by Aseem Gupta | Jun 24, 2023 | Narrative, Media & Storytelling
Marvel fatigue did not happen because audiences suddenly stopped liking superheroes. That explanation is too easy. If people were simply tired of capes, masks, powers, and comic-book worlds, then Spider-Man: No Way Home, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and Deadpool...
by Aseem Gupta | May 23, 2022 | Business, Innovation & Industry
Streaming was supposed to save us from cable. No long contracts. No bloated channel bundles. No waiting for shows to air at a fixed time. No paying for dozens of channels you never watched. Just open an app, choose what you want, and watch it instantly. For a while,...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 11, 2016 | Geopolitics, States & Global Power
For almost half a century, the world lived with a strange contradiction. The United States and the Soviet Union never fought each other in a direct, declared war. No American army marched on Moscow. No Soviet army invaded Washington. Yet the fear of war was...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 10, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
The Great Emu War sounds like something invented by the internet. Australia, a country already famous for deadly snakes, giant spiders, crocodiles, kangaroos, and animals that seem specifically designed to test human confidence, once sent soldiers with machine guns to...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 9, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
The American Revolution did not begin as a clean, heroic march toward independence. It began as an argument inside an empire. For more than a century, Britain’s mainland colonies in North America had lived in an uneasy middle ground. They were British subjects. They...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 8, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
English is a strange language because it remembers its invaders. You can ask someone to “come in,” or you can invite them to “enter.” You can talk about a “kingly” duty, or a “royal” one. You can “buy” something, or you can “purchase” it. You can raise a cow in a...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 7, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
There is a version of this story that sounds almost too ridiculous to be true. Two countries play a football match. The fans riot. National pride boils over. A few days later, the armies march. That is how the 1969 war between Honduras and El Salvador is usually...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 6, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
Introduction: A Small War That Was Never Small At first glance, the Falklands War can look almost absurd. A short war. A remote archipelago. A British task force sailing 8,000 miles across the Atlantic. An Argentine dictatorship trying to recover islands most of its...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 5, 2016 | Economics, Markets & Money
The Great Depression is often remembered as an American disaster: Wall Street crashed, banks failed, breadlines grew, and the United States sank into the worst economic crisis of the modern age. But the Depression did not stay American. Across Europe, it became...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 4, 2016 | Economics, Markets & Money
The Crisis Was Bigger Than a Housing Crash The 2008 financial crisis is often described as a housing crash. That is true, but only in the same way a heart attack is a blood-flow problem. Technically correct. Not nearly enough. The crisis began with houses, mortgages,...
