Issues

Issue 007, Q1 2026: For Your Eyes Only

Issue 006, Q4 2025: Three Martini Lunch

The Business of America is Business, and Arena is the magazine of American business. Arena 006 is a love letter to (one of the) Golden Ages of American Capitalism. In this issue, read: misremembered lessons from 1980s Wall Street, now “a symbol of raw, unrestrained capitalism”; John Coogan’s daily schedule — at 9 am, reading the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times cover to cover — as he hosts TBPN; the story of Marc Rich, the “king of Oil” who built his fortune energy trading with Revolutionary Iran and apartheid South Africa — only to flee a 300-year sentence and secure a Clinton pardon from Swiss exile; a genealogy of the martini and the history of the three martini lunch itself; how Jan Sramek secretly raised a billion dollars and bought nearly 70,000 acres of land to build a new city in California; Michael Gibson’s dispatch from his trip to Gettysburg with Jocko Willink and a group of Navy SEALs.

Issue 005, Q3 2025: Mission Critical

Arena Magazine believes the future ought to look like the future. In Issue 005, read stories about how we secure that future. The companies and industries that we cover in this issue are vital to our strength as a nation: ports, air, electricity, chips. Without them, we couldn’t hope to thrive and build prosperity for our fellow Americans; in some instances it would even be difficult to survive. Read about: Base Power, a two-year-old home battery start-up proving that with a critical mass of home batteries, connected via telemetry, one can actually build a distributed power plant with reservoir capacity equal to or greater than traditional plants; the now-crumbling ports that form the “circulatory system” of American capitalism and the need for port automation; an obituary of Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx and the man responsible for the mindboggling reality that we can airdrop physical packages anywhere in the world in a short period of time; Perplexity’s Araavind Srinivas on the oncoming Question Age; the French sculptors building massive titanium statues meant to commemorate our civilization; and a guide of how to rebuild American semiconductor manufacturing dominance.

Issue 004, Q2 2025: War

The story of technology is largely a story of warfare; the story of warfare is largely a story of technology. Arena 004 tells the stories of how the battlefield has changed and how it may change in the future, as well as those of the people and companies looking to change the future of warfare. In this issue, read about: Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf — profiled for the first time in Arena — the engineer leading most ambitious enterprise for American defense since DARPA; the legacy of Mao Zedong’s concept of “People’s War” evident in Chinese drone warfare capabilities; the parallels between submarines and satellites, between naval control and, now, “space control”; why Erik Prince called drones “the biggest disruption to warfare since Genghis Khan put stirrups on horses” in Stephen McBridge’s dispatch from El Segundo’s CX2. And, only in print, see the shockwaves of Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 aircraft, which reached Mach 1, the speed of sound.

Issue 003, Q1 2025: Machine World

In Issue 003: Machine World, we explore man’s fascination with machines, and try to get serious about what a machine future or “machine world” looks like. We talk about a few of our favorite machines, and some of the big debates about them. Should anyone be allowed to repair any machine? Do we want to be “watched over” by machines? In the pages of Issue 003, read about: the countless anonymous incremental inventions over decades that made fracking (formerly known as “petroleum torpedoes”) a core source of American energy; how robotics is tackling the ancient (yes, really) dream of embodied intelligence; the Right to Repair debate between “those who believe that users have the right to modify their own products, and those who believe that, in a capitalist system, creators should be able to sell whatever products they think the market values most––regardless of what customers are able to do with those products afterward”; how to fill in the hole of 2.1 million missing American manufacturing workers and to demonstrate the beauty and awe of manufacturing; an antique ad for the Technology Brothers Podcast — before it was called TBPN.

Issue 002, Q4 2025: America Punk

In Arena Magazine’s second issue, we’re celebrating the rebellious spirit of the country we love, and some of its scrappy heroes who love to build. Here, we celebrate the irreverent: the irreverent founders who fought a war against the world’s largest empire; the irreverent Rahul Ligma (real name: Rahul Sonwalkar) who went viral after tricking the august press into portraying him as a laid-off Twitter employee — and founder of Julius AI (of which Arena is a customer!); the irreverent SpaceX engineers who created the Starship catch and release system and the irreverent astro-pilgrims who came to cheer them on; the irreverent Noor Siddiqui whose company, Orchid, wants to use genome-sequencing for human embryos to help everyone have a healthy baby; the irrelevant glory of San Francisco, both dysfunctional and the global center for technology.

Issue 001, Q3 2025: The New Needs Friends

Arena Magazine’s inaugural issue is the first installment of what we consider the yearbook of American capitalism — a celebration of the technologists, tinkerers, builders, and capitalists who are driven by the creative spirit of enterprise. In these pages you can read about: Yadhu Gopalan, Microsoft’s cell phone lead, who takes Maxwell Meyer through a box of phones and relays his lessons from how the smartphone war was won and lost; Ginevra Davis’s response to Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia which tackles the age-old “meaning of life” question by asking what world Bostrom is even writing about; Nadia Asparouhova’s essay, part response to Jonathan Haidt’s crusade against cell phones, part exploration of how tech stopped defending itself, and part call for Silicon Valley to properly grapple with its power; Julia Steinberg’s report on supersonic planes that could leave London at 1pm and land in Washington D.C. that same day at 12:10pm and the bureaucrats who manufactured frivolous reasons to wipe it off the map; and the origin story of American Dynamism, the investment thesis of Katherine Boyle, a gifted memetic warrior and former Washington Post style desk reporter who conceptualized the idea once known as “God and Country” before it became a buzz word on Sand Hill Road.