Links to these and a longer selection of Economist articles I have written are available here. One of them, I was informed, played a role in Donald Trump’s signing of an executive order to lessen the remarkable damage that an electromagnetic pulse from a high-altitude nuclear detonation could wreak on America’s electric grid. An earlier story I wrote on the rapid evolutionary emergence of “coywolves” in North America was The Economist’s most-read article that year.

I edited Modern Warfare, Intelligence and Deterrence, an Economist book on how advances in military and intelligence systems are shaping conflict and spycraft. The book has been published in five editions. For another Economist book, Megatech: Technology in 2050, I contributed a chapter on how innovation is poised to shape future warfare. For more information on those and other books with my work, as well as links to some of my Economist podcasts, click here.

I also periodically teach MBA and undergraduate courses in business and geopolitics at schools including H-Farm College, near Venice, Italy. I’ve also taught undergraduate and master’s courses in journalism. I occasionally travel to deliver lectures or speak for clients that have included the Smithsonian and Germany’s ministry of foreign affairs. For more on that, click here.

Earlier in my career I wrote for Newsweek, principally on defense, business and technology. Before that, I was a senior editor at COLORS magazine, where I led research by five staff journalists and roughly 40 foreign correspondents. COLORS, a groundbreaking and multilingual anthropological publication founded by the late Oliviero Toscani, was judged, in one ranking, the 10th-best magazine of all time.

Other jobs I’ve held include “cool hunter” (for trend-spotting corporate advisories in Milan and Paris); writer and editor of art catalogs featuring figurative expressionism (for a Parisian dealer); and staff screenwriter (for a production company in Paris). I co-directed Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, an award-winning and commercially successful 52-minute documentary filmed in France, Morocco and the United States.

I studied political sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my hometown. My studies included stints abroad: Spanish and sociology at the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain; French and business at the Alliance Française in Paris; and global studies on Semester at Sea, a university program on a ship. Today, I work mostly from Italy, the United States, and, periodically, the United Arab Emirates. I travel widely. In addition to fluent French and Italian, I speak decent Spanish.