LeVine leaves Quartz for Axios to cover future of work

Steve LeVine, who has been Quartz’s Washington correspondent, has left the business news organization to become future editor at Axios.

LeVine will be running a new vertical on the Future of Work, with a new weekly newsletter and a daily news stream around AI/Robotics, jobs and the social and geopolitical ramifications. It is launching next month.

“I’m pretty excited about the chance to shift into this space — the buzzword for it is the Future of Work,” said LeVine in an email to Talking Biz News. “It’s one of the top stories of our lives, I think at least equivalent to the big stuff I’ve covered over the years, including the Soviet collapse and the rise of al Qaeda. It’s about the massive technological shift to automation, and the social and geopolitical fallout it is and may cause — the existential challenge to our lifestyles, and the post-war economic system created in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

“We’ll be doing a weekly newsletter and a daily stream that start with the science and technology of artificial intelligence and robots, and follow them into the cratering of jobs and incomes; social impacts in the opioid crisis and the blight of cities; and the geopolitical turbulence in the U.S. and across Europe.”

At Quartz, LeVine wrote about the intersection of energy, technology and geopolitics. LeVine came from Foreign Policy magazine, where he formerly wrote the influential blog, “The Oil and the Glory.”

He is a Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation and an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. His newest book, “The Powerhouse,” came out in paperback in January 2016. It tracks the geopolitics of lithium-ion batteries.

LeVine is the author of two prior books: “The Oil and the Glory,” a history of oil told through the 1990s-2000s oil rush on the Caspian Sea; and “Putin’s Labyrinth,” a profile of Russia through the lives and deaths of six Russians.

Previously, LeVine was a foreign correspondent for 18 years in the former Soviet Union, Pakistan and the Philippines, running a bureau for The Wall Street Journal, and before that writing for The New York Times, the Financial Times and Newsweek.