In the summer of 2024, a song called "Save the Whales—Again" went viral on TikTok before anyone noticed the fine print: the vocalist, the composer, and the lyricist were all algorithms. Six months later, the artist who released it was dropped from his label—not because he had cheated, but because the label realized they could generate the same output internally without paying him royalties at all. This is the new political economy of music, and it is moving faster than the la

While international headlines often focus on South Korea’s world-beating birth rate crisis as the primary symptom of national despair, they often miss the immediate mechanical cause: an unprecedented, accelerating divergence in wealth that has turned generational economics into a zero-sum game. As of early 2026, the data paints a picture of a society cleaved not just between rich and poor, but between Seoul and the provinces, between those who bought property before 2020 and

For decades, the world of investing was dominated by a central belief: that with enough skill, research, and nerve, a clever fund manager could “beat the market.” This was the realm of active investing—a world of stock pickers, economic forecasts, and CNBC punditry. Yet, over the past 15 years, a silent, unrelenting revolution has unfolded. Trillions of dollars have migrated from actively managed funds to passive index funds and ETFs. This isn’t a minor trend; it’s a fundamen