The origin story of Flagship runs through fertilizer. When we were writing our pre-release trial editions in late 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was still relatively recent. And an underreported — we felt — story was that the disruption to fossil fuel supplies would drive up fertilizer prices. Without fertilizer, much of the world’s population would starve; about 50% of the nitrogen in our food comes from it. To quote the economist Howard T Odum, writing in 1971, “Industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.”
Fertilizer was not the sexiest or most obvious story you could tell about Ukraine. There were heroic tales and tragic ones from the battlefield, and more obviously relevant ones to Western readerships such as the impact on European energy prices. But it was among the most important, in some sense of that word: It would affect the lives of millions. The point of Flagship has always been to provide you with what is most consequential, in our interconnected world. Sometimes that means the global impact of a story; sometimes it means the story’s relevance to readers’ ability to make decisions.
(And, OK, sometimes we just put in things we think are cool. But mostly, it’s the important stuff.)
Fertilizer still matters, four years on; I think we’ve written about it 14 times this summer alone. It remains unsexy but relevant. But the world has changed enormously in other ways. It is remarkable to think that when we launched, AI as we know it now was a niche technology: ChatGPT’s release was six weeks in the future, and image generators like DALL-E were novelties. Early on we thought it would be a big deal, and had ChatGPT write a guest column for Flagship in Dec. 2022. But the sheer scale of its growth has been astonishing. AI runs weapons systems, solves famous mathematical conjectures, designs biological experiments; the companies that make it (and the chips that it runs on) have become trillion-dollar behemoths. It plausibly could kill us all.
Unlike fertilizer, AI is sexy. But like fertilizer, it is important. We’ve spent four years trying to work out what will matter to you; sometimes that has meant ignoring stories that everyone else is chasing while focusing on things no one else seems to care about. All the while, we have trusted that you, our readers, demand this complexity — that you want to know what is tangible, not what is trivial.
This is my last day as Flagship’s lead writer; I am extraordinarily proud of what we’ve built. The briefing will no doubt improve without me holding it back, but you can be sure it will continue to concentrate on what matters.
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