Welcome to Mind and Iron, a weekly newsletter about how this crazily changing tech world is transforming how we live, work, heal, become informed, get entertained, and do pretty much everything else.
I’m Steve Zeitchik, a longtime reporter with the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times who in 2023, the Year of Our Logan Roy, left behind a quarter-century of working for Big Media to launch a direct newsletter.
I loved my time in the trenches of some of the country’s most influential newspapers, where I was surrounded by scores of talented writers, story editors, copyeditors and designers. I felt slightly…less regret at leaving behind a system that can feel too-many-cooks bureaucratic (I know, you’re shocked) or panicky social-media-chasing (I know, you’re even more shocked).
I’ve spent much of my career covering business, culture and tech, and that’s what Mind and Iron does — locate that spot where the vectors of business and science crash into each other and land right onto our lives. Many of my stories in recent years have looked at the human consequences of tech developments (the AI researchers changing how we’re screened for cancer; the Whitney Houston hologram that freaked out everyone in Vegas; the algorithm that could predict the next Jan 6; the robot umpire that would transform sports as we know it).
And that’s what you’ll see on this platform — simply, pieces that make vivid how society and humanity could change (and not change) in this new tech era. Stories about how these new developments will affect our lives in the most profound ways. Stories that resist the pull to cover cults of personality that some legacy outlets don’t always resist.
No, we do the human stuff. And fundamentally we see things through a humanity-affirming lens — by covering either changes that could make our lives better or changes we need to avoid if we don’t want our lives to get worse. Mind and Iron (named for Isaac Asimov’s preferred title for “I, Robot,”) sprinkles down everything from deeply reported stories to quick-hit interviews, from boppy thoughts to rich analyses, all based on conversations with actual sources. And years of covering tech, business, culture and humans.
And while AI is all the craze right now, Mind and Iron isn’t all AI — new forms of and trends in transit, media, biotech, finance, education, health care, weapons, religious worship, even space exploration — all lie within our purview. Basically, if it’s going to make tomorrow look and feel a lot different than today, we cover it. And if you have your own ideas on something we should be covering, please reach out. Steve@mindandiron.com.
You can partake of all of it by just hitting the button below. Come on, do it. You know you want to!
The world is shapeshifting at a rate that will make the previous era of tech-driven change — of social media and digital payments, of streaming and laser surgery – seem downright Conestogan by comparison. And wouldn’t it be nice to have a few words every week to help make sense of it?
So come on and join the conversation. It’s a wild theme-park out there. But we’re tall enough to ride.
