ThinkAbout — The story behind the story

Siddharth Jangid · 20 Jul 20263 min read

If life were a Video Game, what level would humanity be on?

Here’s how the game breaks down: Skills – solutions we found. Bosses – threats that forced us to find them. Levels – a simple way to mark the era rather than pointing them out individually.

AI won't replace you. You'll be replaced by the person using it

This line was thorn around a lot during a recent TIME100 panel in Cannes. Four executives - from Nespresso, Luma AI, Philip Morris International, and Publicis Sapient - sat down to argue about what AI is actually doing to the creative work. Not the Sci-Fi version but the version that you use every day and the one that shows up in your inbox on a Tuesday.

Utkarsh Sahariya · 20 Jul 20263 min read

ThinkAbout Team · 20 Jul 20261 min read

Why Your Grocery Bill Keeps Climbing Even as Inflation 'Cools'

Inflation slowing doesn't mean prices fall — it means they rise more slowly, from a higher base. Here's why the number on the news and the number at the till feel like different worlds.

ThinkAbout · On the Record

We don't chase the news. We explain the forces underneath it.

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AI

Utkarsh Sahariya · 20 Jul3 min read

AI won't replace you. You'll be replaced by the person using it

The AI Layoff was a story. The Rehire is the Bill.

Utkarsh Sahariya · 15 Jul2 min read

The internet is Filling Up with AI… We don’t have any idea how much

You scrolled past something AI-made today. Probably more than once. A caption, an image, a video that felt just a little too much of what the internet calls ai slop.It doesn't hit the same anymore.

Siddharth Jangid · 8 Jul2 min read

The AI Chip War Is Really a Water War

Every data-centre announcement this year hides a cooling footnote, and the resource nobody names — fresh water — is quietly becoming the real constraint on compute. Whoever secures it controls the next decade of AI, and the map of winners looks nothing like the chip rankings.

Utkarsh Sahariya · 15 Jun1 min read

The Open-Source Model That Embarrassed Big Tech

A small lab shipped open weights that beat the giants on the benchmarks that actually matter, for a fraction of the budget. It turns out the moat was never the model itself — and the companies that bet billions on secrecy are suddenly exposed.

Utkarsh Sahariya · 3 Jun2 min read

Technology

Utkarsh Sahariya · 11 Jul3 min read

Technology

Your phone beats a $3,500 AR headset

A four-person team says the future of AR won't need a headset — or the cloud. A talking cat has just perched itself on the couch of a reporter and told him some jokes. The cat responds to actual barking dogs, syncs itself to the music playing in the room, and most importantly, it doesn’t send a single piece of information about anything it sees or hears to the cloud. The cat is a toy; the underlying bet is definitely not:

Why One Copy-Paste Can Give Hackers Your Mac

There's a new category of hack that's doesn't have to break into your computer's defense. It borrows you instead - your hands, your trust, your willingness to follow instructions when something feels urgent. The "copy-paste" scam targeting Mac users

Utkarsh Sahariya · 4 Jul3 min read

The Next Big Upgrade for E-Bikes Might Be Hiding Inside the Motor

A major shift could be coming to e-bikes. At Eurobike 2026, two companies unveiled integrated Motor Gearbox Units (MGUs) that combine the motor and gearbox into a single component, eliminating the traditional derailleur and cassette. The new technology promises automatic gear shifting, lower maintenance, and a simpler drivetrain, with the first production bikes expected to arrive in 2027.

Utkarsh Sahariya · 30 Jun2 min read

Google Quietly Rewired the Internet It Built

AI Overviews are cutting publisher click-throughs sharply, starving the open web of the traffic it was built on. The business model that funded two decades of free content is unwinding — slowly at first, then all at once — and almost no one is ready for what replaces it.

A. Sharma · 12 Jun1 min read

Why RAM Economics Stopped Making Sense

Memory prices keep sliding even as compute costs climb, breaking the neat relationship hardware makers have relied on for years. The implications for margins, upgrade cycles, and who actually profits from the AI boom are stranger than the spec sheets suggest.

V. Mehta · 9 Jun2 min read

Business & Power

Utkarsh Sahariya · 21 Jul5 min read

Business & Power

The Currency weapon most countries don't have

This Airport wants to separate wealthy travelers from everyone else.

Utkarsh Sahariya · 13 Jul3 min read

The Startup Everyone Copied — and Why It Died Anyway

Blitzscaling needs fat margins to survive the losses, and this company had everything except the spreadsheet to back it up. It owned the product, the press, and the mindshare — and still ran out of the one thing that actually keeps a business alive.

V. Mehta · 28 May1 min read

OnePlus: How a Challenger Brand Lost Its Nerve

A brand that once stood for something genuinely radical slowly traded movement for margin, one safe decision at a time. The story of how that happens is the story of almost every challenger that grows up — and forgets why anyone cared in the first place.

P. Joshi · 25 May1 min read

The Quarter That Broke the Subscription Economy

Churn finally caught up with the cohort math, and the recurring-revenue dream started to look like an expensive treadmill. The warning numbers were there for years — investors just preferred the story to the spreadsheet, until they couldn't anymore.

Utkarsh Sahariya · 22 May2 min read

Economy

Utkarsh Sahariya · 21 Jul5 min read

The Currency weapon most countries don't have

Why Your Grocery Bill Keeps Climbing Even as Inflation 'Cools'

Inflation slowing doesn't mean prices fall — it means they rise more slowly, from a higher base. Here's why the number on the news and the number at the till feel like different worlds.

ThinkAbout Team · 20 Jul1 min read

The Job Market Is Sending Mixed Signals. Here's What's Actually Happening

Low unemployment, slowing hiring, and workers who feel stuck all at once. The labour market isn't contradicting itself — you're just seeing three different clocks.

ThinkAbout Team · 19 Jul1 min read

What a Strong Dollar Actually Does to the Rest of the World

When the dollar rises, the effects ripple far beyond the US — into fuel prices, debt repayments, and the cost of everyday imports for billions of people. A short explainer.

ThinkAbout Team · 18 Jul1 min read

The FTA is practically supposed to reduce car prices by half in the Indian market. But why is it far from reality? (2026)

The FTA is practically supposed to reduce car prices by half in the Indian market. But it’s far from reality. The news that has taken the world by surprise is the new EU-India FTA that has long been negotiated between the two major economies. This is a major step in bilateral trade relations between

Utkarsh Sahariya · 7 Feb3 min read

Science & Discovery

Utkarsh Sahariya · 13 Jul4 min read

Science & Discovery

The Great Dying: Why Metabolism Decided Who Lived Through Earth's Worst Extinction

NASA celebrates America's 250th birthday with incredible views of space

When celebrating America’s 250th birthday, NASA did not use fireworks, but sent its probes much further into space, taking four pictures with lots of red, white, and blue. The observatory decided not only to show the pictures but also turned three observations into sound......

Utkarsh Sahariya · 5 Jul2 min read

Three Discoveries This Week That Rewrote the Rules

A bird-syntax paper, a gene-therapy result, and a single telescope image — all underreported, all genuinely large. We connect why these three landed in the same week, and what each one quietly overturns about how we thought the world worked.

Utkarsh Sahariya · 10 May1 min read

The Battery Breakthrough That Isn't (Yet)

Every month brings another miracle cell that promises to change everything and then vanishes. Here's the simple test for telling a real lab result from a press release — and why the gap between the two is where most of the hype quietly dies.

A. Sharma · 7 May1 min read

What the New Webb Images Actually Show

Look past the colour and the data underneath is quietly upending a decade of confident assumptions about how galaxies formed. The pretty picture is the hook; the real story is in the numbers most coverage skipped right over.

V. Mehta · 4 May2 min read

Culture & Society

Siddharth Jangid · 20 Jul3 min read

If life were a Video Game, what level would humanity be on?

Here’s how the game breaks down: Skills – solutions we found. Bosses – threats that forced us to find them. Levels – a simple way to mark the era rather than pointing them out individually.

AI won't replace you. You'll be replaced by the person using it

Utkarsh Sahariya · 20 Jul3 min read

The Diet Coke Trap: Why Your Brain Can't Go Back to Regular Soda

There was a time when you took a sip of your first Diet Coke, and after months of making Diet Coke a habit, now regular sodas feel like you are drinking excessively. It wasn’t just a habit; your brain...

Siddharth Jangid · 28 Jun2 min read

The 200-Hour Problem of Relationships

A researcher once put a number on friendship: about 200 hours of voluntary, off-the-clock time to turn a stranger into a close friend. The problem isn't that people stopped wanting friends — it's that the institutions which used to hand us those hours for free have quietly shut off. Loneliness isn't a feeling problem. It's a logistics failure. And the fix that's starting to spread looks almost too simple to work.

Utkarsh Sahariya · 28 Jun5 min read

You are probably stuck in “News Will Find Me” Trap

One in three people have stopped looking for the news — they just wait for it to find them. A Penn State study reveals how that one habit quietly rewires who you trust, until a machine's recommendation carries the same weight as a newsroom's. The only question left is whether you read your feed, or it reads you.

ThinkAbout · 23 Jun5 min read

Deep Dives

Siddharth Jangid · 20 Jul3 min read

If life were a Video Game, what level would humanity be on?

Here’s how the game breaks down: Skills – solutions we found. Bosses – threats that forced us to find them. Levels – a simple way to mark the era rather than pointing them out individually.

The Epstein Network: What the Documents Actually Say

A full, careful reading of the unsealed filings, separating the confirmed from the alleged from the deliberately obscured. We stay with what the documents actually establish — and resist the temptation to fill the gaps with the story everyone already expects.

Utkarsh Sahariya · 4 Apr1 min read

The Chemtrail Conspiracy Got One Thing Right

Almost everything in the theory is wrong, but the single exception turns out to be more interesting than the myth. We separate the real, documented science of atmospheric experiments from the fiction that grew up around it.

A. Sharma · 1 Apr1 min read

Inside the Year the Cloud Almost Broke

Three outages, one shared root cause, and a glimpse of the fragile plumbing holding up the modern internet. The story of how much of daily life now quietly depends on a handful of systems most people have never heard of.

V. Mehta · 29 Mar2 min read

The Long Con of the Wellness Industry

How a trillion-dollar market learned to sell you the disease and the cure in the same breath, and call it self-care. We follow the incentives behind the supplements, the tests, and the language — and who quietly profits from your anxiety.

P. Joshi · 26 Mar2 min read

Explore by Pillar

How artificial intelligence actually changes life and work — implications and consequences, not hype.

7 stories →

Technology

Tech

Phones, chips, gadgets and the systems behind them — what changed and why it matters, not spec sheets.

10 stories →

Business & Power

Business

Founder stories, market dynamics, and the money angle behind every major move.

8 stories →

How money moves — trade, prices, jobs and the forces quietly reshaping what you can afford.

4 stories →

Science & Discovery

Science

Breakthroughs made simple — what was found, why it matters, what changes next.

8 stories →

Culture

Why things go viral — digital culture, the meme economy, and internet behaviour.

12 stories →

Long, analytical, opinionated. The things people only know the surface of — all the way down.

14 stories →

Facts & Reveal

Things worth thinking about

90% of the World's Data Was Created in the Last Two Years

We now generate more information every couple of days than humanity did from the dawn of writing to 2003. This piece looks at where all of it actually goes, who owns it, and why that ownership is quietly becoming one of the defining questions of the century.

Training One AI Model Can Use as Much Power as 100 Homes in a Year

The energy bill behind the magic is enormous, and mostly invisible. We break down why the next AI race is really a race for electricity and for the water used to cool the machines — and what that means for where these systems get built.

The Average Person Checks Their Phone 144 Times a Day

That's roughly once every ten waking minutes, a habit most of us would swear we don't have. We look at what that constant checking is quietly doing to attention, memory, and mood — and why the design behind it is no accident.

More Than Half of All Internet Traffic Is No Longer Human

Bots now outnumber people online, and the gap is widening every year. We unpack what that means for everything you read, click, and trust — and why the web you experience is increasingly built for machines, not for you.

Only About 3% of the World's Money Exists as Physical Cash

Almost everything you think of as money is really just numbers in a database. This piece traces how money quietly became pure information — and what actually happens, for all of us, when that database fails or is frozen.

We Make More Transistors Each Second Than There Are Stars in the Galaxy

The scale of modern chipmaking is almost impossible to picture, so we tried anyway. The comparison only gets stranger the closer you look — and it explains why a single industry now sits underneath nearly everything else.

Things You Missed This Week

Jul 20 – 26, 2026

The Currency weapon most countries don't have

21 Jul · 5 min read

If life were a Video Game, what level would humanity be on?

Here’s how the game breaks down: Skills – solutions we found. Bosses – threats that forced us to find them. Levels – a simple way to mark the era rather than pointing them out individually.

20 Jul · 3 min read

AI won't replace you. You'll be replaced by the person using it

20 Jul · 3 min read

Why Your Grocery Bill Keeps Climbing Even as Inflation 'Cools'

Inflation slowing doesn't mean prices fall — it means they rise more slowly, from a higher base. Here's why the number on the news and the number at the till feel like different worlds.

20 Jul · 1 min read

More from ThinkAbout

V. Mehta · 10 Apr2 min read

The Death and Rebirth of the Music Album

Streaming killed the tracklist, and then playlists quietly revived it in a stranger, looser shape. Artists are adapting in real time, and the album that emerges from this is something genuinely new — not the old thing restored.

V. Mehta · 17 Mar1 min read

The 10,000-Hour Rule Was Never a Rule

The study that launched a thousand self-help books actually said something far narrower, and its author quietly walked the famous version back for years. We trace how a careful finding became a slogan — and what the research really supports.

Siddharth Jangid · 28 Jun2 min read

The Diet Coke Trap: Why Your Brain Can't Go Back to Regular Soda

V. Mehta · 22 Apr1 min read

Why Everyone Reads the Same Books Now

TikTok, the recommendation algorithm, and the collapse of literary taste into a single global monoculture. We trace how discovery got centralised, who benefits when everyone reads the same thing, and what quietly disappears in the process.

Siddharth Jangid · 17 Feb2 min read

EPSTEIN: The Billionaire Who Hid in Plain Sight

This isn’t just a scandal. It’s one of the darkest power stories of our time. Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t born powerful. He was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, with a working-class background. Smart kid. Good at math and physics. Dropped out of college — twice. And somehow? He landed a job teaching a