absolute disaster. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the fo
Ken Liu graces ChinaTalk with his presence. He is the author of the Dandelion Dynasty silkpunk fantasy series and a brilliant short fiction writer — one of his stories was recently adapted into Sam Altman’s favorite show, Pantheon. We all k
is a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab and holds a Master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford.On April 23, 2026, the White House released a memo warning that Chinese entities were running
Earlier this year we launched an economic security contest. We had two prompts:What are the most important high level KPIs that policy should aim for? What is the analogy of the Fed’s ‘2% inflation and full employment’ target for economic s
recently declared the death of partying, finding that Americans spend significantly less time attending social events than they did twenty years ago. The largest decline — by almost 70% — occurred among people aged 15-24. Thompson offers a