The Winter Olympics are marketed as a sporting spectacle, but sport is the least durable part of the system. Medals fade, records are broken, and ceremonies are remembered selectively. What persists are the networks built to make the event possible. Roads, rail lines, airports, power grids, snowmaking systems, hospitality capacity, media infrastructure, security protocols, and governance arrangements do not disappear when the flame goes out. The Winter Olympics function less

For most of the last half-century, weight management has lived in an awkward space between medicine and advice. It has been discussed in clinical settings, but rarely treated as a condition with its own infrastructure. Patients received comments, leaflets, brief encouragement, and occasional referrals, but little in the way of sustained systems designed to support long-term change. The assumption was implicit: weight was something individuals managed between appointments, not

YouTube child stardom did not emerge because audiences demanded it. It emerged because platforms discovered that childhood is one of the most reliable content engines available. Children generate repeatable attention without scripts, without sets, and without fixed working hours. Play, surprise, emotion, routine, conflict, learning, embarrassment, and growth arrive naturally and renew themselves daily. From a systems perspective, childhood is not a genre. It is a renewable re

Valentine’s Day works because it does something most emotions resist: it imposes a deadline. Love, care, and commitment are continuous states, but markets struggle with continuity. They function best when desire is compressed into moments that require action. Valentine’s Day converts an abstract feeling into a fixed date, and once a date exists, an economy can be built around it. Deadlines change behaviour. A gift purchased on 14 February is not better than one purchased a we

Gold is treated as timeless because it survives everything we throw at it. Civilisations collapse, currencies fail, technologies age out, but gold persists. That persistence is why we treat it as special. What’s less examined is where gold actually goes between moments of reverence. Not in vaults or crowns, but in drawers, cables, discarded phones, obsolete laptops. Gold doesn’t vanish. It fragments. Modern economies use gold constantly while pretending they don’t. Tiny quant

Chess is often used as a metaphor for business, usually badly. The language is familiar: strategy, foresight, sacrifice, endgames. But most business writing treats chess as a teaching aid rather than a diagnostic tool. In reality, the deeper parallel is not about clever moves or grandmasters’ brilliance. It is about how systems behave when information is incomplete, resources are asymmetric, and early decisions constrain everything that follows. Chess does not reward inspirat

Eczema presents itself as a medical condition, but it behaves like an economic system. For most sufferers, especially children and their parents, eczema is not managed through a single diagnosis or treatment plan. It is navigated through repeated cycles of trial and error, where relief is temporary, causes are uncertain, and solutions are constantly revised. This uncertainty is not an accident of medicine alone. It is the foundation on which an entire ecosystem of products, s

Ageing is universal. Where ageing happens is not. Across the world, elderly care is organised less by personal preference than by geography, economics, housing design, labour markets, and state capacity. The result is a quiet but profound sorting process: some people age at home, some age in institutions, some age far from their families, and some are effectively exported to other regions or countries. These outcomes are not cultural accidents. They are the predictable result