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If you don't believe that the catastrophe described in THREE BLACK SWANS is possible, or maybe even likely, check out Christopher Cox's excellent essay in the Aug. 23, 2026 NYT Magazine section entitled "What if America went Completely Dark?" The tagline on the cover reads "What if the Grid Fails? A national blackout would be surprisingly easy to trigger- and extremely hard to fix." That says it all. See < https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackout-power-e

The ability to create viruses has long been a part of scientific research, especially in the fields of genetics and microbiology. Recently, a new development has made this process significantly easier and more accessible. Researchers at Stanford have trained an AI language model named Evo to recognize DNA patterns and design entirely new viruses. This breakthrough led to the creation of 16 phages capable of attacking resistant strains of Escherichia coli. While this experimen

My book, THREE BLACK SWANS, speculates that the day when human-engineered Black Swans could pile up and create a polycrisis. Well, this week, the ShinyHunters hacker group stole roughly 275 million user records. We understand that a substantial ransom was paid. That’s on top of the stalemate in the Straits of Hormuz, which has 20% of the world’s oil supply bottled up. Imagine if ShinyHunters attacked major banks and the SWIFT settlement system simultaneously? We’re creeping c

I’m always amused by how banks tell you they provide great service, but it takes 15 minutes to get a human being on the line – if you’re lucky. For some reason, banks and health-care providers think automated telephone answering chatbots are the bees' knees. On the other hand, a Deloitte banking survey found that 74% of respondents preferred human agents over chatbots. Someday, a smart marketing person at a big national bank will realize that advertising that a human operator