Writing

Do exam leaks push young Indian men toward the manosphere?

political economy

A few weeks ago, I attended a talk organized by Georgetown’s South Asian Society, where I had the pleasure of listening to Professor Tariq Omar Ali and Professor Irfan…

The bond market trusts an unbuilt data center more than the neocloud that rents it.

AI

finance

bonds

The AI boom runs on data centers, and most of them are built with borrowed money. A company like CoreWeave, which rents out the computer chips that AI labs use, usually…

Using Satellites to Find Human Trafficking in Fleets at Sea

political economy

interventions

Interactive: where high-risk fishing fleets came into port in 2024. Open the port explorer in a full window, or read how it works.

One Announced Megawatt of AI Capacity Can Be 50% “More” than Another

AI

energy economics

AI companies talk about their capacity in megawatts, but almost nobody publishes what a megawatt costs. In this post, I analyzed 320 documents, almost all SEC filings, and…

Open and Closed LLMs on OpenRouter Are Not Substitutes

AI

tokenomics

In January of 2025, open-weight models received about a quarter of the tokens paid for on OpenRouter. By September 2026 they handled 73% of OpenRouter’s paid tokens. For…

Empires and Friendships

economic history

political economy

networks

Earlier this year, I stumbled on a very cool dataset called the Social Connectedness Index (SCI) from January 2026, which measures the probability that two Facebook users in…

Prompting LLMs in the Arabic script is 2x cheaper if you speak Arabic vs. Acehnese

tokenomics

AI

Suppose you are a Malian programmer, using an LLM to help you write code: the same prompt in Tamasheq, your language, written in a Latin script vs. a Tifinagh will have the…