“... goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule ...”

“... in the Bahamas in an attempt to answer that question.Bankman-Fried’s parents are both Stanford law professors, Barbara Fried (public policy, ethics) and Joseph Bankman (tax). They were philosophical utilitarians who did not celebrate holidays or birthdays. SBF, as he is known online, grew up aware that his mind worked differently from most ...”

“... copy of Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, picked up on a whim a few evenings earlier at the Stanford Shopping Center. (I once spotted Condoleezza Rice there, smoothly circumnavigating the potted ferns and plashing fountains: a well-dressed zombie on a mission.) I’d found it – somewhat surprisingly, along with the paperback of Straight Life – in ...”

“... of exile, a place where he could be a figure of swaggering talent and a marginal actor. Thus when Peter Hall saw MacGowran on stage in London in 1959 he knew immediately what MacGowran was made for on the English stage. He had, Hall decided, ‘the perfect qualities for a Shakespearean clown’ and he invited him to join the Royal Shakespeare Company to play ...”

“... Donald Trump Jr is paid lavishly by, and has been given equity in, both Kalshi and Polymarket, and Peter Thiel raised $70 million in venture capital for Polymarket. The chair of the CFTC since December 2025, Michael Selig, is a libertarian nationalist who writes self-promoting op-eds for Breitbart; as a lawyer, he worked for many years at a firm that ...”

“... of Hobsbawm in its own records, which were housed in the Registry, described by the MI5 veteran Peter Wright as ‘a mass of dry paper’ inside which ‘were warm trails waiting to be followed’. This repository, containing an estimated 500,000 files by the mid-1950s, was organised according to an elaborate system of cross-referencing between Personal ...”

“... attention of Facebook’s first external investor, the now notorious Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Again, The Social Network gets it right: Thiel’s $500,000 investment in 2004 was crucial to the success of the company. But there was a particular reason Facebook caught Thiel’s eye, rooted in a byway of intellectual history. In the course of his ...”

“... from a menu. But 1997 was a critical year for the undermining of complacency. Two PhD students at Stanford registered the domain google.com. Steve Jobs, returning to Apple, made Jony Ive his chief designer and set out on the path that ten years later would lead to the iPhone. The main wireless protocol – the system that later acquired the ...”

“... for the birds. If you can’t check the maths, how can you be sure? I wrote to four Princeton and Stanford cryptocurrency experts during the preparation of this story and sent them some of Wright’s white papers. These men, who are together about to publish a textbook on bitcoin and blockchain technology, are obsessed with who Satoshi is, and obsessed with ...”