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The Great American Eclipse

If you ask the desk clerk at the Hampton Inn why people move to and live in Casper, Wyoming, she’ll say, “Oil.” Perhaps it was fitting, then, that the Sun, which had nourished the organisms that had created that oil over billions of years, should draw the multitudes to Casper on August 21, 2017, the day of what was dubbed (and not necessarily in a jingoistic way) the Great American Eclipse. According to estimates, one million people visited Wyoming, a state where the population is less than 600,000, for the celestial spectacle. My cousin Susan Hawkins and I were two of them. The previous day we had arrived within an hour of each other at Denver International Airport, rented a car and glided off into the stream of traffic, talking as we slid under an electronic sign warning of eclipse traffic. (When was the last time you saw one of those?) Even though we were hours away from the event, I furtively checked the cloud cover every 10 miles or so, hoping for an unobstructed view of the
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The Future of Work

 Artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it is seen as a boon that will propel us, Jetson-like, into a century  of self-driving cars, drones and perpetual leisure; but it is also viewed as a bane that will deprive most of us of a job and, consequently, an income. History suggests that the truth is somewhere in-between, that AI will create opportunities even as it displaces jobs; but only if there is a fundamental restructuring of the way people go about their business. The world has been divided into nation-states since the Treaty of Westphalia. In recent years it has become somewhat axiomatic to assert that those nation-states and the borders that divide them have become almost irrelevant. In the words of Parag Khanna, "The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance from which the future world
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