Laleh Khalili

In​ 2015, while I was researching a book on shipping, I travelled on the Corte Real from Malta to Jebel Ali. The other two passengers on board, sailing from Hamburg all the way to Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia, were German septuagenarian widows who preferred travelling by freighter to the ‘false sociality’ of cruise ships. They had brought good coffee, which they brewed at 10 a.m....

Two years​ after the end of the Civil War, William Seward, the US secretary of state, negotiated the purchase of ‘Russian America’ – Alaska – for $7.2 million, equivalent to $165 million today. The New York Times noted that the acquisition

includes the strip four hundred miles long, which extends down the coast, thus excluding a large part of British America from the...

In October​ 1961, John F. Kennedy and the entire White House press corps decamped to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to watch US airborne forces put on a show of power. It was the president’s first foray out of the Boston-Washington DC corridor to ‘meet the people’, and in his acerbic book The Best and the Brightest, published a decade later, David Halberstam described it as...

You may remember​ Palantir as the company that was given access to all of NHS England’s data in November 2023, in order to create a Federated Data Platform. The cost was £330 million – the largest NHS technology contract to date. Palantir’s first sales pitch to a UK agency came much earlier, in 2008, when its representatives gave a demo to an enthusiastic audience at...

When​ I started developing software for the management consulting firms I worked for in the mid-1990s, we still had to connect to the World Wide Web on slow and clunky lines to access our coding work. The laptops we carried weighed at least five kilogrammes and couldn’t be used for actual programming. One of our clients was a matchmaking company, which operated a number of...