Steve LeVine
Medium
Washington, DC, United States
Contact Steve
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Steve:
How the Black Death Radically Changed the Course of History
The plague, aka the Black Death, was a tragedy that also changed the course of history, in many ways for the better. Will the coronavirus pandemic do the same thing? → Read More
Tesla May Have Invented a Million-Mile Electric Car Battery
Is it for cars built to last 76 years, or the key to a driverless car-on-demand future? Yes. → Read More
No one is prepared to stop the robot onslaught. So what will we do when it arrives?
AI is coming. Policymakers need to start making a plan. → Read More
Trump’s short show of presidential leadership on Syria isn’t enough to sustain him
Ignore the vows and hair-pulling. There will be no campaign to remove the killer Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who again has gassed his people, murdering some 85 in his most recent attack. The usual international coalition possesses no will. The facts on the ground don’t allow for easy extraction. A palatable quasi-democrat isn’t waiting to step... → Read More
The Trump administration says the Syria airstrike was a one-off
The Trump administration has given out conflicting signals regarding its attitude toward Syrian president Bashar al Assad: it says its missile airstrike was a one-off response to Syria's sarin attack, and that its policy accepting Assad as the country's leader hasn't changed. But it also called for an international coalition to remove Assad. US secretary... → Read More
Syria airstrikes force a critical question: What did Russia know about Assad’s chemical weapons?
The US gave advance notice to Russia before the missile attack on Syria today, because president Donald Trump wanted to avoid hitting Russian forces who were assumed to be deployed at or around the Shayrat base in Homs province, the US administration said. That will force the Trump administration to confront the possibility that Russia... → Read More
Dyson has abandoned patents aimed at creating a battery-and-car juggernaut resembling Tesla
Dyson, the UK appliance maker owned by billionaire James Dyson, has relinquished the core intellectual property of Sakti3, a hyper-secretive solid-state battery startup that it acquired for $90 million just 18 months ago as the first step in a plan to become a battery juggernaut. The move—canceling its $200,000-a-year license for Sakti3's patent portfolio from... → Read More
Trump's treasury secretary: One of the top threats to US jobs is "not even on our radar screen"
Automation is one of the biggest concerns (paywall) of labor economists these days. But US president Donald Trump's Treasury secretary thinks the threat that robots will replace whole classes of white- and blue-collar jobs is too remote to even think about. "I'm not worried at all" about job-stealing robots in the nearer term, Steven Mnuchin said today in an interview with Axios; that... → Read More
Meet the Russian oligarch who paid Trump’s former campaign manager to help Putin
Deripaska has been the consummate political insider. → Read More
Rex Tillerson will reportedly skip the next NATO meeting but visit later with Putin in Russia
In a fresh sign of the Trump administration's cold shoulder toward its traditional allies, Rex Tillerson, the US secretary of state, will skip the next meeting of NATO foreign ministers, but will visit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and later with Russian president Vladimir Putin. In an exclusive story, quoting what it said were four... → Read More
David Rockefeller, the oil heir who made philanthropy the family business, has died at 101
It was a life of power and influence matched in some ways only by monarchs and the heads of nation-states. → Read More
Has lithium-battery genius John Goodenough done it again? Colleagues are skeptical
A claimed breakthrough that could allow electric cars to compete on sticker price. → Read More
Trump’s budget “will cut science off at the knees,” and hurt American industry too
America's tech companies rely on basic government research for the sources of their innovations. → Read More
OPEC and US shale drillers seem back at the brink of war
In December, the world's petro-states congratulated themselves for what they called a historic achievement—24 of them agreed to cut their collective production by 1.8 million barrels a day, all in the service of bringing order to a chaotic oil market in which prices had plunged to about $27 a barrel. Among the most surprising things... → Read More
What it really costs to turn a car into a self-driving vehicle
Amid a race to market, the promoters who say a self-driving future is just around the corner rarely disclose one important thing—the price of outfitting an autonomous car. That extra cost, according to one of the few experts prepared to discuss the subject openly: about $250,000 per vehicle. When you ask carmakers and industry researchers... → Read More
As pressure mounts, Trump reportedly hires the best US expert on Putin's psyche
Amid intensifying demands for action to combat an offensive by Moscow against the West, US president Donald Trump has reportedly appointed a paramount expert on Russian president Vladimir Putin as his chief Russia adviser. Fiona Hill, a dual US-UK citizen and the co-author of a seminal psychoanalysis of the Russian leader called Mr. Putin: Operative... → Read More
We are not afraid of you, president Trump
Trump is forcing reporters to up their game. But we don't fear him, or the battle. → Read More
The US and Russia are back to what they know best: brinksmanship
After a few months of attempts at warmth, the US-Russia Cold War is back. For the entire 2016 campaign and until very recently, US president Donald Trump promised a new relationship of cooperation with Russia. After years of tension between Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama, Trump argued that it would be better for the two countries to get along and take on... → Read More
Trump is getting reamed for his latest reported blunder—a call on nuclear weapons with Putin
“It’s impossible to overstate the negligence of the president ... not knowing basic facts about nuclear policy and arms control,” says senator Jeanne Shaheen. → Read More
The US moneyed and political elite is fighting back against Trump
From the Super Bowl to Silicon Valley and federal court, the establishment is attempting to keep out a threat to the way the modern world works. → Read More