Half a century is plenty of time for an Apple to stay fresh, or to rot.

The New York Times‘s Kalley Huang (“For Employee No. 8, Many Changes in Apple’s 50-Year History,” April 2) traces the evolution of Apple Inc. from a “scrappy start-up that assembled computers by hand” — and whose organic name was a natural fit for an environment in which “Silicon Valley’s fruit orchards hadn’t yet been taken over by office parks” — to one which “has come to define how to be a global technology company.”

In a 2014 Bloomberg interview, Steve Wozniak recalled how he had “given away my designs for the Apple-1 for free,” leaving it to Steve Jobs to take projects the other Steve had “designed for fun” (while being “totally aware that a revolution was close to starting”) and “somehow turn them into some money for both of us.” The sum of their money would become so enormous that Chris Espinosa, who admits that having “had no college degree and … only worked at one company” since 1976 doesn’t sound like much of a résumé, owns what Huang estimates is well over $100 million worth of the corporation that makes a thousandfold of that in profit every year.

Craig Newmark’s op-ed “Craigslist Made Me Rich. Giving the Money Away is Easy” might have included Espinosa as evidence for how “making money isn’t proof to me that I know something any better than someone else” but of being “in the right place, at the right time” to apply common sense to a new field, if it hadn’t gone to print in the same day’s edition of The New York Times.  Newmark doesn’t propose any political program, keeping his distance even from any endorsement of “left-wing nonprofits” and instead promoting such voluntary philanthropic efforts as the Giving Pledge. Still, the public souring on the information industry, as captured by such titles as Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and Tripp Mickle’s After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul, might seem the inevitable result of it enabling such outsized yet largely fortuitous accumulations in the first place.

The Giving Pledge cofounder Bill Gates owes much of his fortune to emulating Apple. The video game Halo was first showcased at MacWorld by Jobs before it became an exclusive killer app for Microsoft’s Xbox. Gates’s Windows operating system tapped the talent of Macintosh’s iconic icon designer Susan Kare. And yet the broader impact of Apple’s innovations is hardly confined to such sheerly financial windfalls.

This is not just because Apple efforts like the HyperCard which made creating and viewing multimedia straightforward, the Pippin which brought built-in Internet access to a video game console, and the Newton which pioneered the personal digital assistant were influential on later developments without managing to become profitable products for them or anyone else.

Indeed, much of the creativity that spread from Apple’s roots in Cupertino, California to cyberspace is closer in spirit to Wozniak than Jobs. It was entirely typical for Stephen D. Young and Debra Willrett’s Backgammon, programmed for the Apple Macintosh in the same non-Orwellian year 1984 during which the desktop model was introduced, to give out a postal address for users who “enjoy it and would like to see more ‘freeware'” to “please send whatever you think it’s worth” … and permission for them to disseminate the software itself.

Huang notes that Apple’s current survival requires not just satisfying customers but withstanding “tariff whiplash, antitrust scrutiny and geopolitical turmoil.”  Consumer sovereignty and cooperative networking can tame such seemingly relentless forces — and make the fruits of tech’s golden geese as common as dirt.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Guest Column: The age of the Gilded Apple” by Joel Schlosberg, The Elizabethton, Tennessee Star, April 7, 2026
2. “The Age of the Gilded Apple” by Josh Schlossberg [sic], CounterPunch, April 10, 2026

A New York Times columnist offering pointers for “Pitchfork Pat” Buchanan-type populists on “the isolationist right who thought Trump shared his views” might seem akin to a mad scientist named Frankenstein offering a road map to a pitchforks-and-torches peasant mob.  Yet Michelle Goldberg does just that in “The President Was Never Antiwar” (March 2).

While maintaining that Donald Trump was indeed the embodiment through which “the once marginalized politics of Patrick Buchanan became a dominant force in the Republican Party,” Goldberg insists that “Trump was never Buchanan’s heir when it came to foreign policy.”   While “it is true that he broke with key elements of neoconservative ideology,” he hasn’t distanced himself from even “the most fanatical of neoconservatives,” preferring instead to discard the ideology’s “notion that American power should ever be constrained by a veneer of idealism.”  The end result is “less a repudiation of neoconservatism than a mutation of it.”

Trump might, as Goldberg suggests, be “attracted to right-wing cranks of all stripes.” But “paleoconservatives who are skeptical of foreign entanglements” can trace their views back to Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams.  As Franklin Foer highlighted in The New York Times, during another rash Republican administration garnering “fierce loyalty from conservatives” to the point where rightist “backlash against the war may seem unexpected,” the Buchanan who “vociferously opposed Bush’s campaign against Saddam Hussein, just like he had opposed the one waged by Bush’s father” was drawing on a tendency that included Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy, “not just angry farmers and protofascists.”

If none of those four forefathers were that peaceful as presidents, neither were they real-life versions of the reactionary rule of Charles Lindbergh as imagined by Philip Roth in The Plot Against America (what was for Foer in 2004 a “new counterfactual novel” dramatizing a dystopia of paleocon precursors).  Contemporary conservatives who “bemoan feminism, immigration and multiculturalism” have given up hope of a USA unshaped by such movements to the point where “they see no point in exporting its values abroad.”

By contrast, Goldberg points out that Trump being “anti-immigrant, hostile to free trade and given to John Birch Society-style conspiracy theorizing” is taken to show that he will cut off military maneuvering at the borders as well.  That doesn’t just ignore the longstanding observation by laissez-faire radicals that voluntary relations across state lines tend to defuse rather than fuel international tensions.  It’s almost as if Perseus didn’t bother with his painstaking tracking and taming of the mythological winged horse Pegasus in Clash of the Titans, but was satisfied with a particularly malodorous pile of manure.

Goldberg is on to something in noting how Trump’s persona evolved in an environment with “no real cost to his belligerence” … not even mentioning his 2000 interview in The Advocate magazine defining his politics in opposition to, not imitation of, “the things [Buchanan] had written about Hitler, Jews, blacks, gays, and Mexicans.” As Herculean as the task may seem, we don’t need a Greek demigod to clean up the political horse race.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Neo-Trumpers: The Next Mutation?” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, March 9, 2026

When David Brooks claims that his preferred “moderate conservative political philosophy” is in 2026 “so fantastically successful … that moderate Republicans are now the dominant force in American politics,” his intentional sarcasm is clear before the fourth paragraph of his final New York Times column (“Time to Say Goodbye,” February 1): “I’m kidding.”

Even if a reader missed out on the decades of Brooks’s commentary as resolutely as literally-frozen-in-time Futurama protagonist Philip J. Fry, its remainder would beg for the response of Fry’s snarky robotic sidekick Bender: “Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.”

The very next paragraph, Brooks sees “a weird market failure” failing to provide programs addressing “the fundamental questions of life” (like Cosmos and Star Trek?) and asking “Does America still have a unifying national narrative?” without specifying when one ever existed.

To Brooks, the 2003 of his earliest op-eds was a time before widespread suspicions “that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people.”  He should have heeded the line in The Matrix Reloaded, as applicable to those thronging theaters that year as its in-universe insurgents, on how “we well know that the reason most of us are here is because of our affinity for disobedience.”  A “faith that capitalism when left alone would produce broad and stable prosperity” would have had to explain the long-burst dot-com bubble well before the housing bubble followed (both inflated by the political patronage implied to have left it alone).

The twentieth century is at least distant enough by now to understand how Brooks’s non-total recall pigeonholes the Sixties counterculture as one “less conformist … more creative than the one that came before, though also one that was more atomized” — not one that Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker could quip “gave us both drum solos and drum circles.”

It’s even easier to recount the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Progressives moving beyond the nineteenth’s supposed “social Darwinist culture, with its individualistic, survival-of-the-fittest emphasis” that would eventually recur in “four decades of hyperindividualism” culminating in the “nihilism personified” of Donald Trump.  After all, even most historians of the period ignore how many of the Progressives, rather than seeking Brooks’s “antidote to nihilism,” remained advocates of the Henry George for whom “all that is necessary for social regeneration is included in the motto of those Russian patriots sometimes called Nihilists—’Land and Liberty!'” Both sides of Georgism derived from the Herbert Spencer who insisted that far from endorsing or excusing “the rebarbarizing effects of the struggle for existence carried on by brute force,” he “had chosen the expression ‘survival of the fittest’ rather than survival of the best because the latter phrase did not cover the facts.”

Brooks acknowledges that “the Iraq war shattered America’s confidence in its own power” (while omitting his role in promoting it).  Cynics who seek not “permission to embrace brutality” but what the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism’s Tim Madigan calls “an enjoyment of worldly pleasures, and a disdain for worldly power” could warn future pundits about similar blunders.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Bon Voyage, David Brooks (and Let Laissez-Faire Come Back!)”
   by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], February 9, 2026