Aventine

08/15/2026

Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, talks about economic uncertainty, what it is and how it affects companies, countries, investors and consumers.

Jack Nitschke, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, discusses uncertainty’s effect on our brains and why it makes us less prepared for the future.

George W. Casey, a retired four-star US Army general, discusses leadership under uncertainty and the lessons he learned taking over the multinational forces in Iraq in 2004.

Kate Sweeny, a research psychologist, studies how uncertain outcomes affect our behavior and sometimes prompt poor decision-making.

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https://aventineresearchinstitute.substack.com/p/the-uncertainty-boom

08/13/2026

AI is upending the financial markets, disrupting education and remaking our lives. Add to that political polarization, economic turmoil and international conflict, and the result is a world in which no person or institution has any confidence in what comes next.

To understand these times better, we interviewed five experts — historian Jill Lepore, neuroscientist Jack Nitschke, economist Nicholas Bloom, retired US Army general George W. Casey and research psychologist Kate Sweeny — on the subject of uncertainty itself, how it affects our thinking, our actions, the economy and how we might thrive under such chaotic circumstances.

We begin with Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian and staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” published this month, examines the growing influence of technology on liberal democracy. Her previous book, “We the People: A History of the US Constitution,” won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2026. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Dear Aventine Readers,

08/06/2026

Meredith Whittaker has been warning us about what she calls the surveillance-driven business models of Big Tech since long before lawmakers were sounding the alarm. Now, with the demands of advanced and agentic AI, she thinks we could be heading into a world in which privacy is essentially over.

After joining Google back in 2006, she rose to fame in 2018 when she helped lead the employee effort to prevent the company’s involvement with Project Maven, the Pentagon’s flagship artificial intelligence initiative to integrate machine learning and computer vision into military workflows. The company walked away from the project. Around the same time, she founded the AI Now Institute at New York University with the researcher Kate Crawford, to produce interdisciplinary research on the social implications of AI and the concentration of power in the tech industry. In 2019, she left Google, citing retaliation for her internal organizing, to focus on AI Now.

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Dear Aventine Readers,

07/30/2026

You might remember AI 2027, a project published in April 2025 that imagined the near-term impact of rapidly escalating AI capabilities. It was put together by a team of well-known AI safety researchers working together as the AI Futures Project, and it has held up pretty well. It predicted the dramatic rise of AI coding agents in early 2026 and described a national security panic that — if you squint — resembles this summer’s flap around Anthropic’s Mythos. The same-ish team is back with a new analysis called AI 2040: Plan A, announced on the group’s Substack earlier this month.

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A Plan to Tame AI

07/24/2026

The clichéd knock on solar power is that it produces electricity only when the sun shines. And on the brightest days, when panels can make more power than the grid can use, those extra electrons go to waste. The long hoped-for solution has been a battery big and cheap enough to store solar energy, then release it to the grid as needed.

In the last six months, thanks to a combination of factors ranging from technological advances to shifts in geopolitics, that solution has arrived. As a result, the cost of power from a combination of solar panels and what is called utility-scale energy storage — essentially giant racks of batteries — is now competitive with power generated by fossil fuels in the US, according to new estimates.

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How Better Batteries Are Transforming the Grid

07/16/2026

While many of us have watched with a mixture of panic and awe as AI gobbles up fundamental parts of our jobs, mathematicians are seeing the very rationale for their existence threatened as machines topple one mathematical challenge after another.

Progress has been swift. This time last year, artificial intelligence models joined the ranks of International High School Math Olympiads. In the months since, they have solved math problems that had stood unsolved for decades, using reasoning that their human peers consider worthy of publication.

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Dear Readers,

07/09/2026

Builders often say you don't know the scale of a job until shovels are in the ground. The geothermal industry, increasingly flush with cash and facing high demand, is now living that reality.

Two years ago, we covered the then nascent next-generation geothermal industry, which aims to drill into hot rock beneath the Earth's surface to generate power. We found an industry poised to enter the mainstream, one emerging from early R&D, with demonstration plants being drilled and funds being raised. Now, geothermal companies are building commercial facilities and fielding a wave of potential partners; one has even gone public.

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Dear Aventine Readers,

06/30/2026

This week's reading spans cancer prevention, geopolitics, drug development and the hidden costs of the wellness boom. Researchers have identified a 14-protein blood signature that can predict lung cancer more than five years before diagnosis. A potential blueprint for preventing cancer, not just detecting it. A deep dive into WuXi reveals how dependent Western pharma has become on a single Chinese company, and how hard it will be to change that. And two sharp essays argue that AI may flood the drug development pipeline with candidates faster than biology and clinical trials can keep up. Meanwhile, Derek Thompson asks whether our obsession with optimizing our health is quietly crowding out the social connection that matters just as much for a long life.

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Cancer-Predicting Proteins Bargaining with AI The Threat of WuXi Why China Got Rich and India Didn’t The Limits of AI Drug Discovery The Cult of Self-Enhancement Do We Have What it Takes to Validate AI Ideas at Scale? How Meta is Flubbing AI Adoption and Other Notable Thoughts from Life Online

06/24/2026

Three stories this week that reveal the quieter side of the AI boom. China has launched the world's first wind-powered underwater data center, using the ocean itself for both cooling and electricity. Two new studies suggest smartphones may be responsible for a meaningful share of the global fertility decline, a finding that, if confirmed, would have sweeping implications. And Meta is launching the largest private-sector trades training program in US history, because building the infrastructure behind AI requires workers that simply don't exist yet. The biggest technological shifts always ripple further than expected.

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As large language models become ever more powerful, access is becoming stratified according to how much users can pay and who can be trusted with the technology. Is this the best way to determine access? And if not, who should determine what is?

06/20/2026

Access to the world's most powerful AI models is becoming a geopolitical issue and fast. When the White House ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its most advanced models for all foreign nationals, it sent a clear signal: the era of open, borderless AI may already be ending. As models grow more capable and computing power remains scarce, the question of who gets access and who decides is becoming one of the most consequential policy debates of our time. Aventine spoke with experts to understand what a rationed AI future might look like, and what's at stake if we get it wrong.

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As large language models become ever more powerful, access is becoming stratified according to how much users can pay and who can be trusted with the technology. Is this the best way to determine access? And if not, who should determine what is?